The Stones and Brian Jones

 Last night I watched Nick Broomfield's big feature-length documentary about The Stones and Brian Jones – and Lord, it made for intensely sad viewing.
  Jones was clearly a deeply troubled young man who never really got over his difficult relationship with his parents – who, like many parents at the time, were by turns bewildered, worried and utterly infuriated by their strange son and his refusal to 'do the right thing'. Perhaps they were right to be worried, as the unfolding life of the musically gifted Jones developed into a hideous melodrama of self-destruction that was only ever likely to end in his early death. The film was rich in remarkable archive and interview material, ranging from the early days of the Rolling Stones' tumultuous, riot-inducing success (Beatlemania was a vicarage tea party by comparison) to the grim endgame in which Brian, by now too drugged and drunk to perform, was sacked from the band that he had founded. It was clear that Jones could be very sweet, especially in his younger days, and he was obviously vulnerable, but, as more than one voice attested, he was capable of being gratuitously cruel to others, and his record as a parent – fathering five (or was it six?) children by different mothers and having nothing to do with any of them – was lamentable. Maybe if he hadn't got so heavily into so many drugs, things might have turned out differently – but wasn't he always going to take that route, especially at that time and in that milieu? How would I – how would many of my coevals – have coped in those circumstances? Would we have survived? 
  Towards the end of the film a heart-breaking letter from his father to Brian is quoted, in which Jones senior, reaching out to his son, blames himself for throwing the 17-year-old Brian out of the house, an act for which he has never been able to forgive himself. But would things have been any different if that particular incident had never happened? It was not his fault. It wasn't even Brian's fault, or not entirely: if he hadn't hit such an insane level of fame and success with the Stones, and so suddenly, things might have played out very differently, and he might not have ended up at the age of 27 face down in his swimming pool. Talking of which, I was expecting, in view of the scale of the documentary, a rather fuller treatment of Jones's death (and the conspiracy theories that still swirl around it). But there was a little footage of the funeral, with Jones's parents looking completely broken, and some from the Hyde Park concert, with Jagger's reading of 'Adonais', and the notorious butterfly release – a subject about which I have written in both The Mother of Beauty and my forthcoming book on butterflies (scheduled publication date the Twelfth of Never, or maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic). 
  The Stones and Brian Jones is available on iPlayer, but believe me, it does not make cheering viewing.