neat front lawn and a wrought-iron ‘sunrise’ gate. Here and there, beyond a uniform creosote-covered garage, one can see the terraces of Cheltenham’s exclusive district and beyond, the soft green Cotswolds, striding away towards Wales.
That Lewis Jones was a Welshman could not be doubted by his colleagues at Dowty and Co., Cheltenham’s aeronautical engineering works. Short, straight-backed, severe in manner, he possessed the inflexible virtues of Welshness in exact measure with its irreproachable faults. He was, in other words, respectable, decent, hard-working, religious, conventional, puritanically intolerant of those less strong-minded than himself. Like many of his countrymen, he regretted the advance of the twentieth century almost on principle. ‘Times change but I don’t,’ he would say, adding a heartfelt ‘Thank God!’
The Welsh have almost an obligation to be musical. Lewis Jones played the organ at his local parish church for some years, until his dislike of petty ecclesiastical politics led him to resign. His wife Louisa – also Welsh – possessed a more pronounced talent, and supplemented Lewis’s income from Dowty’s by giving piano lessons to local schoolchildren.
Their first child, Brian Lewis Hopkin Jones, was born on February 28, 1942. Of the two daughters who followed, only one – Barbara, born in 1946 – survived. The other, Pauline, died of leukaemia when Brian was three. Brian thought his parents had given her away and, for a long time afterwards, lived in terror that the same would be done to him.
He was, his father said, a thoroughly normal and happy small boy, healthy but for childhood ailments and an attack of croup which left him prone to bronchitis and chronic asthma. At his first school, Dean Close, he worked well, enjoyed sport – particularly cricket and badminton – and became an excellent swimmer and diver. Sea air aggravated his asthma, however; after a single day at the beach, he would be confined to bed, wheezing and croaking piteously.
Like his parents, and the race from which he sprang, Brian Jones was instinctively musical. Louisa started giving him piano lessons from the age of six; he afterwards took up the recorder and clarinet. Though able to read music, he mastered the reed instruments by ear and intuition, stumbling on melody by means he himself did not fully understand. So marked was his talent as a small boy that Lewis Jones thought he might be destined for a career as a classical musician.
He passed the eleven-plus exam without effort and went on, as his parents had hoped, to Cheltenham Grammar School, down in the exclusive district of ‘The Promenade’, the retired generals and the Ladies’ College. This exclusive seminary, in fact, stood immediately adjacent to Cheltenham Grammar School and daily provided its senior boys with an unreachable fantasy as the young ladies ran forth, squealing, for their mid-morning break.
Brian began well at Cheltenham Grammar, getting good marks for work, especially science and languages, excelling at cricket and swimming and winning a place as a clarinettist in the school orchestra. ‘Then, all of a sudden,’ Lewis Jones said bleakly, ‘he became very difficult. He started to rebel against everything – mainly me.’
The trouble began when Brian ceased practising classical pieces on piano and clarinet, and began listening to a kind of music that Lewis Jones abhorred. At thirteen, he discovered jazz and, at fourteen, the saxophone-playing of Charlie Parker. He sold the clarinet his parents had bought him and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand alto sax. Within a few days, to his parents’ horror, the sound of a first, shaky solo brayed through the quiet house in Hatherley Road.
He was soon good enough to sit in with local bands playing the trad jazz of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Even Cheltenham had its bohemian quarter, centred on the art college, on coffee bars like the Aztec, the Patio and the Waikiki, or pubs like the Wheatsheaf Inn, Leckhampton, where the 66 Jazz Club convened, with Brian Jones as membership secretary.
At Cheltenham Grammar, meanwhile, he became known as a troublemaker, able to disrupt a whole class by his blandly outrageous behaviour. A classmate, Peter Watson, remembers how Brian would sit in class in football boots, claiming they were more comfortable than shoes. ‘Brian said it was boring to drink the regulation milk at break time, so he started the fashion of drinking brown ale instead. It became a whole fashion to drink brown ale at break time instead of milk.’
At break, according to immemorial custom, the whole class would crowd at the window and gaze longingly down on the Cheltenham young ladies as they frolicked on the grass below. Brian Jones, it was well known, belonged to the select few Grammar School boys whose sexual adventures had gone beyond mere kissing and ‘petting’. It was known, too, that he scorned the Durex contraceptives that other boys carried symbolically in their wallets. ‘Bareback’ was the best way, he would insist, smiling a smile so lascivious, yet so mischievous, no one knew whether to believe him.
They believed him when, in 1958, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the girls’ Grammar School became pregnant and named Brian Jones as the father. The news caused a scandal in Cheltenham and even got into a Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, where Brian was destined to feature many times more. The baby was born but put out to adoption. All that could be hoped, after bringing such disgrace on his family and himself, was that Brian had well and truly learned his lesson.
The scandal brought about his premature exit from Cheltenham Grammar School, despite nine passes at GCE O-Level and Advanced-Level passes in Physics and Chemistry. For the next eighteen months, he worked variously as a shop assistant, a coalman and a trainee in the Borough Architect’s office of Cheltenham Council. A boyhood passion for buses led him to a brief career on Cheltenham municipal transport, as conductor and driver. He continued to play alto sax in various trad bands, then in a rock ’n’ roll combo called the Ramrods, which enjoyed some local fame until its lead singer went away on honeymoon and choked to death while eating a chip.
In 1961, Brian made a second girl pregnant. Her name was Pat Andrews: she had met Brian at the Aztec coffee bar during one of his spells of unemployment. He had left home by now and was living with a friend named Dick Hattrell at a flat in Cheltenham’s art college district. This time, he seemed resigned to marrying the girl he had put ‘in the club’. After the baby was born, he visited her in hospital, bringing a vast bouquet of flowers he had bought by selling some of his precious LPs. On his insistence, the baby was named Julian, after the jazz musician Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.
Brian did not marry Pat Andrews. Instead, shortly after his conversation with Alexis Korner, he took off for London suddenly, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, to start a job his father had found for him with a firm of opticians. Lewis and Louisa Jones heard no more from him until he had become nationally notorious.
He continued to write to Pat Andrews, assuring her he still loved her and would be sending for her and the baby soon. Pat grew increasingly restive after learning he had several girlfriends in London. Finally, one day in 1962, she bundled Julian Mark in her arms and, with just one pound note in her purse, set off from Cheltenham by long-distance bus to track the baby’s father down.
He had left even his name behind in Cheltenham. It was not Brian Jones but ‘Elmo Lewis’ who made his first guest appearance with Blues Incorporated at the Ealing club. He had changed instruments, too, from alto sax to electric guitar, a brand-new, shiny Gibson, bought with money half saved, half stolen, and mastered by his usual blend of intuition, willpower and desire.
No greater contrast could have been imagined between the middle-aged, rather beery-looking blues sidesman and the boy who stepped up beside Alexis in his neat Italian suit, holding the shiny new Gibson with one finger pointed stiff across its pearled fretboard. His debut was the Elmore James classic Dust My Blues. In his West London bedsitter, he had taught himself to play it exactly as James did, with a metal ‘slide’, swooping the metal bar along the guitar neck to lengthen each note into almost a second angry, sarcastic voice. The sudden appearance of Pat Andrews and baby Julian had only temporarily interrupted the
