‘BRIAN, YOU’RE SO ESOTERIC!!!’

– placard hoisted by a member of the audience when The Rolling Stones appeared at the Cobo Hall, Detroit, Michigan on 26 November 1965

Contents

Information Page

About The Author

Prologue: Foundation Stone

1        Along Came Jones

2        Someone Else’s Baby

3        Beatnik Fly

4        Halfway To Paradise

5        Bachelor Boy

6        Go Away Little Girl

7        Devil In Disguise

8        Don’t Talk To Him

9        Golden Lights

10      It’s Not Unusual

11      Silence Is Golden

12      Little Arrows

13      Bringing On Back The Good Times

Epilogue: Stone Dead

Appendix

Notes

About The Author

Born in Dover, England, in 1951, Alan Clayson lives near Henley-on-Thames with his wife, Inese, and sons, Jack and Harry. His portrayal in the Western Morning News as ‘the AJP Taylor of the pop world’ is supported by Q’s ‘his knowledge of the period is unparalleled and he’s always unerringly accurate’. He has written many books on music, including bestsellers Backbeat (subject of a major film) and The Yardbirds, as well as for journals as diverse as The Guardian, Record Collector, Mojo, The Times, Mediaeval World, Eastern Eye, Folk Roots, Guitar, Hello!, The Independent, Ugly Things and, as a teenager, the notorious Schoolkids’ Oz. He has also performed and lectured on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as broadcasted on national TV and radio.

From 1975 to 1985 he led the legendary group Clayson And The Argonauts and was thrust to ‘a premier position on rock’s Lunatic Fringe’ (Melody Maker). As shown by the formation of a US fan club – dating from a 1992 soirée in Chicago – Alan Clayson’s following has continued to grow, as has demand for his talents as a record producer and the number of cover versions of his compositions by such diverse acts as Dave Berry – in whose Cruisers he played keyboards in the mid-1980s – and New Age outfit Stairway. He has also worked with The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Wreckless Eric, Twinkle, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things and the late Screaming Lord Sutch, among others. While his stage act defies succinct description, he is spearheading an English form of chanson. Moreover, his latest album, Soirée, may stand as his artistic apotheosis, were it not for the promise of surprises yet to come.

Further information is obtainable from www.alanclayson.com

Prologue
Foundation Stone

While he wasn’t someone you’d trust with either your heart or your cheque book, Brian Jones was the foundation stone of the group that, to the same arguable degree as The Beatles, soundtracked the Swinging Sixties. Moreover, if Mick Jagger was the mind, Keith Richards the heart and Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts the flesh and blood, the charismatic Jones – androgyny with underlying dread – was surely the soul of The Rolling Stones. He was also their James Dean, their Jet Harris, their Pete Best, their Ace Kefford, their Syd Barrett, their Sid Vicious.

He satisfies any requirement of a doomed rock hero: a loveless upbringing, bohemian wanderings, drug busts, neurotic self-absorption, aspirations to bridge a gap between lowbrow pop and higher artistic expression, a visual image that remains modern – and, to round it off, the ‘beautiful sadness’ of an early grave. Furthermore, Jones held for a long while some sort of British record as the pop star with the most number of known illegitimate offspring. Yet, despite the unquiet nature of his 27 years, Brian clung onto his good looks – just – retaining a boy’s face, albeit one with a lot of miles in the eyes.

His was, therefore, a triumphant and tragic life in which he both glided high on pop’s strongest winds and swam shoreless seas of despair. He has since moved into an orbit separate from that of the Stones. This has so strong a definition that a forthcoming biopic, The Wicked World Of Brian Jones, threatens to be the British movie of 2005, and an annual memorial event in Brian’s home town of Cheltenham draws multitudes of pilgrims.

After drifting from pillar to post, from group to unsatisfactory group since his schooldays, the talented and musically adventurous Brian’s musical career left the runway in 1962 when he formed The Rolling Stones, who, to his apparent chagrin, began moving away from their blues core during an accelerating run of hit singles written by Jagger and Richards. Though their abilities brought the group continued success, and may have saved Jones from a more mundane existence, his thwarted ambition as a composer deserves sympathy.

