The Scottish Stone: How a Fifer set the stone rolling

The Rolling Stones may be one of the most famous rock bands in the world, but it was a young man from Fife who worked for ICI, had short hair and wore sensible shoes who started it all, writes Keith Richards in his new autobiography

• Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Ian Stewart on the set of Ready Steady Go! TV show in 1966

FOR the most keenly awaited memoirs of this or any year, Keith Richards has delivered a thumping 564-page tome which would seem to confirm the guitarist they call The Human Riff as the custodian and indeed the soul of the Rolling Stones – the greatest rock'n''roll band in the world.

But that is an honour Richards happily confers on Ian Stewart, the Fife-born sixth Stone who played piano in their scratchy beginnings but was forced out of the group when they got their record deal because the lad from Pittenween wasn't as pretty-boy as Mick Jagger or Brian Jones.

Stewart died in 1985, just 47, and his story rates as a mere footnote in rock history. Except in the East Neuk, of course, and except where Richards is concerned. Five years ago, he among the surviving Stones made a contribution to a biography of Stewart, a modest publication limited to only 950 copies. Now, in his own book, Life, published with considerably more fuss and bother, he writes: "Ian Stewart. I'm still working for him. To me the Rolling Stones is his band."

The Scottish Stone's remarkable and poignant tale began on a farm owned by his Uncle Jack. His father, John, and mother, Annie, were Scots required – because of John's work with the army – to live in Surrey. But they were so determined their son should be able to call himself 100 per cent Scottish that a heavily pregnant Annie dashed to Pittenweem for the birth.

Stewart's cousin, Marianne Meldrum, remembered him as a boy "thumping away" on the piano in the parlour. Even though he could pick up tunes just like that, Meldrum was unimpressed. "I always used to tell him to stop making that terrible noise. And I remember our grandmother saying, 'Ian will never be a musician. Fetch me some cotton wool for my ears.'"

Both would have to admit they weren't great judges. In London in the early 1960s his day job was as a clerk with ICI but at nights he was a leading player on the blues scene, a true boogie-woogie boy. Richards' first encounter with him came in May 1962, in a seedy Soho pub called the Bricklayers' Arms, for what turned out to be the Stones' inaugural rehearsals.

"I come in and there's an upright piano facing the window overlooking the street," Richards recalled for the Stewart biog, titled Stu. "Stu's got his back to me, he doesn't know I'm in the room. What amazes me is that while he's sitting down, playing all the shit, looking out the window, I come up behind him and there's this stripper walking by outside. But his eyes aren't following her, as mine are, they're fixed on his bike chained to a parking meter."

He expands on the anecdote for Life. The "shit" Stewart was bashing out was Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Leroy Carr. Richards could hear it at the bottom of the stairs and said to himself: "I've got to go up there and meet this cat." Stewart was sporting Tyrolean leather shorts. He gave off a headmasterly air. Richards came back down the stairs a different man.

Brian Jones placed the ad in a jazz magazine which brought everyone to the Bricklayers' Arms and he also booked the room. But Richards is in no doubt who "owns" the Stones. "There have been arguments about this ever since we started, and it goes on," he's admitted. "In my opinion, whose band is it? It's Stu's band. He was the first one there at the beginning. Without his input, his little extra bit of push, in those first few months it would have probably dissolved. In a way you could say that Stu discovered the Stones and then forged them."

In the pages of Life Richards again goes further: "Without the leap he made from where he was coming from, to take a chance on playing with this bunch of kids, we'd be nowhere. He was absolutely the main impetus behind what happened next. We didn't know shit from Shinola. It was his vision, the band, and basically he picked who was going to be in it. Far more than anybody actually realised, he was the spark, the energy, the organisation."

Stewart was a rock in every way: a big man with a strong chin you might call determinedly Scottish. A childhood illness requiring his jaw to be wired up had also left a psychological mark. Richards remembers Stewart, who was five years older than him, as "a good-looking guy" but with a detached personality. "I'm sure much of his character was influenced by his looks, and people's reactions to them."

In purely practical terms, Stewart the working man had the funds with which to buy more rehearsal time. Richards, Jones and Jagger were so hard up in their manky Earls Court flat they were reduced to stealing from neighbours and nicking "empties" from pubs to sell them back. And, simply by being connected to the outside world via ICI, Stewart assumed heroic status. "He had a phone in his office and we could use it," Richards has recalled. "He networked the band without us really realising." And Stewart also had the contacts: the kind who "could actually open a door to a studio late at night and get an hour there".

He refused to play minor chords. "F****n' Chinese music," he dubbed them. He didn't approve of the Rolling Stones moniker. But these were not the reasons he was ousted, just as the Decca contract was signed – and however tempting in view of the Stones' future bacchanals, you cannot attach too much significance to the fact he seemed more interested in his bicycle than that first official sighting of half-naked women. On the fateful day he lost full band status he simply turned to the others and said: "Don't look the same as you, do I?"

Richards writes in Life that six is too many for a group and that the piano-player is always most vulnerable to losing out. But Bill Wyman has dismissed the idea of a six-piece being too unwieldy: "It was Andrew's decision (Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones' manager] that Stu didn't look the part." And Loog Oldham has never disagreed: "Nobody said, 'Not with our band, Andrew, it's all or nothing – Stu stays.' I got what I wanted… the group could say, 'It was Andrew', which it was.

The slaughter had been bloodless, except for the obvious pouring in Ian Stewart's heart."

Richards has admitted that Stewart had been a bigger man than him in accepting the decision. "He just sort of took a gentleman's step back. That's the heart of a lion, to do that. If it had been me I would have gone, 'F**k you.'"

In Life he claims his friend was never really fired – he drove for the band and fulfilled crucial Stonesian duties, covering up for them when girlfriends showed up and they were busy "entertaining". He alone could tell them when a performance was poor. "Come on, my three-chord wonders," he called them. And he continued to play on their records and during ever-grander gigs would wander over to the piano for favourite songs. He also had his own band, Rocket 88, and had been playing with them a couple of nights before he died of a heart attack.

"I was waiting for him that afternoon," writes Richards. "Around three in the morning I got a call from Charlie (Watts]. 'Are you still waiting for Stu?' I said yes. 'Well, he's not coming.' The wake was held at his golf course in Surrey. He would have appreciated the joke that this was the only way he'd ever get us there."

Although Ian Stewart missed out on the Stones' greatest successes and greatest excessess, Richards says: "The only fantasy Stu ever had was his insistence that he was the rightful heir to Pittenweem. He always felt cheated, usurped through some weird Scottish lineage."

He must have been a big man in every sense if that is all he felt cheated about.

• Life by Keith Richards is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, price 20.