Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the Edith Grove Flat: From Sharing Coats to 'Satisfaction'

In 1962, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shared a cramped, cold flat at 102 Edith Grove in London. They were dirt poor, often stole milk from doorsteps, and rotated the same pair of trousers—whoever had a date got the good clothes. That forced intimacy, complete with late-night record listening and endless arguments over blues licks, forged a creative partnership that defined the Stones’ early sound.

Their first real co-write, “As Tears Go By” (1964), came when manager Andrew Loog Oldham locked them in a room and told them to write something commercial. Richards strummed a simple descending guitar line; Jagger scribbled lyrics about childhood nostalgia. It was a polite pop ballad, a deliberate move away from their blues covers. Within a year, that same collaborative process—Richards finding a riff in the middle of the night, Jagger supplying the sneer—produced “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” driven by a fuzz-toned hook Richards dreamed up in a Florida motel. The leap from melancholic folk-pop to raw, distorted rock captured the growing tension between Jagger’s sharp pop instincts and Richards’ gritty, guitar-first approach, a dynamic forged in that freezing Edith Grove kitchen.