As he lost his grip on both the Stones and non-professional realities, Brian wanted to, but couldn’t, rewind to 1962, when everything was possible. He wanted to, but couldn’t, brush aside all the millennia that had passed since, like so many matchsticks. Once the group’s livest wire, Jones was reduced to a pitiful isolate, shrouded in melancholy and paranoia, the twinkle vanished from his eye. His exit weeks before his death in 1969 did not, therefore, bring the Stones to their knees, as it might have done had he left six years earlier.

The posthumous legend continues to be nourished by half-truths, tidy-minded media fiction – and no less than six previous books about Jones, though none could be described as ‘definitive’.

In this account, care has been taken to address the myriad social, cultural, economic, environmental and further factors that polarise and prejudice what is generally understood about Brian Jones already, and the new and rediscovered evidence and information that recent research has brought to light. Often pop biography – and that’s all this is – has tended to shy away from these areas – even though they form a more tangible basis for investigation than treating flippant public remarks by the subject as gospel.

Those who devote themselves to collating facts about The Rolling Stones may pounce on mistakes and omissions while scrutinising this work. All I can say to them is that it’s as accurate as it can be after the synthesis of personal memories and interviews with some of the key dramatis personae – not to mention filing cabinet drawers labelled ‘Brian Jones’, and exercise books full of doctor’s prescription-like scribble drawn from press archives – some of them quite obscure.

Please put your hands together for Iain MacGregor, Laura Brudenell, Chris Harvey, Nikky Twyman, Claire Musters and the rest of the team at Sanctuary, who went far beyond the call of duty from this biography’s sluggish genesis to its final publication.

I am also very grateful to Pat Andrews, Dave Berry, Mike Cooper, Don Craine, Keith Grant-Evans, Richard Hattrell, Mick M Jones, Phil May, Jim McCarty, Tom McGuiness, Brian Poole, Dick Taylor and Twinkle for their pragmatism, clear insight and intelligent argument.

Thanks are in order, too, for Jane Allen, Robin Brooks and Verity Herrington of the Gloucestershire Echo, as well as Brian Auger, Mick Avory, Jayne Down (of Cheltenham Reference Library), Jonathan Meades, Sally Pillinger, Roger Winslet and, especially, Trevor Hobley and John MacGillivray of The Brian Jones Fan Club.

Whether they were aware of providing assistance or not, let’s also have a round of applause for these musicians: Roger Barnes, Alan Barwise, Cliff Bennett, the late Lonnie Donegan, Chris Gore, ‘Wreckless’ Eric Goulden, Brian Hinton, Robb Johnston, Garry Jones, Barb Jungr, Graham Larkbey, the late Noel Redding, Mike and Anja Stax, the late Lord David Sutch, John Townsend and Paul Tucker.

It may be obvious to the reader that I have received much information from sources that prefer not to be mentioned. Nevertheless, I wish to thank them – as well as B and T Typewriters, Bemish Business Machines, Stuart and Kathryn Booth, Peter Doggett, Ian Drummond, Katy Foster-Moore, Michael Heatley, Dave Humphries, Rob Johnstone, Allan Jones, Sarah Jones, Spencer Leigh, Doug Little, Elisabeth McCrae, Stefan Mlynek, Russell Newmark, Mike Ober, Mike Robinson, Mark Stokes, Stuart Stokes, Anna Taylor, Michael Towers, Warren Walters, Gina Way and Ted Woodings, and also Inese, Jack and Harry Clayson, for letting me get on with it – plus a special nod to Kevin Delaney.

