IMMEDIATE

Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was the enfant terrible of Swinging Sixties London, the man who had crafted The Beatles’ antithesis. By 1965 he was a millionaire notorious for working every publicity angle for his rising stars but he still felt frustrated by the men in grey suits who controlled the music industry. His solution to that problem was Immediate Records - the UK’s first independent label - with a mission statement to wash away those grey men.

What followed was five years of scams, chicanery, sex, drugs, violence and sensational music. Immediate’s ‘in-house’ polymath producers: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Oldham himself, Jimmy Page and Steve Marriott, attracted a crowd of daring, young British talent, forging the hippest scene in the world.

Yet, following his ousting as Stones manager in 1967, the label itself began to fray at the seams as the drugs and booze clouded Oldham's creative genius and the grey suits quietly took their revenge.

Simon Spence’s acclaimed telling of Immediate’s rise and fall was first published in 2007 but has now been augmented with explanatory footnotes and even more detail following a further decade’s research.