Amy stumbled into this classy event wearing ragged shorts and a black vest that revealed her skeletal torso. ‘She looked like a concentration-camp inmate,’ says John Altman. ‘I mean, she looked dreadful, absolutely terrible.’ Amy had a posse of hangers-on with her, including the comic Russell Brand, band members and minders. She saw Patrick Alan and gave him a hug. ‘She literally was hunched over like a homeless woman … I was just in shock to see her that way.’ Patrick asked Amy if he could get her a drink, out of politeness, realising at once that he’d put his foot in it. ‘I swear to God every one of her people looked at me – it was like a Monty Python movie – they looked at me. Shush! But without making any noise. No! Cutting their throats. What are you doing? I was, like, Oh, my gosh! And she reeled off, like, eight things she wanted: a vodka tonic, a bottle of this, a bottle of that …’
Patrick Alan and John Altman went on stage with members of Amy’s band and Dionne Bromfield, who was going to sing Motown songs. The audience applauded politely. Then there were gasps as Amy appeared along with her friends, looking like the walking dead, followed by the sound of chairs being scraped back as people got up from their tables and ran to the front to stare at this spectre. Amy was clearly high. Her eyes were wild. Her movements were jerky as she danced and sang.
Backstage Amy got into a fracas with a woman who complained to police that Amy had punched her. Amy was acquitted at trial. During an eventful evening she also spoke with John Altman, telling him something sad and revealing. ‘She said, “I didn’t want all this. I just wanted to make music with my friends.”’ Success had not made Amy happy, any more than it had brought happiness to Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Looking at Amy at the Berkeley Square Ball, John Altman doubted that she would live to see Christmas.
* During the writing of this book, Doherty offered to sell an account of his ‘liaisons with Amy during [Blake’s] little HMP chez da Ville [sic]’ in exchange for money to get his car fixed.
Part Two
Death
Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick
Eight
IN WHICH BRIAN IS ENTIRELY SURROUNDED BY WATER
There was a loud splash, and Eeyore disappeared.
A. A. Milne
1
So far we have followed the principal 27s from their difficult childhoods, through early success, to the point in their mid-twenties when they were dosing themselves with alcohol and drugs to stabilise their moods, and cope with the pressures that came with fame. Now we turn to the end of these lives. All six artists met different deaths. Yet each was a shade of the same colour.
When British pop stars of the 1960s started to make money they tended to buy country houses tucked away down leafy lanes where their fans and the press would struggle to find them, but still within driving distance of London. Members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones all bought such homes, and Brian Jones was no exception. In late 1968 Brian purchased Cotchford Farm just outside Hartfield in East Sussex, fifty miles south of the capital. The house is at the side of a valley, overlooking a stream, on the edge of Ashdown Forest. The oldest part dates to the sixteenth century, including a beamed living room with an inglenook fireplace. Over the years owners have expanded the property to create a rambling six-bedroom house that seems to grow naturally out of the countryside.
Brian loved Cotchford Farm and he took pride in the fact that A. A. Milne had lived there in the 1920s, writing his Winnie-the-Pooh stories, inspired by his son Christopher Robin and his toy animals. The landscape around the house – which Brian bought with eleven acres – was the landscape of Pooh. The ‘100 Aker Wood’ was Ashdown Forest; Eeyore’s Gloomy Place was the soggy ground at the bottom of the garden by the stream, forded by the bridge upon which Christopher Robin, Piglet and Pooh played Poohsticks. This was where Eeyore the neurotic donkey, a character Brian resembled in certain respects, fell into the water in The House at Pooh Corner. All these places were immortalised in Milne’s stories and in the original illustrations by E. H. Shepard, who visited Cotchford Farm for inspiration. It is a striking irony that Brian Jones’s debauched life as a rock star ended in a place associated with childhood innocence.
After The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was filmed in December 1968 (though not shown for many years), Brian played little part in the band he had founded. He turned 27 in February, and was back at the Priory in March ‘suffering with depression’, according to Bill Wyman, when the Stones began recording Let it Bleed at Olympic Studios. Brian attended on occasion, playing auto-harp on ‘You Got the Silver’ among other bits and pieces, but he was now a peripheral figure.