Alan Clayson
October 2003

1 Along Came Jones

It was heralded with an extensive poster campaign, press advertisements and extensive word of mouth. A show on the capacious bandstand of a public park, it promised 27 bands plus a pageant of supplementary entertainment. A calculated risk about the weather meant the audience would be open to the sky but, even at dawn, the day was promising to be a scorcher, and a buzzing multitude of thousands was already sprawled across the greensward, many having arrived by train the previous evening. Estimates varied but, if exaggerated, it was certainly one of the largest assemblies for any musical event ever accommodated by the locality. The tribes would depart afterwards, having participated, however passively, in the proverbial ‘something to tell your grandchildren about’.

The crowd’s morning vigil was measured in expeditions for tepid drinks – and, unless you had an iron bladder, concealing bushes en route were not ignored. The gathering tension was also punctuated by announcements from a master of ceremonies with a sad gaucho moustache, transmitting information about lost youngsters and the forthcoming programme as well as pleas to consider the environment by not leaving litter or climbing surrounding trees for a better view.

Could we be at a San Francisco ‘Be In’, circa late 1966? Waiting in Hyde Park for The Rolling Stones? Castle Donington? Glastonbury? Reading? Any major outdoor pop extravaganza since 1966? Actually, it’s the Grand Brass and Silver Band Contest, held in southeast Gloucestershire in Cheltenham’s Pittville Park on 14 July 1868 where, though nine of the expected outfits declined to play, those that did mount the stage blared out a test piece called ‘Venetian Waltz’ plus one item of their own choice. Craning distant necks, and commanding attentive silences and considered ovations, The Worcester County Lunatic Asylum Band – selected from staff not patients – carried off the £16 ($27) first prize with entrants from Gloucester, Stroud and faraway Abertillery amongst runners-up. The greatest day anyone could ever remember concluded with fireworks ‘prepared by Mr Grundy’, and – as was proper – the massed 400 or so performers blasting up ‘Rule Britannia’ and the national anthem.

While such tournaments took place in Gloucestershire as early as the Industrial Revolution, the shire forged further opportunities for musical expression beyond trumping a euphonium in the Remembrance Day procession. The most famous musician Cheltenham ever produced, for instance, was to pen ‘very catholic, but I hate brass bands’ when filling in the ‘Tastes in music’ section of the New Musical Express’s ‘Life-lines’ questionnaire late in 1964.²

While Tony Sheridan (the vocalist The Beatles backed in 1961 when they began their commercial discography) and Mick Farren (leader of The Social Deviants, mainstays of Britain’s ‘alternative’ circuit of one-nighters in the late 1960s) are connected by simple accident of birth, Brian Jones will be eternally, if reluctantly, Cheltenham’s as The Beatles will be Liverpool’s. Indeed, there are middle-aged folk who boast still of having sat next to Brian at infant school, sang in the same church choir or danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with him at St Luke’s Hall along Bath Road. The fellow who’d cadged a cigarette off you there – and Brian, they’d chuckle, was always one of nature’s takers – had been the cynosure of unseen millions of eyes on the very first edition of Top Of The Pops on New Year’s Day 1964.

Yet once Brian Jones had been, on the surface, an expressionless youth mooching along the pavement, and it had been impossible to deduce that, within his shell, he was an epitome of JB Priestley’s assertion in his 1956 critique of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, ‘that butchers cutting off chops may be touched by intimations of immortality, that the grocer, even as he hesitates over the sugar, may yet see the world in a grain of sand’. There’d been nothing to suggest that, like his immediate forebears, Brian too would not live a relatively uneventful life, even dwelling until the grave in the town that vied with Cirencester and Gloucester as stone-built ‘capital’ of the Cotswolds.

Cheltenham was remote enough, even after World War II, for the distance to the metropolis to be measured in years rather than kilometres. Bigoted Londoners still assumed that the further towards the Atlantic or Irish Sea you travelled, the more yokel-like the natives. Yet Cheltenham had thrived in its isolation and built-in resilience as an agricultural centre from the pre-Christian era, and as a Roman settlement, exemplified today by period pavements uncovered for public scrutiny then buried again to preserve against decay.

