"My best friend hated him, could've killed him," says Charlie Watts. "He was a scheming little bugger. And then as we got more famous he became more conscious of himself. He became sadder and more obnoxious at the same time. But to be fair to Brian, a lot of his problems with people might have been because he wasn't that healthy. He was a great catalyst, though, especially at the beginning."
"He was such an ambitious young man, so determined, long before the Stones ever were," confirms Paul Jones. "He was always dressed sharp. When he met people he would intensely concentrate on the conversation; that was very different to how he later became: very vague and self-concerned."
"I've been really shocked at some of the things that people have written about Brian. It's like they hated him or something," says Kathy Etchingham. "I was really miffed when Bill Wyman wrote in his book that I was one of Brian's critics. He used me as an example to show that other people hated Brian, as well as himself. What he said in his book was totally untrue."
Rolling Stones fan club secretary Shirley Arnold is another of those offering only positive testimony. Rooting through drawers and cupboards in her south London flat she proudly shows me mementoes of her past association with the band; one of Brian's stage outfits, a red velvet frock coat, a little blue Dinky toy Commer pick-up truck and a carved wooden cutlery holder that Brian brought back from Morocco: a thank-you for all the fry ups Shirley had cooked him when he'd been up all night getting wasted. "It's probably the only thing that came out of Cotchford that got to the person it was meant to get to," she says poignantly. Shirley used to go and see the Stones at Ken Colyer's Studio 51 on Sunday afternoons early in 1963. "They were doing all the old rhythm and blues stuff like Cops And Robbers and Roll Over Beethoven." One day, down at the front in the crush and the heat, she fainted and was passed over the heads of all the punters and into the dressing room. "Bill said the fan club's not that together. Would you like to run it?" It was a chance encounter that brought Shirley Arnold into the inner sanctum. "I was working in the city for a fiver a week. They offered me seven. I said I'd have done it for free. There was never any bitchiness in those early days within the band," she claims, "never anything that I thought was nasty."
Cast your eyes over those early publicity shots. They look remarkably prescient: Bill, the shrewd, slightly older guy; Charlie, looking like what he always was and forever will be, a jazzer who thought he'd give this pop lark a go; Keith looks like he's got potential, as soon as he grows into that demeanour; Mick, undeniably enthusiastic and undeniably gauche, too. And who's this one on the end? Dressed in white slacks and black polo neck, and already sporting a hairstyle that every band from The Byrds to The Yardbirds will aspire to over the next three years: there's yer pop star, mate.
"Brian, I'd met socially in 1964, before I met the Stones," says group photographer Gered Mankowitz. "At that time he was very charming, very polite, and well-mannered. A lovely man. Andrew Oldham liked the photos I'd done of Marianne Faithfull and asked if I'd do The Rolling Stones. In visual terms Brian was the strongest. On that first photo session that became the 'Out Of Our Heads' cover he is in the foreground with his blond hair glowing, while Mick, always the leader on-stage, is right at the back. Brian's hair was coiffured, shaped, and pretty long, but he didn't just look shaggy like The Pretty Things or Them. It was groomed. Extraordinarily so for that time, when I think back."
"I don't think we'd have got where we are if he hadn't been at the helm at the beginning," says Charlie Watts. "But I think he wanted to be the lead singer. Well, of course, he wasn't. He wasn't a singer at all. His breathing would never allow him to be. And he wanted to be leader, and he wasn't a leader."
Gered Mankowitz saw the power struggles that were starting to develop within the band. "Remember that the lighting at concerts in those days were relatively crude, and there would just be a spotlight on the main singer. It might just manage to swing over if there was a guitar solo but otherwise the singer was the only one who was consistently lit." The few surviving early Top Of The Pops clips bear this out. As they mime their way through that month's hit record the camera focuses almost exclusively on Mick. On the rare occasions that it picks out Brian, stage left, he often appears to be disenchantedly gazing up at the studio monitors, already seemingly disillusioned with the pop route. As if to say, How can you mime the blues?
"The thing about Brian is that he wanted so much to be the leader of the band," confirms Jagger, "and when you try too hard to do something you quite often fail. He was so jealous of everybody else: that was his personality failing." Did he feel threatened by you? "I guess so. The thing is that singers always get more attention than anyone else, even if they're not very good. And Brian really didn't like that. He thought he should get more attention.
"But," Jagger stresses, "he was quite fluid in the way he talked. He was quite a good communicator at the beginning, though it was in a kind of slightly schoolmaster-ish way. But he did communicate, which was really needed then, because people didn't quite understand what it was all about." In the early days Brian was the self-appointed conscience of the band, the R&B evangelist writing earnest letters to the poop and trade press and to BBC producers. Within two years that entire raison d'être had been usurped by Top 10 singles, and light entertainment impressionists doing Jagger's monkey walk and big lips on prime-time TV. Keith, also with an initial awkwardness, visible on those early-televised appearances where he is not averse to the odd self-conscious mop-top shake of the head, gained confidence both through live performance and his burgeoning songwriting partnership with Jagger. Arguably it was this factor alone that irreversibly upset the subtle dynamic of the early Stones, edging Brian out of the limelight.
When Andrew Loog Oldham first came on the scene (becoming the band's co-manager with Eric Easton in 1963), Brian passed him off as an old Cheltenham pal of Giorgio Gomelsky, who himself had designs on managing the group. "Brian stepped up and said he was the leader," Oldham remembers. "When they came to the office first, it was Brian and Mick who appeared. Brian was an important power in the Stones while he could play. Once he'd stopped trying and decided to play rhythm guitar that was it. Brian was basically the manager of the group until Eric and I were. When a real manager comes along you've got to assume that some people can handle the loss of power and some can't. Within a short time of Eric and I signing the Stones for everything, they were coming to us direct. He'd lost his power. In 'Charlie Is My Darling', the film I made, he said he wouldn't be around at 27. That seemed to be a big age with him. He was self-destructive."
Gomelsky was promptly erased from the picture. Fame isn't so much fickle as ruthless, and its path, then as now, was littered with those whose faces simply didn't fit. Just ask Pete Best. And just ask Ian Stewart who was relegated from bona fide Stones member to roadie in one fell swoop just because he didn't look the part. It was Loog's arrival that effectively hastened the demotion of Brian Jones, too. It was Loog who decided six was too many band members. More crucially it was the Stones manager who threw Jagger and Richards together as a songwriting team. And as far as songwriting goes, three's a crowd.