Andrew Loog Oldham

David Belcher meets The Rolling Stones' first manager and finds him cleaned up and looking back to the future

Never one to let moss gather, the man who invented the Rolling Stones in his own frankly louche image has apparently left the building. Andrew Loog Oldham is not in his hotel's reception area. He's not in

his room.

Weathered by 30 taxing years in the business of delivering rock'n'roll legends to interviews, Andrew's unflappable media-handler checks his charge's whereabouts. My meeting with him looms large. Andrew's not in the hotel's bistro.

I sit. I wait. I sip coffee. In the distance I spy Andrew's unflappable media-handler searching the darker recesses of the hotel's restaurant, unflappably. Up stairs. Down stairs. On his mobile phone. ''Has Andrew . . . gone?'' I ask.

Naah, says Andrew's media-handler, remaining commendably flap-free. He remembers the bad old days. The bad, bad old days. That very, very bad day five years ago in New York when Andrew looked out of his hotel window and saw a white horse ambling by.

A 15-storey white horse. A transparent 15-storey white horse that wouldn't vanish, no matter how tightly and how often Andrew closed his eyes and hoped it would.

Of course, you become used to hallucinations when, as Andrew Loog Oldham had, you've dosed yourself daily for two decades with large amounts of cocaine, grappa, and heroin. But at least those hallucinations are based within your imagination.

In hellish contrast, the 15-storey white horse was one hallucination which Andrew couldn't control. He knew change was needed. Since that day Andrew has neither drunk alcohol nor touched any form of drug. Two years ago, he cemented his total abstinence by embracing Scientology.

Getting back to the here and now in Glasgow, Andrew's media-handler is therefore certain that today's hiatus is purely temporary. ''Once upon a time,'' he says, ''you needed to keep a rope tied around Andrew. Not these days.''

Seeking to describe the new Andrew, his media-handler recalls the old Andrew's rare visits to Blighty in the 25 years since he set up home with his South American wife, 8000 feet above sea-level in Bogota, Colombia.

There was the re-launch of Andrew's legendary record label, Immediate, as Immediate 3. Bands were signed. Albums recorded. Nothing was released. There was the launch of Andrew's less-than-successful book about a fly-weight pop group whom the Stones would have marinated overnight in Jack Daniel's and then set alight for breakfast, Abba.

I interviewed Andrew in London then. Vaguely abstracted, he spent the whole time shifting restlessly from foot to foot and oozing towards the lavatory. His pronouncements then? Gnomic.

Thankfully, his health now is much improved - but Andrew Loog Oldham's style remains more free-wheeling than Joe Public's. ''The thing with Andrew,'' his media-handler says, ''is that he's . . . naturally tangential.''

This is confirmed when Andrew finally hoves to. Verbal-wise, Andrew's all off-the-cuff allusion, revealing non sequitur, and beatnik riff. Naturally, where he's been prior to materialising before me is of no consequence. As ever, it's where he's at that matters.

He's in Britain for two reasons, most obviously to talk up his first book, Stoned. An erratic-but-gripping tome, Stoned ruminates upon Andrew's emergence as a groovy teenage chancer in the swinging sixties.

An ultra-confident showbiz PR man with dreams of hustling some snake-hipped androgynes to the top, Andrew had been chiefly motivated by Laurence Harvey's depiction of a suave managerial Svengali in Expresso Bongo, Britain's first decent rock'n'roll film. In 1963 he found The Stones.

In a way that's self-aggrandising but charming, too, Stoned is an odd autobiography in that it was chiefly assembled by someone else - journalist Simon Dudfield, an erstwhile member of Fabulous, one of the bands who failed to see a vinyl outcome to their association with Immediate 3.

''He met me when I was still well bombed, around 1991,'' admits Andrew with disarming candour. ''He'd made my life his agenda, and got a publishing deal for an authorised biography. He'd been naughty there. And he'd deliberately pitched it somewhere between Enid Blyton and The Age Of Innocence. I told him 'Go and do the unauthorised biography - and make it real.' ''

With Andrew's assistance - ''I gave Simon a list, like a detective providing the evidence'' - Dudfield conducted interviews with many of Andrew's contemporaries. Strange, surely?

''I found myself fascinating . . . but only so fascinating,'' says Andrew. ''There are only so many paragraphs you can start with the word 'I'. The interviews make it more interesting for me - it was good to read how many people I'd conned.''

And how many did you?

''A lot. Well, not really con - I got them on the same pony I was riding, and it was good for them.''

Too Stoned, covering 1964 onwards, is already at the second-draft stage. ''If Stoned is the yolk of an egg, there's still the white. No, Too Stoned is a full omelette. I want to share the amazement we felt when I arrived with The Stones in America for the first time.''

It's a book which should also cast light on Andrew's remarkable work of self-recovery. ''I went off the rails for a while. I've used a lot of tools to get back to the way I was, to make myself healthy, to make my mind healthy.

''I am a Scientologist. I got my body better, and then I got my mind back to be trained up again, to be polished up. If your ethical standards get down, you have to look at the people you're mixing with - and I was lying down with whores and criminals.

''Being better isn't good enough, simply not being drunk or doing drugs. . . one of L Ron Hubbard's tenets, his one-liners, is that you've got to be doing something - production is the basis of morale! We should all stay in school, and this is the school I've picked - writing - and it suits me.'' Andrew is thus at work on two works of fiction, Pimpresario and Pretend.

Are there regrets about his past? Did he imagine then that he was fully in control of his life?

''No regrets. I thought I was in control till the time we got busted in 1967. I read the papers and it was the same names, the same amount of words, but I could no longer pretend that I was manipulating the press.

''With drugs, you lie, you don't confront things. You think you're taking them, but they're taking you. My son is 17 now, and he's very present-time . . . but he saw what I did, how I went to sleep for 25-30 years. He once asked me to leave a school speech day because I was as green as the suit I was wearing.''

Andrew's long slumber meant other innocents paid a price, too. The second part of his British mission is a legal one that's intended to make amends to all the Immediate artists who haven't been paid for three decades.

''Lots of artists and producers didn't get paid because of acts I was party to after Immediate's liquidation and before my survival. I'm trying to clear my universe to get that addressed. It remains a piece of dirty laundry that other people present as a clean bill of goods, hiding behind cute little laws. It's beyond the pale of decency.''

Unlike the present-day Andrew

Loog Oldham, to many people's relief and betterment.

l Stoned, Secker and Warburg, #16.99.