Timed to coincide with Mick Jagger's 50th birthday, this biography traces the career of a thin, shy economics student who began a weekly singing engagement in a Richmond hotel in March 1963. Today, he lives in a #2 million house overlooking the same hotel. Born at the height of World War II - an event which obsesses him to this day - Jagger was an average grammar-school student who, like millions of others, discovered rock and roll in the mid-Fifties. While at the London School of Economics, he fell in with an amateur group which was signed up by Decca and whose first album in 1964 achieved huge success, both in Britain and America. The success was due largely to Jagger's outrageous stage antics and his deliberately boorish public persona. In writing the book, Christopher Sandford had access to Jagger's school records, the recollections of those who knew him there and at university, comments from all three members of the original group, and revelations by his former aide-de-camp, Tom Keylock, regarding drug-taking and other excesses. Other aspects of Jagger's life which are covered in the book include his affairs, his tax exile and jet-set existence in the Seventies, and his long relationship with Jerry Hall.