7/6/2023 0 Comments Panoply gameHe wanted to be Brian, because Brian had all the girls and all the fan mail.” “Early on, he even signed the management and recording contracts, and, as the most popular member of the band with girls, he received 75% of all Stones fan mail in those early years.” In Broomfield’s film, Linda Lawrence, who was Jones’s girlfriend from 1962 to 1964, recalls that, “Mick was in awe of Brian. “Brian was the leader,” Bill Wyman, the Stones’ former bassist, tells me. Before they found a manager, he was the one who rang venues in London and beyond to hustle for live gigs. He formed the group, named them after a song by one of his idols, Muddy Waters, and honed their early sound in the style of the American blues musicians he worshipped. Put simply, there would have been no Rolling Stones without Brian Jones. He wanted to be Brian, because Brian had all the girls And, though Jones’s early death saw him canonised for a time as a 60s icon, alongside other doomed figures such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, Broomfield believes his creative genius is all but overlooked today. “I felt they didn’t go anywhere,” he says, “and, in terms of the story, I just thought: what’s the point of me wasting a lot of time just to end up dismissing them?” Instead, his film is, at its core, a psychological study of a gifted, complex individual, ill prepared for fame and dogged by insecurity. In 2010, however, Sussex police, having conducted a review of the death, concluded there was no new evidence to contradict the original verdict.īroomfield avoids what he calls “the murder conspiracies” altogether. That film’s central premise is that Jones was actually killed in a violent argument over money with a builder, Frank Thorogood, who had been renovating his house and, as one contributor puts it, “leeching off” the hapless musician. The story of Jones’s speedy rise and tragic fall has been told in some depth before, not least in a 2019 documentary, Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones. I can still recall the shock I felt on hearing the news of his death.” He epitomised that dazzling 60s moment in many ways, which is so very different from now, and then he was suddenly gone. He was young, charismatic, incredibly gifted, and an integral part of a group that would define the time more than any other apart from the Beatles. “That chance meeting with Brian Jones on the train has stayed with me, not least because, back then, he seemed to have everything going for him. “I’ve always wanted to do a film about the 60s, which were my formative period,” says Broomfield. The Rolling Stones in 1964, left to right: Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. The narrative unfolds slowly in an evocative, mesmerising and sometimes heartrending interweaving of first-hand testimony and rich archive footage: a portrayal of a gilded time of astonishing creativity, but also of self-destructiveness and inevitable tragedy. Unlike many of his previous documentaries, in which he appears onscreen as a character in the unfolding story, Broomfield is present here only as interviewer and in a voiceover. The tumultuous seven-year period that Jones spent as a Rolling Stone, as well as the troubled childhood and adolescence that preceded them, are explored in depth in Broomfield’s latest film, The Stones and Brian Jones. The coroner’s report concluded that it was “death by misadventure”, and noted that his liver and heart were greatly enlarged by sustained drug and alcohol consumption. Just six years after their encounter on the Cheltenham train, though, on 3 July 1969, Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool of his home, Cotchford Farm, in rural Sussex. In the subsequent TV interviews and press conferences that attended the rapid ascendancy of the Rolling Stones, Broomfield’s fleeting impression of the musician was borne out, as he engaged effortlessly with the media, coming across as the most pleasant and articulate band member.
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