‘Being a Catholic,” says Dawn Molloy, the mother of Brian Jones’s fifth child, “I was very inhibited. He kind of got that out of me – not to be ashamed of my body and what I could do. He was very, very sexy. Yeah. The way he made love was insatiable. He made me feel amazing. He made me feel loved and special. He was an amazing teacher of how to make love to a woman.”
Nick Broomfield’s biography of the Rolling Stone whose drug- and booze-ravaged 27-year-old body was pulled from his swimming pool on 3 July 1969 is at its best when telling his life story through the women who loved him – and whom he, at least temporarily, loved.
After his strait-laced parents kicked the longhaired, jazz-loving, seeming wastrel out of the family home in Cheltenham, Jones gathered no moss. He developed a modus operandi whereby he would seduce a woman, move in with her and her parents, charm the latter, get the former pregnant and then jog on, leaving broken hearts and fatherless children in his wake. Broomfield estimates Jones did this five times in the early 60s.
Linda Lawrence, whom he met when she was 15 and he was 20, recalls the erotic high, but also the comedown. “We were the love generation,” she says. Years after he left her and their son, Julian, she turned up on his doorstep seeking a little money from the famous Rolling Stone to tide them over her.
Inside, Jones and his new squeeze, the 60s It girl and actor Anita Pallenberg, were in the first throes of their affair. Instead of giving Linda money or even letting her into the house, Jones laughed at her, as did Anita. “When he started hanging with her [Anita], his dark side came out,” says Jones’s friend Prince Stash Klossowski de Rola, whose unlikely name, with its two apparent drug references, seems curiously fitting.
“Anita was putting oil on the flames,” says the film director Volker Schlöndorff, who cast Pallenberg in his 1967 film A Degree of Murder and allowed Jones to write its incidental music. They were aroused by spiking others’ drinks and fighting with each other. “I guess they got a lot of sexual and or erotic excitement out of these fights,” says Schlöndorff.
One photo from the time shows Brian and Anita in matching hairdos and gaunt beauty, he in a Nazi uniform with a swastika armband, like a prototypical Prince Harry. The image seems to sum up the sinister element of the swinging 60s: not so much its liberation as its self-regard, cruelty and dimwit politics.
Jones got his comeuppance, at least. In Cannes for the film premiere, Pallenberg awoke in Jones’s hotel room, went down the corridor and was found later by Schlöndorff in Keith Richards’s bed. She got her most memorable role in the Stones’ rolling, incestuous swingers’ party.
By that summer of 1967, Jones was already a falling star. True, it had been his love for, and appropriation of, African American blues music that made the Stones special; his retooling of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf gave them the edgy sound that, say, the Beatles could never approximate. When the Stones played in the US, appearing on TV shows with Howlin’ Wolf, these scrawny, white London herberts were introducing many Americans to the blues for the first time. For that, at least, Jones deserves kudos.
As Broomfield notes, though, the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, realised that Mick Jagger and Richards could make the group a hit factory – and that Jones, who did not write songs, was expendable. One of Jones’s lovers, the actor Zouzou, tells Broomfield that Jones hated the way the band was evolving away from the blues. “He said: ‘Mick and Keith are writing shit and I can’t stand it. It’s vulgar, awful and out of tune.’”
Another of his lovers, Marianne Faithfull, understood Jones. His lack of self-esteem was worsened by Jagger and Richards’ self-confident creativity. He became increasingly uncertain of his own talents. He fell back on scotch and coke, downers and LSD, seeking succour in things that, as the drummer Charlie Watts says, he was neither physically nor mentally tough enough to handle.
Apart from the odd flash of musical ingenuity – Bill Wyman reminds us that the flute on Ruby Tuesday was Jones’s idea – Jones became a liability, scarcely capable of playing live. When he was fired from the band a few weeks before his death, Jagger recalls, he seemed unsurprised.
Forty years after Jones’s death, a heartbreaking note from his dad, Lewis, turned up in the attic of Lawrence’s family home. Read poignantly by Lawrence, it forms the denouement to Broomfield’s touching film. Lewis Jones regretted how he treated Brian: “I have been a very poor and intolerant father in many ways. You grew up in such a different way from that in which I expected you to. I was quite out of my depth.” And, in his short life, so was his son.
• The Stones and Brian Jones was on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
• This article was amended on 16 May 2023. Brian Jones was aged 27 when he died, not 26 as a previous version said.
