Blues guitarist Mick Taylor, noted esteemed rock writer Robert Palmer, was the most accomplished technician who had ever served as a member of The Rolling Stones - a great blues guitarist with a jazzman's flair for melodic invention. But - and this is the mother of all buts in the context of The Rolling Stones - Taylor was never a rock'n'roll riff machine and human laboratory like Keith Richards. He was never a camp showman like Mick Jagger.
As rigidly stoic as bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts were, they were more stylish figures than the six-foot plus bruiser of a blues guitarist who plodded around the stages of the world with wavy blonde hair and a blusher complex. On stage he was, noted a Stones biographer, "as solemn as some thinking girl in a novel by George Eliot."
Taylor's lack of rock'n'roll attitude within a band that pioneered the very essence of it was but one of the reasons why he left. From the outset talking to Taylor, it's clear that he is a man who expresses himself far better through his quite superlative guitar work than through the art of conversation. A nervous, stumbling and occasionally stammering character, his conversational tone lacks the self-confidence (but curiously enough not the humility) of an internationally renowned musician. He's currently in the middle of writing a book about his life. How's it going, I ask him. "Not great," Taylor replies glumly. "I might have to get someone to help me."
The guitarist visits Ireland next week for two gigs. It's the first time he has played in Ireland since the mid-1980s, when as part of Bob Dylan's backing band he performed at Slane. His impressions of Dylan? "I found him to be really special," says Mick from his home in what the brochures might aptly describe as leafy Suffolk. "He's someone I enjoyed being with. It was a real privilege to be asked to play with him. He has a tremendous capacity for writing songs and singing. He was fun . . ."
Taylor was eight years old when he witnessed his future flashing before him. His parents were rock'n'roll fans and had taken him to a concert by the rotund rock'n'roll star Bill Haley at the Golders Green Hippodrome. What Taylor experienced that night was virtually inexplicable - a fate-sealing charge passed from performer to probably the smallest member of the audience.
"My mother had a younger brother who taught me how to play blues, rock'n'roll and R&B guitar playing," he remembers. "It was the kind of music I was hearing all the time. I listened to all kinds of music as a young lad. I taught myself how to play rhythm guitar, but I was naturally drawn to R&B and blues, especially by the time I was in my early teens. What kind of feeling did I get from playing guitar? A pure feeling. I must have been quite good at it, but then I was good at football."
By his early teens, Taylor was head hunted by every amateur group in his locality. His reticence and shyness were overcome by his guitar playing, however, and at 14 he temporarily deputised for the AWOL John Mayall's Bluesbreakers guitarist Eric Clapton. His school-going age prevented him from touring, but when he reached 17, Taylor was quickly sourced by Mayall to take over from Peter Green, the guitarist who officially replaced Clapton.
Mayall was the erotica-collecting, founding father of British blues, and his Bluesbreakers line-ups were effectively finishing schools for budding blues-rock superstars. Did he look upon Taylor as somewhat of a prodigy?
"I don't think so," is Taylor's typically self-effacing reply. "I was a bit young, younger in fact than any other guitar player he had employed. But he had lots of young guitar players around at the same time. It was great to be 17 years old and to be playing lead guitar with Mayall seven nights a week.
"It was confirmation of my instinct that I would become a professional musician and play the guitar for a living. My parents were good about it. They encouraged me, liked it, and were proud of me. I don't think they ever thought of it as a proper job, though!"
After four years with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Taylor was recommended as a successor for Rolling Stones' guitarist Brian Jones. On induction into the Stones' world (so decadently sex- and drug-fuelled that a history of mythic proportions has been built up around it), Taylor neither drank nor smoked. Allegedly. He was also, so the story goes, into macrobiotic food. The Stones' iniquitous, spiked playground was hardly a home from home for the angelic-looking boy from Hertfordshire.
After almost five years with the Stones (during which time he recorded the classic Stones' albums, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street and experienced the rock'n'roll horror that was Altamont), Taylor gave up. Although valiantly attempting to stick to his middle-class principles and morals, the black vortex enveloping The Rolling Stones at this time (Keith Richards' sailing boat was called Mandrax; the first words spoken by Richards' two-year-old son, Marlon, were "room service") was too much to withstand. He bowed out, not exactly a beaten man but very much a heavy drug user and most definitely bitter about his treatment in the context of money and royalty payments.
"I suppose in some ways I was bitter," he says. "The unpaid royalties are contentious issues and not ones I really want to talk about. It's still a real issue, though, but I don't feel any bitterness towards them, for God's sake. I saw them at Wembley recently - they were great, sounded great, played great. They're still the same guys that I used to play with, it's just that they're a lot older, same as I am.
"Being old doesn't disqualify you from playing music, though, does it? If the music is good, it doesn't matter what age you are. I'm probably one of the band's biggest critics, because I've played with them. I know a lot of the people who go to their concerts go for nostalgia reasons, but I actually thought they were great. It was a 1999 version of The Rolling Stones."
A grandfather in October, the genial but - it has to be said - lacklustre personality that is Mick Taylor is at odds with his expressive, sparkling guitar playing. His album of last year, A Stones Throw (couldn't he have come up with a better, less obvious title after all these years?), highlights his technique to excellent effect. What a rotten paradox - if he had more of an ego, he'd probably be less of a guitarist.
It all goes back to that, of course, as only it should. Talent-spotter John Mayall once described Mick Taylor as a virtuoso guitar player. Would he agree? "I wouldn't describe myself as such," he says quietly. "I wouldn't categorise myself as anything other than a good guitar player - I'm happy to be known as that."
Mick Taylor plays Dublin's HQ next Saturday. He plays Monaghan on September 5th, as part of the Harvest Time Blues Festival.
