Sorry to continue to be morbid on New Year's Day of all days, but we started this series yesterday with Stu Sutcliffe of The Beatles who departed the band and then life early and it seems only natural to move on here to Brian Jones who did the same with The Stones and his own all too short life a few brief, but very important and eventful years later.
I spent half an hour yesterday mistakenly watching the start of the dreadful biopic about Jones, Stoned. It seems to set him up as some kind of victim worthy of pity, (at least its first thirty minutes do, perhaps I'm doing it an injustice), which virtually any account of his brief life and description of his ugly, vain personality portrays him as absolutely anything but. Read Nick Kent's quite beautiful chapter on him in his collection The Dark Stuff, because clearly the book's title was exactly what Jones was made of. 'Quite simply, he was the quintessential beautiful damned face of the sweet, sad sixties.' Or watch the listless, bored interview below. He was not built to last. At the free Hyde Park concert The Stones gave a few days after his death, Jagger, wearing an appropriately dandyish frilly white blouse, read a eulogy to him, a Shelley poem, and a herd of butterflies were released onstage from sacks to mark the moment. Apparently, most of them died almost instantly.
'Life is a paradox for me. I'm so contradictory. I have this need for expression, but I'm not certain what it is I want to do. I'm not personally insecure, just unsure. I would like to write, but I lack confidence. I need encouragement. If someone told me I could write and egged me on, I suppose I could do it. It's like jumping in at the deep end and not knowing which way you are coming up.'
Jones about himself in 1966. Deeply ironic considering how things turned out.
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