The Stone who rolled away

TRUST a child to put things in perspective. When Ned Hoste's five-year-old daughter Katy saw a photo of ageing rockers The Rolling Stones, she wasn't impressed. "Is that a band of grandpas?" she asked.

Grandpas or not, the surviving Stones are certainly wealthy. And wealthy is what you will have to be if you are to afford a copy of a new and exclusive Stones memorabilia book.

Stu, a tribute to the "forgotten Stone" Ian Stewart, is a privately-published, limited-edition book which boasts contributions from all six surviving Stones, interviews with a host of other people in and out of the music business who knew him, a wealth of previously unpublished photos, a signed and numbered limited-edition print by Ronnie Wood - and a plush leather binding.

All this can be yours for £570.

Not one to buy as a Christmas stocking-filler, admits Ned with a grin. But most certainly one for the Stones enthusiast with money to spare. "Of which there are a fair number," he says.

Actually, he adds, sitting in the study of his home in Haxby, that £570 price-tag isn't as steep as it sounds. Ronnie Wood is a recognised artist whose prints can sell for anything from £500-£700. So the book's a bargain, then.

Ned, who has designed the book from its sumptuous leather binding to its hand-marbled end-papers, admits that before starting work on the project he knew little about Ian Stewart.

Being a fan of contemporary music, however, the 41-year-old graphic designer could not resist when an email pinged into his inbox one day, asking : "Would you like to design a book about the Rolling Stones and the last 40 years of English music?"

Ned called publisher Will Nash straight back, beginning a collaboration which was to last two years. Along the way, as he read the transcripts of interviews with more than 80 people who knew and worked with Stewart, he came to feel he knew the man, and better understood the work of the Stones.

So who was Stu? He was, says Ned, one of the founder-members of the band, a blues, jazz and boogie-woogie pianist of the highest calibre who never fitted with the Stones' image.

When Andrew Oldham became the band's manager in the early Sixties, just before they achieved superstardom, Stu was ousted.

In an interview transcribed in the book, Oldham explains why.

"From the first, Stu looked different from the rest of the band and the audience," he says. "Bill managed to pass via his silence, stoicism and stance. Charlie came in on a higher tone level. He brought jazz grace and decorum to the proceedings. Brian, Mick and Keith kinda merged with the middle class/young art school/universified crowd who had seized on to this music, rejected the Top Ten, skiffle and traditional jazz and were at one with the sufferings of the southern black man as if Pinner were a Mississippi sharecropping community."

Sadly, there was no place for Stu. Why becomes clear from a Charlie Watts comment about his friend.

"I've never known anyone that stuck with a look and stayed with it like Stu did," he reminisces. "His Lacoste shirts became very fashionable, certainly an enduring look, and the shape of jeans went in and out of fashion about twice during his lifetime. And he still had a way of wearing them that was totally his own."

He may not have fitted in with the band's image, but he remained a powerful influence. For 20 years or so, until his death in 1985, he continued to play with the Stones, although without being credited as a band member. He also became a kind of arch Stones roadie and road manager, setting up for gigs, booking hotels and keeping the show on the road.

Mick Taylor, the Stones' guitarist after Brian Jones' death, acknowledges the part he played. "Stu was part of the Rolling Stones," he says. "I'm not sure if they would have stayed together if Stu had not been there. I think they needed somebody like that."

That was formally acknowledged when Stu was posthumously inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 and recognised as the "sixth Stone".

Ned admits that as he worked on the book, he developed a liking for the man.

"I think there was a degree of bloody-mindedness about him," he says. "He is someone who in his field is right at the top but he's still marching to his own drum that he was before he was thrust into the limelight.

"He was his own man, one who was probably more comfortable in the position that he had than he ever would have been had he been seen as one of the main Stones."

Apart from all his other qualities, Stu was a gifted amateur photographer - and that aspect of the book should make it such a collector's piece for the dedicated Stones fan.

Thanks to his place at the heart of the band, Ian Stewart was able to capture intimate moments denied to professional photographers - such as Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds' Jimmy Page playing his guitar with a violin bow, and the Stones' legendary first concert behind the Iron Curtain.

Some of his images were used in the early Rolling Stones fan magazine, but apart from that, his work is almost entirely unpublished. The book - which, in the words of publisher Will Nash, ensures that Stu should "at last be given his due place in the spotlight" - draws extensively on his archive of photos, as well as the work of some of the world's most celebrated rock'n'roll photographers.

"These weren't just people taking snapshots at the time, but people who have gone on to become very high profile in the music industry," Ned says.

Ned admits he has gained a deeper understanding of the Stones' music through his work on the book. And what about his perceptive daughter Katy? Well, she quite likes Stu's piano playing, Ned says. He has a CD of Stu playing boogie-woogie. "And she calls it the mad piano music," he says.

There probably couldn't be a better epitaph than that.

Stu, the Ian Stewart Tribute Book, is a privately-published, limited-edition book of 950 copies, which is available only from the publisher, Out-Take, price £570. Email info@out-take.co.uk or call 0207 228 6734.

Updated: 09:37 Tuesday, December 02, 2003