The Stones & Brian Jones

I was very interested in this documentary as I knew very little about Brian Jones, his background and his demise.

To be honest, by the end, I think I would rather have been left none the wiser.

Around about the 20 minute mark, Pat Andrews, the mother of one his many offspring, summed him up perfectly. This interview was recorded in 1965, so it was not a matter of hindsight, it was very much relevant and of the time.

Maybe it wasn't possible, but I would like to have seen more about his early childhood with a view to gaining more of an insight into how his character developed and became to utterly selfish and irresponsible.

I can empathise with his feeling of not wanting to be part the monoculture that was so prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s, I am from that time myself. I feel there must have been more to his relationship with his parents than was presented as he seemed to be effortlessly accepted into oth-er families, only to abuse their hospitality by getting the daughters pregnant. Once is careless, twice is foolish ... five times!! What was he thinking?

His demise was mainly down to being completely lost psychologically and latterly being influenced by the wrong type of women.

The Rolling Stones was the band he put together, it was his band, but he soon found he couldn't write songs as was the new way of things at the time, and Mick Jagger was a more obvious spokesman for the group and he was soon sidelined by manager Andrew Loog Oldham.

You can see in the documentary that he was lost when the Stones were being interviewed.

On the plus side it was good to know how influential he was on the Stones early records.

From last year comes a documentary from master documentarian Nick Broomfield (Driving Me Crazy/Kurt & Courtney) about one time member of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, who ended up dying from drowning in his pool (after taking drugs) back in 1969. You think the sky was the limit for Jones as he was one of the founding members of the greatest, arguably, rock & roll band in the world (& history) but as we find out from archival footage & actor reenactments from his own missives, Jones soon found himself falling under the influence of his excessive drug taking & his predilection for feeling he was being constantly verbally attacked by fellow bandmates Mick Jagger & Keith Richards even though according to Bill Wyman some of the signature licks on key tracks came from him but it's sad to see how when the band was celebrating its best life, poor Jones found himself in a rabbit hole of his own making which he could not find himself out of.

I'm shocked this doc has a good-not-great rating. I thought it was borderline phenomenal. The amount of footage from the early '60s is amazing and the editing with said footage is incredibly good. It's a documentary that nails the two requirements for any doc: it's a great story combined with great technique.

I have been a Stones fan for about 25 years but never delved very far into their history. For someone like me this was eye-opening, and I have to believe a lot of the footage and even some audio was brand new to even the most die-hard fans.

To me this succeeds on every level. My only small beef was that sole of the audio interviews were hard to hear. Nothing crazy in the negative department. Almost nothing in fact. It's just a great doc that's nostalgic, fascinating and tragic.

Brain Jones founded the Rolling Stones. He was shy, sexually attractive (and careless with it), and increasingly unhappy for not being Mick Jagger. Kicked out of the band for a level of drug abuse that made him unreliable, he died young a short while later. Nick Broomfield's film is a sympathetic account of his life that doesn't hide from the fact he wasn't always a nice person to be around, and a sad lesson of the perils of getting what you might have thought you wanted. The film relies quite a lot on Bill Wyman, but Wyman actually provides some perspective that those who stayed in the band for longer perhaps would not provide. It's an elegaic portrait of an ultimately tragic life.

This is an unblemished look at Brian Jones and the band he helped to create.

It shows Brian as a very troubled individual who abused women, was a substance abuser - and essentially lost control of himself.

It was like he couldn't compete and adjust to the fast-paced changes that were part of the Stones during the 1960s.

This is a very personal documentary with many interviews - of the band members, of Brian's wife and girlfriends, plus of his parents. With his parents, he could never find acceptance, and this is very sad indeed.

The documentary also high-lights the musical contributions he made to the band.