Stoned: How Brian Jones made Mick and Keith look conventional

Friday 11 November 2005 01:00 GMT
Comments

So which is your memory of the 1960s? The two scenes, both from the new film, Stoned, take place in 1969, but could be from different eras. The first is a scene of late-1950s repression, the second a snapshot of 1960s free love. Chances are, if you grew up during the period, you knew more about drudgery than indulgence. Because, according to Stoned director, Stephen Woolley, only about 50 people actually got to experience the Swinging Sixties. "Most of Britain was in bed by 10pm because there was nothing else to do," he observes.

What's so interesting about Stoned, which recreates the final days of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (found dead in his swimming pool at the age of 27, a month after being sacked from the band), is that it's about class as much as sex.

"It was a hedonistic time in which people like Brian were elevated very quickly and felt their fame put them above the law." No wonder an older generation felt antagonistic towards these long-haired celebrities. For working-class teenagers such as Woolley, however, the Stones represented escape: "I was going to inherit the world of Brian Jones: the world of drugs, flared trousers and hanging out with Jane Birkin. In contrast, my father and uncles had fought in the war, and were still quite young guys, but their world was over."

Woolley, who produced Scandal, about the Profumo affair, and the Beatles biopic Backbeat, is obsessed with the era. "It's still there in the fabric of how we live now: in the fashion and haircuts and a lack of uniformity. Look at the White Stripes and Franz Ferdinand, they're classic Sixties bands."

Woolley has been researching Stoned for 10 years. It stars newcomer Leo Gregory as Brian Jones and Paddy Considine as Frank Thorogood, the East End builder whose intense relationship with the musician may have led to his death.

Frank was ostensibly hired to do building work on Brian's home, Cotchford Farm, but really to keep an eye on the musician. At times, their scenes together have the intensity and claustrophobia of a Royal Court play. They squabble, flirt and spar. A Second World War vet with a glass eye, Frank embodies the traditions of working-class 1950s Britain. Brian on the other hand is a child of the boho 1960s. No wonder Frank is out of his depth. "He was a builder but he was spending every night getting drunk with, and becoming a butler to, a weird little blond version of Oscar Wilde."

Brian Jones was the face of 1960s revolution. With his sexually ambiguous glamour, he was glam rock before the term was ever coined. Without him there would have been no Rolling Stones. He founded the band in 1962, giving them their name (after a Muddy Waters song) and original rhythm-and-blues style. Later, he was the one recording ethnic music in Morocco and introducing the sitar to Western pop music. But by 1969 he had been sacked for excessive drug-taking and failure to turn up for recordings.

By the time Stoned opens, he's out of the charmed London circle, still surrounded by lovers and minders, but no one is really taking care of him. "These days you'd have a legion of gurus and PRs and therapists and chefs surrounding you," says Woolley. "Brian, on the night he died, had a not very good builder, a nurse who just happened to be there, and his Swedish girlfriend of just a few months."

Woolley is under no illusion about Jones; he could be capricious, vain, a violent womaniser. But he had extraordinary charm. As Keith Richards once observed: "I've never met a nicer bunch of guys."

Apple TV+ logo

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free
Apple TV+ logo

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

Conspiracy theories still abound about Jones's death. Stoned challenges the coroner's verdict that Jones died from drowning brought on by drink and drugs. Woolley even hired a private detective to track down a witness who had never spoken before, the nurse Janet Lawson, the girlfriend of the Stones' road manager, who was at Cotchford Farm the night Jones died. And he bases his film "version" on an alleged deathbed testimony given by the Frank Thorogood in 1993.

There has been talk of exhuming the body and reopening the police inquiry. But, arguably, the murder mystery is the least interesting aspect of the film. What it does best is capture the early Stones, as they make the journey from a grimy flat to Belgravia. We forget the celebrity baggage and just see a group of raw teenagers making music as an escape route from suburbia. "We wanted the black and white opening to be like a Pathé newsreel because that's how most of us first saw the Stones."

Perhaps Woolley's cheekiest touch is to make Mick irrelevant to the whole story. Jagger is famously litigious (which may explain why Luke de Woolfson, a dead ringer for Jagger, only has a cameo role) but it's also a deliberate gesture. "Stoned is Brian's film, not Mick's."

Richards said that the band ditched Brian because they couldn't take any passengers. "The thing that comes across in the film is how ruthless the Stones were about their music," says David Morrissey, who appears in the film. "Jagger and Richards, like Lennon and McCartney, were very much seen from outside to be these people having this endless party, but the one thing they were really serious about was their music, and they weren't going to let anyone get in the way."

Leo Gregory admits: "When I read the script, I had to phone my agent and say: 'Are you sure that this was a real guy? How come I've never heard of him?' When it comes to dead rock stars, I could reel off Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Cobain, but I had never heard of Brian. And 95 per cent of my friends are the same."

So will Stoned only attract the baby-boomers? Gregory thinks not: "At festivals, it's the contemporary audiences who are responding. For me, this era of hedonism and free love is such a foreign world and I'm fascinated. Life now seems a much harder and colder place to have grown up in."

'Stoned' is released on 18 November

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in