As far as his personal life was concerned, Brian’s relationship with Suki Poitier ended, but he did not lack female company. On a trip to Paris in the spring of 1969 he caught up with Zouzou, who found Brian depressed, drinking heavily and using drugs to excess. ‘He was really, really fucked up … He said, “I asked Mick to put me in a mental hospital,” to do a cure or whatever, and Mick told him to fuck off.’ Zouzou says Brian knew the Stones wanted to be rid of him. ‘He wanted to see how they were going to tell him.’ Back in England, Brian was seeing a 22-year-old Swede named Anna Wohlin. She came to stay at Cotchford Farm in May, and was Brian’s companion during his final days.
In London, the Stones were recording ‘Honky Tonk Women’ with Mick Taylor, whom Jagger and Richards chose as Brian’s replacement in the band. It was time to tell Brian.
After work at the studio on 8 June 1969, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts drove to Cotchford Farm where they spent half an hour talking with Brian in the living room of the old house, which Brian liked to call his ‘music room’. The conversation was apparently amicable. Keith Richards says they explained to Brian that they were going to tour again and they needed a functional second guitarist. ‘We offered him the chance to stay, but it was an offer we knew was going to be refused.’ So it was decided that Brian would leave the Stones. He wouldn’t do so empty-handed. He would receive a pay-off of £100,000 ($159,000), a considerable sum equal to three times the purchase price of Cotchford Farm, plus further annual payments.
Following the meeting, a statement was issued to the press in which Brian gave the impression he had quit for artistic reasons. He and the Stones no longer ‘communicate musically. The only solution is to go our separate ways …’ This wasn’t completely disingenuous. Brian had ambitions to form a new group, possibly featuring Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which disbanded that summer. At times Brian seemed genuinely optimistic about his future, but it is hard to see how whatever he did could rival the success he’d enjoyed with the Stones. To some extent, Brian was putting on a brave face when he spoke about the projects he had in mind. Friends saw glimpses of depression, and little wonder. It was a defeat and a humiliation to be ejected from the band he had founded, on top of the other humiliations he had suffered: his experiences in court, where his drug history and mental state were laid bare, and losing Anita Pallenberg to Keith. Brian had loved Anita, even though he abused her, and now she was having Keith’s baby. Meanwhile the word from London was that the new Stones album was sounding great, Mick Taylor was a brilliant musician and the band was planning a summer concert in Hyde Park. The Stones were moving ahead, leaving Brian behind. It is hard to believe that his death within four weeks of leaving the band was unrelated.
It should also be remembered that Brian had been living dangerously for years, flirting with Death on a daily basis through his reckless use of drink and drugs. We might imagine Death as a character in the second half of this history of the 27 Club, as it has been represented in art through the centuries, usually depicted as a wraith with a skull face, wearing a black cowl and holding an hour-glass to remind the living that their time is nigh, as in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death has a white clown’s face, an enigmatically solemn figure with a comedian�
�s sense of timing and an ineluctable will. Brian had an appointment with this gloomy character.
2
Brian typically rose late at Cotchford Farm after staying up playing music, drinking and using drugs. Many friends swear that he was clean of drugs by the summer of 1969 – which was what he said – but it wasn’t true. In addition to his asthma inhaler, Brian’s prescription drugs alone included Valium to calm his nerves, Mandrax to put him to sleep, and Piriton for hay fever. Ten days before he died Brian asked his doctor additionally for Durophet, a powerful sedative widely abused in the music community where the black pills were known as ‘black bombers’. The prescription was small, but it added to a significant drug intake. By the account of his girlfriend Anna Wohlin, Brian was not clean of illegal drugs either, getting high on a gift of cocaine left by Keith Richards. And he was drinking.