After the discovery of the medicinal properties of its waters, Cheltenham became a decidedly non-bumpkin spa in 1719 – and ‘the most complete Regency town in England’, according to the borough council’s tourist guide book. Even in the 1950s, the River Chelt – a tributary of the Severn from Bristol – was a-swarm with coarse fish, but to most Britons the town remained just another point on the route between London and South Wales. To train travellers passing through, it seemed no different from any other town of sufficient inhabitants to warrant a railway station by the mid-19th century.

After the Great War, the names over the shops continued to change, but hikers still breasted the surrounding wolds where sheep nibbled on grassy old battlegrounds. Some open country remained just so – such as that within the estate of the aristocratic Mitfords, whose ancestral home, Swinbrook, stood near one of the outlying hamlets. Elsewhere, however, arcadian meadows were about to be buried beneath an urban overspill sprawl of residential hinterland of raw red brick, built by the book amidst small-time light industry, tangles of shopping precincts, arteries of droning traffic, rows of lock-up garages and industrial estates with their engineering, electronics, chemical and printing works.

Yet conservatism and long residency in Cheltenham remained prerequisites of entry into polite society, which contained broods connected either to old money or an officer class that, after a life of service to the Empire – particularly in India – had retired there with memoirs to think about writing, mounted heads of wild animals they’d shot and framed and yellowing photographs of themselves wearing pith helmets.

Along genteel Hatherley Road, geometrically patterned linoleum in the kitchen was among few hints of domestic personality in Ravenswood, a semi-detached that was, recalled Pat Andrews, one of Brian’s first ‘serious’ girlfriends, ‘modern, if quite spartan furniture-wise’. It was the Jones family’s second home in Cheltenham, and it was there that Brian, still in nappies, had caught and held the sounds of Welsh as well as English.

Wales was close enough for Brian, as a round-eyed toddler, to have watched the RAF’s diamond formations zooming towards the Luftwaffe’s bombardment of the docks in both Newport and Bristol – facing each other across the Severn – where the horizon glowed with tonne upon booming tonne of death and destruction. Moreover, on 28 February 1942 – a cold but dry day during a year of meteorological extremes – he’d entered the world as Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones, embracing the two most common surnames in the principality.

‘One of his grandfathers was a schoolmaster in Wales,’ explained Pat Andrews, adding that ‘the family background was “Chapel”, and enjoying yourself in any way played no part in their lives. You were born, you went to school, you made sure you got good marks, you found yourself a good profession, you got married, you had children – and that was it. There was no time in between for any fun.’

Outwardly, however, Mr and Mrs Jones were ‘nice people’, conventionally conscientious rather than doting parents who endeavoured to instil into their son what ought to be admired about quiet dignity and achievement by effort. This they did during a period when it was common for offspring to be berated in harsh and penetrating tones in the most public places. These days, it would be called either ‘tough love’ or ‘child abuse’. Whatever it was, it wasn’t very effective, and its perpetrators earned the adolescent Brian’s scorn rather than filial devotion – though he would remain very concerned about parental disapproval even when ostensibly escaped from their clutches.

Home, therefore, was a place where Brian and sister Barbara, four years younger, kept their emotions in check, and where the good opinion of peers mattered more to Lewis and Louise than their children’s happiness. Their only other child, Pamela, had died of leukaemia at the age of two.

‘His mother told Brian that Pamela had been sent away for being naughty,’ averred Pat Andrews, ‘and he may have formed the impression then that it wasn’t healthy to become too attached to anyone – because they’d leave you. His parents’ behaviour wasn’t intentionally cruel, but it was to do with the attitude then: that you had to be cruel to be kind – especially towards boys. Brian really suffered from this – particularly as he wasn’t able to let his artistic nature surface, though, when he moved out, he painted a beautiful mosaic on the wall of his flat. His father wanted him to be an optician, a solicitor, an architect…something with a solidly professional veneer to it – though he could have just about handled it if Brian had wanted to be a classical musician.’

