At the time Brian died there was no widespread public awareness that his position in the Stones had become contentious, or of exactly why he had left the group a month previously. Information about the split is largely based on the unfavourable testimony offered up by celebrity witnesses, most notably other members of the Rolling Stones. Some of these expert voices may be considered to have had an axe to grind; motivated perhaps by complex reasons of his own, Keith Richards, for example, has never pulled any punches in his assessments of Brian Jones. ‘I never saw a guy so affected by fame,’ said Richards in Life, his autobiography, ‘the minute we’d had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn’t noticed … he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment.’ ‘Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt,’ is another of Keith’s assessments of his former friend. ‘He was a bastard. Mean, generous, anything.
