Gus Coral and the Stones for Jewish News June 2025
One of Gus Coral’s children casually asked her father what he intended to do with the bundles of photographs sitting, untouched and unexplored for decades, under his bed.
In fact, Coral admits today, the pictures were not just “a closely guarded secret”, but a little piece of rock history. They were the first photographs taken of the Rolling Stones in their earliest days, snapped with trademark chutzpah by Coral in 1963.
Mick Jagger was just 20 and the rest of the band around the same age, except for Bill Wyman, then a “venerable” 26 year-old. And for that matter, Coral himself was 26.
But at the beginning of June, 100 pictures taken by Coral will be dusted off and go on display at London’s Dockside Vaults at St Katherine’s Dock, in a show due to run until September 10.
The pictures are not so much rock history, actually, more rock archaeology. Coral snapped the Stones when they weren’t even top of the bill, but a support act for a tour with headliners the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley.
If that’s hard to credit, even more entertaining is one shot taken on a Cardiff pavement as the five band members scraped together the money for a taxi fare. To anyone familiar with stories of the Stones’ later rock’n’roll excess, it doesn’t seem possible that Jagger and co would ever have been so broke.
How did Gus Coral come to take these extraordinary photographs? Now 86 and living in Camden Town, Coral is part of a British Jewish family betting dynasty — Joe Coral was his uncle and his father, Eric, was also a bookmaker. Among his possessions is “a picture of my father in my grandmother’s arms, taken by a Moscow photographer”. He believes that his family lived in a mining town in the south of Poland, before they came to London.
“There were three of us who met at Cambridge University”, explains Coral. “There was James Miller, Dick Fontaine, and me. I went to study architecture — but they threw me out for being a ‘bad boy’.”
Probably he wasn’t as badly behaved as all that, he says: “But I had done two years of National Service in the army and being at Cambridge [and subject to new restrictions] felt a bit like going back to school again.”
But he and Miller — who was also studying architecture and graphic design, and Fontaine, who became an admired documentary film-maker — became fast friends.
“We had all seen the Stones”, says Coral. “We were working together in a sort of loose way, I was a photographer and had made a couple of films while I was at Cambridge. Richard was working for a small TV company and he was asked to say who was going to be the next big band. We all agreed it was going to be the Rolling Stones”. Laughing, Coral says: “We didn’t know how big! We’d all been to see them play in Richmond: we were all jazz fans and we’d got into jazz via the blues, and at that time the Stones were a blues band”.
When they heard that the Stones were doing their first tour, the friends checked the tour dates and decided to go and see them. “I had a car, and Cardiff didn’t seem too difficult to get to”.
So Coral, Miller and Fontaine arrived in Cardiff and went to the theatre where the Stones were due to play that night. “They weren’t there but someone told us that they were at the cafe round the corner. And we went there and said we’d like to take some photographs”.
More than 60 years after this first encounter, Gus Coral doesn’t remember any difficult response from the band. “I think they had been forewarned. In any case, there was no problem, it was never even suggested: I could go anywhere, there were no other photographers. It was the perfect gig in that sense.”
Coral took as many pictures as he could, all “fly-on-the-wall”, not asking the Stones to pose. He is keen to emphasise that they were “well-behaved” and “that they really weren’t ‘yer rock musicians’ at that time. They were musicians and they had spent a lot of time practising, they were serious about their work.”
Though he doesn’t remember how the Stones reacted to his pictures, they must have been happy, because as Coral recalls, “they told me that they were doing a recording in a few days’ time and would I like to go and photograph it”.
The band were in fact recording what became one of their first big hits, “I Wanna Be Your Man” written by Lennon and McCartney. Released in November 1963, it features driving guitars by Brian Jones and Bill Wyman and probably the earliest appearance of the pouting, teasing Jagger on vocals.
Coral’s photographic philosophy, he says, “was to take pictures of people that I thought were going to be pretty significant in the future. Obviously I didn’t know how significant or how long they would last — but I knew they were special.” Initially, he says, the plan was for Fontaine to make a film about the Stones. “But that never happened, so I just tucked the pictures away”. As far as he knows the Stones have never seen the 1963 photos: wouldn’t it be great if someone from the band turned up at the Dockside Vaults?
He has spent his long career as a freelance photographer and occasional filmmaker, often taking pictures of jazz musicians. Going through his Stones pictures today, Coral smiles: “I think they’re rather better than I could do today. And that’s to do with youth, agility, and access”.
Gus Coral’s rare 1963 pictures of the Rolling Stones are on show from June 6 to September 10 at the Dockside Vaults in St Katherine’s Dock, entry £15.