We would like the impossible: videos of scenes that busied the rooms of Ravenswood or to sample with Brian’s own sensory organs how a particular glance, word or gesture from his mother would cow him, even as a young adult. In every family, there is always territory forbidden and inexplicable to outsiders, but it is probable that Brian suffered exultant application of corporal punishment as a boy, and was also subjected to rearing methods intended to force him not to feel bitterness or anger towards Mum and Dad, even when those feelings might be entirely justified.

All children are born in love with their parents. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is the prophet of Mummy. However, when Mummy and Daddy resort to hurting you, saying things, lying, the world stops making sense.

‘Brian’s baby picture is quite startling,’ observed mid-1960s pop star Marianne Faithfull, ‘A jowly, miserable child is looking up at you with exactly that expression of helpless victimisation he gave off in the last year of his life.’³

With his face scrubbed and his blond hair combed until his entire scalp was sore, Brian trudged along as the family paraded to and from divine worship at 900-year-old St Mary’s Parish Church. Once there, Mum, Dad and Barbara took their seats in their usual high-backed pew while Brian went round to the vestry, where cassock, ruff and surplice were to cover the detested and sober suit that, when he began wearing spectacles and was old enough for long trousers, made him look like a miniature version of his father. As a matter of course, he had been obliged to join other boys who cantillated every Sunday and, when required, at weddings and in St Cecilia’s Day oratorios. As he rose through the ranks, he’d be privileged sometimes to bear the processional cross as priest and choir filed in and out. He also doused the altar candles after the General Confession during Matins.

Yet the holy sounds he sang were slightly unintelligible (if occasionally extraordinary) at 9, and over-familiar and rote-learned by 13. As it is with every intelligent teenager, he began to question the motives of adult communicants. Were the rafter-raising votes of confidence and thanks to the Lord once a week to assuage His inferiority complex, to quench His restless thirst for applause or a stockpiling of spiritual ammunition for the defence when the worshippers’ cases came up on Judgment Day?

He soon absorbed the habits of those choristers of the same kidney. Mostly, they were tiny, covert, cat’s-cradling rebellions, but the story goes that, for an involuntary giggle during a sermon, Brian was subjected to an explosive churchyard tongue-lashing by Mrs Jones – which included a promise that he’d be ‘sent to bed with the light off as soon as you get home’ – so that sin rebuked by a godly woman would be witnessed by the others filing out after evensong.

From then on, at several points during each of the three services he endured every Sunday, Brian would direct as sincere a smile as he could muster at his mother in the congregation, in order to gauge the mood, relaxing only if the smile was returned as he sang into the tedium of enough churchgoing to last a lifetime.

Later, Brian would profess to be an atheist, but no one was sure whether to believe him because, for all his brashness, it’s likely that at least a dark and lonely corner of his psyche remained superstitiously terrified of eternal punishment for sin. Another legacy of his boyhood were lengthening bouts of depression and lifelong nervous disorders that either triggered or were aggravated by chronic asthma. Certainly, it drove out both a capacity for uninhibited joy and any pleasant recollections of life in a dysfunctional home where, through lace curtains, he’d glower and wonder if this was all there was.

In reciprocation, Lewis, relaxing over an after-dinner crossword in plain cardigan and baggy trousers, couldn’t understand what his son found so loathsome about a decent life in a country town where the only times a true gentleman’s name appeared in the Gloucestershire Echo was on the occasion of his marriage and when he shuffled off this mortal coil.

A lot of Brian’s parents lived on in him, but a positive side of the soul-murdering persecution from so-called loved ones was his liberalism during those brief periods when, before the novelty wore off, he was actively involved in his own children’s upbringing after he’d understood that there might be openings other than in secure but – to Brian – dull jobs like Dad’s at Dowty and Co aeronautical engineering works, with Eldorado a bonus in your pay packet. Perish the thought, but you might be better off as the scion of some unrespectable coalman or bus conductor who didn’t frown should you ask to go to the cinema on the Sabbath and wouldn’t threaten to disinherit you if you dared to come downstairs in an American tie.