After he got up, Brian typically put a record on his hi-fi, often Creedence Clearwater Revival, which he would blast through the open windows and down the valley where Christopher Robin had played. As June turned to July he spent much of the rest of the day indoors watching the tennis on television. It was the year of Pancho Gonzales’s marathon five-hour match against Charlie Pasarell at Wimbledon, with victory for Ann Haydon-Jones in the women’s final. It wasn’t always easy to concentrate on the tennis, however, with the builders in.
Brian was having renovations done to his house. The man in charge was a 44-year-old Londoner named Frank Thorogood. Although he came recommended by the Stones’ chauffeur-turned-tour manager, Tom Keylock, having worked for Keith Richards, the consensus is that Thorogood was an incompetent builder who, with his workmen, took advantage of Brian. ‘[Thorogood] was a nasty piece of work … a bit of a cowboy builder,’ says Les Hallett, who did odd jobs around Cotchford Farm while his wife Mary cleaned for Brian. The couple lived opposite. Hallett shakes his head as he describes watching Thorogood strip paint from the Elizabethan panelling in the dining room with a blow lamp, and recalls that another bodged job was the installation of wooden beams in the breakfast room to match the old beams in the house. One of the new beams fell down and almost brained Anna Wohlin. Brian seemed ready to sack Thorogood for this, but the builder stayed on the job. Indeed, he lived in the stable block, and Brian evidently forgave him because he invited Thorogood to the house for drinks and supper.
On 1 July 1969 a nurse named Janet Lawson came to stay with Frank Thorogood in the stables. That night the couple were invited for dinner with Brian and Anna. Typically, Brian drank wine with dinner, and consumed more alcohol as well. Then he went for a late-night swim. There was a heated open-air pool on the terrace adjacent to the house, overlooking Eeyore’s Gloomy Place. Installed by the previous owners, after the Milne residency, the pool was forty feet long and eight feet deep at the end nearest the house, where there were steps into the water and a diving board. Brian kept the water temperature high, and floodlit the pool at night. Going for a swim on a full stomach, having consumed alcohol and medication, not to mention any illegal drugs he may have obtained, was, of course, dangerous.
The weather continued fine the following day, Wednesday, 2 July. Brian rose at eleven a.m. and sat down to watch the men’s quarter finals from Wimbledon. He and Anna ate a salad lunch and Brian spoke to people on the telephone, including the Stones’ office and Amanda Lear, whom he invited to the house. ‘He said, “I’m really together now. I’ve got myself together and I’m leaving the Stones and I’ve been to Morocco recording some sounds in the mountains … amazing folk music, I’m really interested in all this.” [He] was talking a lot. But I don’t think he was very together. And he was very hurt that the Rolling Stones had turned [their] back to him.’ Lear says Brian sent a car to collect her, but she told the driver to take her to Heathrow, where she caught a flight to Spain. She’d had enough of Brian’s crazy life. ‘That remained always a [source] of guilt … If I had gone there, perhaps I could have helped, or something different would have happened.’
In the early evening Brian sent Frank Thorogood to the Dorset Arms in the village to buy wine, vodka, brandy and whisky. When Frank returned with the bottles, the men had a drink. Then the builder went back to the stables. That evening, after ten o’clock when Anna Wohlin was ready for bed, Brian became restless for company. He fetched a torch and walked over to the stables to rouse Thorogood and Janet Lawson, who told the police that Brian was already ‘unsteady on his feet’. Nevertheless, they followed him back to his house where the men had more to drink. Brian was drinking brandy and his speech was garbled.
‘I’ve had my sleepers,’ he said, a term he sometimes used for his black bombers.
Anna had witnessed him swallowing several such pills. Having mixed alcohol with medication, Brian now wanted to swim. ‘He seemed anxious to be occupied and invited us to swim,’ Janet said, in her police statement. As a nurse, she warned Brian and the others not to swim in their condition, but they ignored her. She decided ‘they were all being very stupid’.
