I loved all those early rock’n’roll singers. I didn’t care who or what they were — and I didn’t make any value judgments about whether they were tacky or not. Eventually, though, I gravitated towards a number of singers who were really quite good, like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

I put together a band with some friends and on Saturday nights I would go out and do gigs, sometimes simply with pick-up bands who were playing in some hall or other, singing Jerry Lee Lewis tunes or country music. I also had a number of friends who had their own record collections, so we used to go round to their houses and listen to them. It was all a bit like trainspotting.

KEITH: I was fortunate that I came from quite a musical family. I thought everybody played the piano or sang because that’s what my family did. My grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, my mother’s father, was a musician.

Gus liked to sing, he played guitar, saxophone, violin and piano, and when he got bored with his seven daughters he’d take the dog for a long walk and go singing on Primrose Hill. He taught me the love of music, the sheer love of it.

Gus had an upright piano, and on top of it there was a Spanish guitar, a very nice one. Whenever I went to visit him, I knew where it was and I just presumed it was part of the furniture. I only found out years and years later, in fact soon after Gus died, that he put it there deliberately.

My family said, “Oh, he only put that up there when he knew you were coming round”, and there had been a period of about five or six years before he had said to me, “Well, now you can reach it, you can take it down”. It’s uncanny, as if he had his eye on me as a guitar player before I knew it. He put it up there like some kind of unreachable icon.

As Richards now puts it, he and Jagger “met on the train at Dartford”, their home town in north Kent, in 1960. Richards was attracted by the rare American blues records under Jagger’s arm.

KEITH: Within a few days of seeing each other, I either went over to Mick’s place or he came over to mine. And almost inexplicably, from that one meeting between Mick and myself, with me wanting to know where he’d got his records from, and then as we listened to them together, we realised that we were really in touch — which we still are now, in this weird, bizarre, night-and-day method of ours.

When it comes to music, if we work on it together, there’s something that just happens. I don’t know how or why: I leave that to the mysteries of alchemy. We started listening to records and playing a bit, and without really saying, “Let’s start a band” or anything, we just began to have fun playing together and figuring out how it was all done.

A visit two years later, in April 1962, to a new club in Ealing, west London, run by the legendary blues guitarist Alexis Korner began the process that rapidly changed their lives. Mick borrowed his father’s car to get there.

MICK: Alexis Korner used to play in this club in Ealing, and I would go there on Saturday nights, for a laugh. It was full of all these trainspotters who needed somewhere to go, just a bunch of anoraks. The audience was mainly guys and the girls were very thin on the ground.

KEITH: Throughout his entire life Alexis had a passion for the blues and his band was like an informal school; the number of musicians that he turned round and encouraged is huge. He would ask anybody who could play, “Do you want to take over for 10 minutes while I have a drink?”, and you’d get up there quivering and ankle deep in sweat.