GIs on passes had burst upon the fun palaces of Cheltenham in garb in which only blacks, London spivs and the boldest homosexuals would be seen dead – padded shoulders on double-breasted suits with half-belts at the back, ‘spear-point’ shirt collars, two-tone shoes and those contentious hand-painted ties with American Indians or baseball players on them. Sartorial visions, they would acknowledge bemused or envious stares with waves of fat wands of cigars. At one stage during World War II, it was reckoned that North Americans stationed in the town had outnumbered the British residents.

Though few lights had showed along the tree-lined Promenade at night, it was jammed with US army vehicles. Traffic was as heavy up and down stairs in at least two prominent hotels that had become part-brothel, part-casino, and where you’d be scrutinised through a spyhole and refused access if you were less than a lieutenant.

Lower ranks whooped it up in the noise and crush of those pubs where prostitutes were welcome, mingling with parochial roughnecks until representatives from Gloucester of the most fearsome if narcissistic of post-war youth cults descended on Cheltenham one evening in the pre-rock ’n’ roll 1950s. Resplendent in their seedy-flash finery and quiffed glaciers of brilliantine, the Teddy Boys were wielding flick knives and bicycle chains. They had some grievance against the US visitors, and the expedition climaxed with the killing of a GI in the bus station toilets. One outcome of this incident was that the whole town was declared off limits to North American servicemen.

The US presence also marked the genesis of Cheltenham’s participation in Britain’s attempts to get to grips with jazz, a form detested by Lewis Jones in his office as sometime organist at St Mary’s, as it was by Louise, a piano teacher, even if Stravinsky had been, in 1913, sincerely loud in his praise of jazz, thus elevating it from a slang expression to describe the improvised extrapolations prevalent in negro dance music.

Regardless of who was present, Mr or Mrs Jones would switch off the wireless if it was broadcasting not only jazz, but also whatever else they had lumped derisively together as ‘swing’ – because it epitomised the depraved cacophony that was the distinguishing feature of the modern music that was subverting all that was good and true. Hitler had had his faults, but pouring contempt on that rubbish hadn’t been among them.

‘To Brian’s parents, jazz was black music, played in speakeasies,’ elucidated Pat Andrews, ‘anything to do with it was connected with drugs and sex. Brian had problems listening or playing any sort of music there. It wasn’t to be too loud. He’d rarely practise at home, apart from piano which his mother taught him, and clarinet. He played piano in a duet on a school open day, and his father was very proud of Brian’s rendition of Weber’s Clarinet Concerto.’

It was beyond them to be too demonstrative about it, but his parents were delighted at their first-born’s inherited musical strengths, and his willingness from earliest youth to try, try again as he sweated over Bach, Chopin and further prescribed exercises that revealed to him that music was a science as much as an art. Brian was also self-contained enough to disassociate it from the drudgery, albeit with Pat Andrews’ qualification ‘give Brian half an hour, and he could get something recognisable from any musical instrument, but the chase was better than the catch. Once he’d mastered the thing, he’d get tired and move onto something else.’

In a cultural atmosphere of diminished fifths and Brahms’ German Requiem as well as the general oppressive ennui of Ravenswood and the ebbing Regency calm of his home town, Brian had been sheltered as far as possible from bohemianism as the country paid for its victory, and the West Country continued to be pictured in metropolitan breakfast rooms as a corner of the map where nothing much was guaranteed to happen, year in, year out.

Morris Minor ‘woodies’, bulbous Ford Populars, Ford Anglia delivery vans with the grocer’s name on the side-panelling and the odd Morris 100 police car could park with ease and without restriction along the High Street where the number 6 bus began and ended its ding-dinging, stop-start commute to Warden Hill, and the offices of the Gloucestershire Echo then cooked up its weekly diet of whist drives, winter farrowing, the Operatic Society’s production of Merrie England, gypsies camped illegally on a disused army camp, the Rotary Club’s ‘celebrity’ football match, horse-racing results and the more intriguing lots at forthcoming house auctions.

