Stone Free

Andrew Loog Oldham managed and produced the Rolling Stones in their first years, and he knows the breed of the impresario from the inside. Here, in the third part of what he calls his triography, he turns his eye on the showmen he admired, loved and loathed: Diaghilev, Mike Todd and Otto Preminger, then the British pop fixers Larry Parnes, Brian Epstein, Don Arden, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, Malcolm McLaren, and the American heavyweights Albert Grossman, Phil Spector and Allen Klein. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards get profiles of their own.

It is also a reckoning with what became of the sixties lads now in their seventies, as bands turned into brands and the Beatles, the Stones and the Who carried on in whatever form remained. This is for anyone fascinated by the hustlers and dreamers behind the music, told by one of the sharpest of them.