(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / Alamy / Constantin Film)
Mon 30 March 2026 19:30, UK
“Nobody was really that surprised,” Keith Richards said when Brian Jones died. That’s not something you often hear when someone is found dead, at the tender age of 27, in a swimming pool in Hartfield.
But strangely, for a long while, Richards had foreseen the black dog of death lingering on Jones’ wearying horizon. “There are some people who you know aren’t going to get old,” he told Rolling Stone. Yet, only seven years earlier, Jones was the driving force behind a would-be blues rock revolution whose virility seemed incalculable.
When he formed The Rolling Stones in 1962, his drive was inextinguishable. “Brian was very instrumental in pushing the band at the beginning,” the late Charlie Watts once reflected. “Keith and I would look at him and say he was barmy. It was a crusade to him to get us on the stage in a club and be paid half-a-crown.”
So, how, in only a handful of years, did he go from that vigorous impetus to the point that his own frontman said “he wasn’t functioning as a musician”, and his fellow guitarist claimed that by the time he recorded his fleeting final contributions on Let It Bleed, he was “already in Bye Bye Land”?
The demise
“He created the band,” bassist Bill Wyman affirms, “It was his idea to play blues when blues was unheard of in England.” But that defiant nose-thumbing at convention would become both his triumph and his undoing. He was on a “crusade” to be daring in every sense, not just when it came to music.
“Keith and I took drugs,” Mick Jagger later reflected in Crossfire Hurricane, “But Brian took too many drugs of the wrong kind.” Increasingly, it became clear to the Stones that this would be his downfall. He might have launched the band, but now they were sailing under their own steam, and they didn’t have the will or the wherewithal to save their wayward former captain, who was getting through acid like a Duracell factory.
That became clear on a treacherous road trip. The journey was from London to Morocco and back, but the preamble stretched back far further. In fact, it all began in 1965. By that stage, the Rolling Stones had successfully surpassed their initial target of becoming “the best blues band in London”. With hits like ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ rising to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, they were even beginning to imbue the zeitgeist with a radical air of intrepid insurgency.
So, it came as little surprise that Anita Pallenberg was drawn into their orbit. She would later recall, “I’ve been called a witch, slut, and murderer”. While many of those labels might have been applied retrospectively, as a model and enigmatic member of the Living Theatre crowd, these tags – no matter how troublingly misogynistic they may be – would not have been far from the bingo cards of those who knew her in the ‘60s.
(Credits: Bent Rej)
When Jones met her in Munich, he quickly wowed her with his ability to speak a fair bit of German, and soon they became fast friends. When they reconvened in London, they quickly became a little more than mere friends. Before long, they were the hippest couple on Carnaby Street, where, in the cult ran Satan’s Cavern coffee shop, talk of the pair’s whipping, Stasi-clad sex life was all the rage.
They took acid incessantly and pushed each other further towards occult experimentalism. This influence wove its way into the increasingly expansive sound of the Stones. Jones was a first-rate instrumentalist and ideas man who could carry off this expansion with quirky aplomb. But things began to be pushed too far. In every way, Jones and the Stones had lost sight of their grounded roots.
A drug bust followed two years down the line in ’67, and with Richards, Jagger, and Jones all facing the stress of a court date and the uncertainty that came with it, they decided to blow off some steam, like a hurricane roaring over a recently boiled kettle, and head to North Africa.
Jagger and Marianne Faithfull flew to the fabled lands of Marrakesh, but Richards, who had been best friends with Jones before Pallenberg entered the picture, decided to invite the couple along in his chauffeur-driven Bentley to rekindle their relationship. Things would work out rather differently.
You could argue that Jones’ days in the Stones were done as soon as the chauffeur turned the engine over. By the time the road trip hit Toulouse, France. He was suffering from something described by varying sources as the medically undocumented midpoint between a mental episode and pneumonia. Rather than hole up in the beauty of La Ville Rose and await his recovery, the Bentley rather symbolically headed onwards to Morocco without him.
It takes roughly nine hours to drive from Toulouse to the Costa Cálida, which illuminates the startling realities behind the following anecdote in Richards’ memoir. “With no one to watch over us, we drove on to Valencia. And between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I found out that we were really interested in each other,” Keef writes.