This was spiced with less run-of-the-mill news such as Diana Dors, Britain’s ‘answer’ to Marilyn Monroe, opening a new electrical wholesaler’s along the High Street; Cotswold peer Lord Wogan-Phillips outing himself as the first Communist member of the House of Lords and the rebuilding of the council offices after a fire in 1960 – but, as it was in most other English provincial towns, the 1950s didn’t really end in Cheltenham until about 1966, and bored adolescents with hormones raging wondered what to do until bedtime just as they had since archers had trained on the green prior to setting off for Agincourt. All the alleged excesses of a wider world belonged to speculation while sharing a communal filter-tip behind school bicycle sheds, and rare sightings of the odd student emerging from the art college, carrying a huge painting of a nude, and accompanied by a female who was identifiable as its subject.

Brian Jones’s formal education had started at fee-paying Dean Close Primary School, a middle-class version of Cheltenham Gentlemen’s College, a public (ie private) school that was to be the location for If, the 1968 film about a bloody rebellion against the staff and governors by a coterie of schoolboys.

At Dean Close, Brian sailed through the 11-plus in 1953, and thus gained a place at the grammar school that was between the bus depot and the brewery, with the art college situated on its top two floors. For Lewis and Louise, it was as desirable a social coup as an academic one for Brian to be seen in the grammar’s black-and-white-striped blazer and cap rather than the uniform – if there was such a thing – of one of Cheltenham’s secondary moderns, where ‘failures’ went before the advent of the fairer ‘education for all’ comprehensive system allowed you (theoretically) to follow what best suited your abilities and inclinations as they evolved.

Whether he’d become famous in later life or not, Brian Jones would have been remembered as more than a name on a register at the grammar. As a first-former, all eyes and teeth, in the top academic stream, he settled down almost eagerly to classwork, but, as it was with boring, boring church, he wearied of the draconian affectations and futile rigmarole. Two terms might have transformed another of the same mind into a capable but uninvolved student, unblinking in the monotony of, say, the geography master’s chalky exposition of Belgium’s inner waterways, but Brian’s disinterest could not remain passive, and the more faint-hearted teachers discovered a feeling of relief whenever he was absent.

‘Somewhere along the line, he decided he was going to be a full-time professional rebel,’ sighed Keith Richards, ‘and it didn’t really suit him – so that when he wanted to be obnoxious, he had to really make an effort, and, having made the effort, he would be really obnoxious.’⁴

By the end of his second year at the grammar, Brian Jones was a known nuisance. Already, he had become a sharer of smutty stories and magazines of female lingerie and, despite his respiratory maladies, was a member of a caste that had graduated from the innocence of tooth-rotting Spangles to the lung-corroding evil of cigarettes.

More overt offences began with insulting ‘politeness’ to teachers, red-herring time-wasting tactics in class and dumb insolence when directed to spit a sweet into the litter bin during lessons. Then came an appearance behind an inkwelled desk in football boots – ‘more comfortable,’ he argued – rather than the regulation black ‘bombhead’ shoes; instigating a widespread and hastily suppressed practice of bottled beer instead of the third-pints of lukewarm milk then provided at morning break, courtesy of the Welfare State – and earning a week’s suspension for ringleading a mutiny against the prefects. Far from being homicidally If-like, this prank was as ineffectual and as banal as the others when, for all the school’s cradling of Cheltenham’s intellectual elite, might was right in the face of Brian’s ability to nutshell and, smoothly and logically, contradict the most complex arguments for toeing the line at school. Yet it diverted attention from the fact that Brian was as craven a physical coward as Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. If slightly below middle height like his father, he was broad-shouldered and had a soft husk of a voice that, even with its noticeable lisp, could sound menacing. At school and beyond, Brian could exert a vice-like grip on his allies in delinquency, some of whom weren’t so much friends as disciples whom he could persuade to do almost anything. Among them would be the type of specimen that, ostensibly unbothered and faithful, might be lured into some shaming faux pas, sent on a fool’s errand and driven to near-suicide with mind games.

