Free 27: Brian Jones by Chris Salewicz Page A

Poll-Winners Concert at Wembley Empire Pool, performing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Satisfaction’. The 10,000-strong audience went berserk at this first stage appearance in Britain in almost two years. Although he was of course unaware of this, the show marked the last concert appearance by Brian Jones anywhere.
    Life still seemed to be running out of control for the founder of the Rolling Stones. A week later, on 20 May, he was busted yet again, at the third-floor flat he had rented on the Kings Road, above Alice Pollock and Ossie Clark’s shop Quorum, from which he would order floral shirts by the dozen. [26]
    After failing to wake Brian at just after seven in the morning, the police had climbed into the flat through a window to find him on the phone, calling his solicitor. A small brown lump of what appeared to be hash was found in a drawer. Appearing that morning at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, Brian was remanded for three weeks on bail of £1,000 while the substance was analysed.
    A week later, on 27 May, saw the release of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, a record whose superficially naive simplicity turned both in and out on itself until it achieved epic proportions – until the mid-1970s the character of Jumpin’ Jack Flash became like an alter-ego for Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones’ fourteenth British single, it sold almost 100,000 copies in three days, going straight to number one. It stayed there for three weeks, the group’s first UK number one since ‘Paint It Black’ in May 1966. In the USA it was in the top spot for a week. After the shocks of the previous year, it seemed the group were once again on an upward path.
    Early in June 1968, at Sarum Chase in Hampstead, north London, Michael Joseph – better known at the time for his corporate photography – shot a series of Hogarthian portraits for what would become the inner sleeve of the Beggars Banquet album. Joseph noted that Brian was extremely nervy. He was worried about the consequences of his pending court appearance, scheduled for 11 June. Perhaps this is an explanation for his appearance, like that of a deranged hobbit. ‘Brian was upset at having been busted but he had a dog to play with,’ said the photographer. One of the rooms had been given a mediaeval appearance; on a banqueting table was an entire roasted pig. It is a picture taken from this series that was used on the album’s inner gatefold. Keith is leaning across the table with a fork and stuffing an apple into Mick’s mouth, while Brian sprawls in a chair at the end of the table, as an Irish setter leaps up on him.
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    Mick Jagger spent August 1968 filming in London, working on Performance , co-directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell; Anita Pallenberg had been cast opposite him. Although he had given the film’s script a cursory reading Mick initially had accepted Donald Cammell’s vision that all he needed to do was play himself. Vacationing with Marianne Faithfull in Ireland prior to the shoot, however, he quickly saw that his character of Turner bore only a superficial resemblance to himself. Marianne Faithfull, steeped in the ways of thespians, provided the solution – to play Turner as a cross between Brian Jones and Keith Richards: ‘Brian with his self-torment and paranoia and Keith with strength and cool.’ Although Mick Jagger accepted her advice, undercurrents of himself inevitably leaked into the part. But not so much that they shifted the balance. There was, however, a consequence that Marianne had not considered. ‘What I hadn’t anticipated,’ she later realized, ‘was that Mick, by playing Brian and Keith, would be playing two people who were extremely attractive to Anita and who were in turn obsessed with her.’ For the future of the Rolling Stones, and the relationship between Mick and Keith, the repercussions would linger for the rest of