Brian tottered onto the diving board. ‘Brian was staggering,’ Frank Thorogood told the police. ‘He had some difficulty in balancing on the diving board, and I helped to steady him …’ The water must have appeared inviting to Brian as he stood on the board: an undulating rectangle of aquamarine under the pool lights. Beyond the lights the trees of the ‘100 Aker Wood’ would have been rustling in the dark. Anna got into the water first. It was very warm. Brian had turned the temperature up during the day. Then Brian flopped in from the board. ‘His movements were sluggish, but I felt reasonably assured that they were all able to look after each other,’ said Janet. So she went inside.
Brian asked Anna for his inhaler, which she gave him at the pool-side. Then she went upstairs to their bedroom to change, leaving the men in the water. After twenty or thirty minutes Frank Thorogood came inside for a towel and a cigarette, leaving Brian alone. The telephone rang. Anna answered the extension in the bedroom almost at the same time as Frank picked up the phone downstairs. There was confusion as to who should replace the receiver. Meanwhile, Janet went back outside. ‘I went out to the pool and on the bottom I saw Brian. He was face down in the deep end. He was motionless and I sensed the worst straight away.’
Janet shouted up to Anna in the bedroom, the windows of which overlooked the pool: ‘Something has happened to Brian!’
Janet tried to get Brian out of the water, but she couldn’t do so alone. Frank and Anna came to help. While they struggled with the body, Janet went inside to dial the emergency services, but the telephone was engaged. Seemingly Anna hadn’t replaced her receiver when she’d rushed out. When Janet came back to the pool the others had Brian on the side. They turned him over and Janet tried to pump the water out of his lungs, while Frank went to the telephone. ‘It was obvious to me that he was dead, but I turned the body back and I applied external cardiac massage,’ Janet told the police. ‘I carried on for at least fifteen minutes, but there was no pulse.’
An ambulance arrived around midnight, followed by a constable from Sussex Police. Brian was pronounced dead at the scene.
PC Albert Evans had a look round the house. He found a bottle of brandy, four fifths empty; a bottle of vodka, two thirds empty; and a bottle of Scotch, half empty. This was seemingly all that was left of the bottles Frank had brought back from the pub. The constable also recovered a handful of tablets – Valium, Mandrax and Piriton – and ‘many empty bottles’.
Brian’s corpse was taken to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead where Dr Albert Sachs conducted a post-mortem. Dr Sachs looked into the possibility that Brian had drowned after an asthma attack, but the signs associated with asthma attacks were not present. More to the point was the amount of alcohol in Brian’s blood: 140 milligrams per decilitre, a third of the amount it took to kill Amy Winehouse (by comparison), but sufficient to make a person slurred, confused and unsteady on their feet, which was how Janet Lawson and Frank Thorogood described Brian before he went swimming. The pathologist also found an
unusually high level of an ‘amphetamine-like substance’ in Brian’s urine, more than eight times what would be considered normal. It is unclear what this was; tests were not exhaustive. But Brian had evidently taken something. An examination of his liver showed evidence of years of abuse. Dr Sachs found that Brian had ‘severe liver dysfunction due to fatty degeneration and the ingestion of alcohol and drugs’.
Janet Lawson, Frank Thorogood and Anna Wohlin all gave statements to the police the day after the drowning. Their statements were typed, read for accuracy, and signed by the witnesses as a true account of what happened, on pain of prosecution. Close attention should be paid to these statements, which are the best available evidence of what happened to Brian.
The three witnesses told the police the same basic story: Brian had gone swimming when he was drunk and he drowned. There are contradictions over times, within a limited range, and differences in the order of who had done what after the alarm was raised. Those people who dispute the official account of Brian’s death point to these discrepancies as evidence that some of the witnesses were lying. A disinterested reading draws one to the conclusion that the differences are minor, and to be expected from people who had been drinking and suddenly found themselves in an emergency. It is also generally true that almost any group of people asked individually about an incident will give differing accounts of what happened, and each will swear that they are correct. The important point is that, broadly speaking, the witness statements are consistent, and the story is convincing.
The Rolling Stones were in the studio when they were informed that Brian had died. They went ahead with their work, recording an edition of the television show Top of the Pops later that day. Meanwhile, Brian’s father had the woeful duty of identifying his son’s body.
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