Some of Brian’s ‘victims’, however, either weaned themselves off him or started to snap back. A few went so far as to put up their fists and look fierce, noting how swiftly their antagonist would back down. They’d ascertained that, beneath the bravado, Brian was, psychologically, a bit of a ‘weed’. This was corroborated by the fear in his grey-green eyes when summoned to be confronted with his infamy in headmaster Dr Arthur Bell’s study, and the latter’s informed obituary for Brian in the school magazine in autumn 1969: ‘Brian Jones seemed to be essentially a sensitive and vulnerable boy, not at all cut out for the rough-and-tumble of the commercial world.’

Dr Bell agreed, too, that ‘he always seemed quite clever, and he did in fact do quite well – though nothing like as well as he might have done had he been attracted to an academic career’. Whatever the stomach-knotting repercussions of the turmoil he caused, and however profound his apparent indifference to logarithms and the Diet of Worms, Brian answered barked questions correctly and succinctly without seeming to awake from a daydream, and didn’t lose a knack for passing examinations, even those most important ones held during summer when, shirt-sleeved in the heat, and with pen sliding in sweaty palm, his asthma allied with hay fever.

On the raw statistics of results, Brian was a credit to his parents, and a ‘nice little boy’ to outsiders. In denial, his mother might recall a loving relationship with her fallen angel, lots of cuddles, full of fun, until he became impossible to live with, what with the increasing trouble about his choice of friends of either sex; his late hours and his insolence; those crude drainpipe jeans and other of the more ridiculous clothes he’d got past her quality control, and the way he treated other members of the family. She and Lewis would have to all but disown him after the scandal that caused him to leave the grammar school under the darkest cloud possible.

2 Someone Else’s Baby

By the mid-1950s, you’d come across the most unlikely brass bandsmen buying a ticket automatically for not only a Cheltenham International Festival of Music event – at the racecourse, say, or at Berkeley Castle or Pittville Pump Room – but a Town Hall jazz concert, and being able to discuss with authority such erudite subjects as ‘small-band Ellingtonia’ or dropping buzz words like ‘Monk’, ‘Miles Davis’, ‘Getz’ and ‘Brubeck’ into conversations.

Gloucestershire was to be well represented with Dixieland units, but even during the traditional jazz – ‘trad’ – boom in the early 1960s, the county produced few musicians from a jazz background of comparable national renown to bowler-hatted Bristol clarinettist Acker Bilk, trumpeter Kenny Ball from Ilford, Glaswegian trombonist George Chisholm with his comedy routines on BBC television’s Black And White Minstrel Show or even cornetist Ken Colyer, who, within London’s Crane River Jazz Band, formed, arguably, the first British skiffle group in 1949 as an intermission from the interweaving of the front-line horns – though, two years later, The Washboard Wonders took up one side of Chris Barber’s New Orleans Jazz Band’s first extended-play (EP) disc.

The most famous – if that is the word – Cheltenham jazzer was Tony Mann. His prodigious hand-and-foot coordination earned him a post in the all-purpose combo at London’s Ronnie Scott’s, storm centre of UK jazz, serving Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Cannonball Adderley and other visiting North Americans.

Dotted bebop crochets on Tony’s ride cymbal – ching-a-ching-ching – had no place in rock ’n’ roll, but other drummers were socking a crude but powerful off-beat behind local pop singers. However, as there’d be no Cheltenham Acker Bilk, so there’d be no ‘answers’ to would-be UK Elvis Presleys such as Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury or even also-rans like Terry Dene, Dickie Pride or Vince Eager.

So parochial was provincial pop that there seemed to be no halfway between obscurity and the Big Time. Certainly, Gloucestershire spawned a paltry litter of hit parade contenders of even Eager-sized renown in the principal domain of groups that began during the late 1950’s skiffle craze – coffee bars and youth clubs that convened mostly in musty Victorian monstrosities where soft drinks, with-it vicars and a wholesome, self-improving reek were the norm.