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It seems Jones was quickly out of sight and mind for the pair, with Richards instantly pivoting to discourse detailing his muted courtship techniques. “I have never put the make on a girl in my life,” he recalls. “My instincts are always to leave it to the woman.” But with Pallenberg quite literally in a relationship with Richards’ ailing ‘best friend’ and bandmate, she was, naturally, very slightly reluctant.
According to Richards, this quickly led to “an aura of insufferable tension”. It was one he was unwilling to break, explaining, “I just could not put the make on my friend’s girl, even though he’d become an asshole, to Anita too. It’s the Sir Galahad in me.” On this occasion, Sir Galahad fell on his sword fairly quickly.
“We got closer and closer,” he continues, “And then suddenly, without her old man, she had the balls to break the ice and say fuck it. In the back of the Bentley, somewhere between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I looked at each other, and the tension was so high in the backseat, the next thing I know she’s giving me a blow job. The tension broke then. Phew.”
He adds, “Suddenly we’re together. You don’t talk a lot when that shit hits you. Without even saying things, you have the feeling, the great sense of relief that something has been resolved.”
Regret, however, was not an emotion that lingered in the welter of this silencing ambivalence. The pair, who not long back were checking their friend and partner into hospital, were keen to go further than Bentley-based oral copulation away from the glancing gaze of a chauffeur with one hell of a classic rock anecdote to tell.
The betrayal
“I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia,” Richards, in rare Byronic fashion, recalls of the next page of their love affair. “When you get laid with Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things. We stopped in Valencia overnight and checked in as Count and Countess Zigenpuss, and that was the first time I made love to Anita.” The names might have been comical, but the implication was clear: they were already a couple.
Jones would eventually recover and join them in Morocco a few days later. This was inadvisable. He doubled down on his acid intake and allegedly got violent with Pallenberg after an altercation in a strip club. He was smoking ‘kif’, a strong form of local cannabis. His condition was worsening, and the patience of his bandmates was wearing thin (if it can be said that any remained at this stage).
As Richards recalls, they were trying to be cordial and tactfully hide their affair. But as he writes, their shocking state of mind was closer to: “Yeah, hope he croaks”. Pallenberg’s main fear was for the future of the band, “that this was the big betrayal and it might bring it all down”. But in truth, Jones’ role in the unit already looked unsustainable.
Things had been perilous before Morocco, but rather than lead to a rejuvenated recovery, the stay in North Africa worsened his disposition. When Jones, in an addled state, brought two scantily-clad women up to Pallenberg’s room and began hurling food at her, she raced to Richards.
(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej)
From that moment on, Richards swore that keeping their affair secret was pointless and plotted a sundown escape to Tangiers. An associate was set up to take Jones into Marrakesh’s Square of the Dead for some field recordings of the local musicians with whom he had become mildly infatuated, while Richards’ driver fired up the Bentley and everyone fled.
“All of my plans of rebuilding my relationship with Brian are obviously going straight down the drain,” he recalled of this testing moment. “In the condition he was in, there was no point in building anything with Brian. I’d done my best.” Quite what his ‘best’ entailed was up for debate, but he was only 23 himself, and things were getting hairy.
When Jones returned to the hotel, he was met with stark abandonment and fell into a frenzied panic. He sent a note to the artist and band associate, Brion Gysin, who was still in Marrakesh, announcing, “Come quickly! They’ve all gone and left me. Cleared out! I don’t know where they’ve gone. No message. The hotel won’t tell me. I’m here all alone, help me. Come at once!”
When he arrived, Jones was clearly intoxicated. Fearing that he would jump “down those ten stories into the swimming pool”, Gysin called a doctor and had Jones sedated. By the time he emerged from the heady haze, he would find himself alone, with his old bandmates and partner shacking up in London.
The writing was on the wall the moment Pallenberg laid her plump lips around Richards’ member on the backseat of the Bentley, but somehow, Jones would defiantly soldier on with the band for a little while yet. He even embarked on what must have been a painstakingly awkward tour with the band. But while he was there in a literal sense, from the Marrakesh moment onwards, it was clear that he had checked out of the band, and the band had discarded him.
What was meant to be a retreat of reconciliation ended in sunburn, ruin, and one of the more salacious tales in the storied annals of classic rock’s sordid history.
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