Jones, for his part, quickly decided that Loog was an embarrassment. This manifested itself at an early recording session when it became clear that, for all his Spectoresque aspirations, the teen Svengali didn't even know what a mix was. Unfortunately for Jones, Loog was the image spin-doctor par excellence. It was Loog who came up with Would You Let Your Daughter Marry A Rolling Stone? It didn't help that a Rolling Stone had kids of his own.
"They had done a photo shoot on the steps that led down to the river at Battersea Park," remembers Pat Andrews. "There was this little crèche where you could leave kids and we'd left Mark there and gone on the water chute. When we came out of the park Brian was carrying Mark on his shoulders. He was so happy that day and he'd got some money, so he said, 'Let's go and buy Mark some clothes.' The next day Brian said Andrew had called him into the office and told him he mustn't be seen with Mark again. Brian got very upset about this. After all the hard work he'd gone through he wasn't going to be told that he couldn't walk through the park with his son."
"Oh yes, Andrew wouldn't have agreed with that," confirms Shirley Arnold. "The children were there but Brian couldn't acknowledge them. In those days it wasn't the thing to be married or have children. Look at John Lennon. Charlie and Shirley had to keep their marriage quiet as well."
At the height of their pop fame in 1965 the Stones appeared on the Christmas edition of Ready Steady Go! miming hilariously to Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe. Brian in his pomp played Sonny to Cathy McGowan's Cher. By now he was well used to playing a part. But then they performed live on the programme it was Mick that the girls tried to mob, not Brian. The onset of fan hysteria only heightened the tensions. Gered Mankowitz remembers the mayhem of the Stones' second tour of the USA that year: "Travelling TWA Ambassador class. Allen Klein whisking us through customs. Girls screaming at Mick. Girls pounding on the limo roof." There was a fair bit of partying with the elite as well. "Dylan doing everything in reverse to us. Wearing a mohair suit and then putting on jeans to go on-stage." It was on this tour that Mankowitz first saw signs of Brian's behavioural problems. "Signs of his disturbed personality were quite clearly manifesting themselves. At some point he just disappeared. Just walked out of the limo and disappeared. It was announced that he was ill but he'd just vanished."
"At the time I left the Stones everybody was still getting along just fine," remembers Dick Taylor. "But that was at the start of the Edith Grove period. We didn't see much of each other 'til he lived in the basement flat of the house The Pretty Things had in Belgravia. By then Brian had changed quite a bit: the more paranoid side of his character was a lot more evident. Which wasn't to say his humour didn't still come out, but it was just darker, and the drink and drugs certainly emphasised his mood swings."
Nicky Wright photographed the Stones for the sleeve of their self-titled debut album, which knocked 'With The Beatles' off the top spot in May 1964 (the first time the Fabs had lost pole position in the LP charts in nearly a year). Even as Brian's band were challenging the hitherto unassailable Moptops, the man himself was cracking. "I had a chalet in a little place called Whitehill in Hampshire, near Borden Army Camp," Nicky Wright recalls. "Brian used to come down there in his Humber Hawk for peace and quiet, often to escape these girls' fathers. We'd hide his car in the woods in case any of them came looking for him. He had a string of girlfriends and a succession of babies. He was like a tomcat, really. In the summer of 1964, he'd come down to my chalet, and seemed rather out of it on something or other. As the evening drew on and whatever it was wore off, he was getting more and more morose, complaining about how he wasn't being listened to. Suddenly, standing in this tiny kitchen, he said, 'I'm fed up - this will show all of them', took a knife, and slashed it across one wrist. My brother Patrick was standing by the kitchen door, and as he saw Brian doing this he punched him clean on the chin, and Brian went out like a light. His wrist was just scratched, there was no serious damage."
Brian's cry for help that night didn't end there. Patrick Wright takes up the story: "He threw himself out of the ground-floor window in a futile attempt at committing suicide. We hadn't the faintest idea where he had gone. My brother rushed down to the police station and said rather apologetically to the policeman, 'Please don't tell anybody, but I've got Brian Jones staying at my house and he's fallen out of a window and we can't find him'. This roly-poly old-fashioned policeman came up, and we found this figure lying in the gorse bush beneath the window." Nicky: "My father, very much of the old school, came over to see what all the fuss was about. Ever so politely Brian said to him, 'I'm awfully sorry, Mr Wright; I've been such a cunt.' Next morning I went upstairs, rather apologetically, to take Brian a cup of tea. He was all sweetness and light then, cheerful and happy."
Patrick Wright recalls another of Brian's visits to the Whitehill chalet: "He would come down with Linda [Lawrence] and a box of fanmail. She was pregnant by him and he would sit there opening his fanmail from teenage girls who wanted to go to bed with him or meet him in Epping Forest. He would say, 'Do you think I should do this one Linda?' She would sit there looking absolutely distraught. She obviously loved him a great deal but he was callous: a nasty little man, really vicious and unkind." A few months later, in early 1965, Brian returned to the chalet with Linda and baby in tow. "They started having this argument, and their baby started crying," Nicky Wright remembers. "Suddenly he lost his temper, grabbed the baby from her, she started shouting at him, and he opened the window, and held it out of the window by one leg, upside down, saying, 'Shut the fuck up!' I ran over and pulled him away. It was shocking. He had absolutely no control over himself at all."
"I don't really want to pop psychoanalyse Brian," says Jagger before rendering as astute and expansive account of his former colleague as he's ever given. "He wasn't really good material to be in the pop business. He was too sensitive to every real slight and perceived slight; just over-sensitive to everything. And then when he started taking drugs that became more and more exaggerated. I think he was a shy person - and shy people in showbusiness put themselves at risk. Shy actors have to drink before they can act. I've seen shy singers who take drugs before they go out." (Ironically, Shirley Arnold had earlier said to me, "The amount of people in the industry I've seen who have to have a line of coke before they could go up and talk to Mick…" Readers who want to double the irony quota are referred to Tony Sanchez's book Up And Down With The Rolling Stones.)
"It's mostly to do with the fact that some people are born shy," continues Jagger. "You see children of the same age, of the same parents or similar background, and some children are very shy and won't come out. Remember when you were a kid? There was always the one that wouldn't go into the circle for Pass The Parcel or they wouldn't go in the Dancing Statues. Well, Brian was probably one of those children. Those people are very bad material for show business because they're not like some other people, like myself or the more extrovert people. We have a shy part, of course, and don't want to make fools of ourselves, but it's completely overshadowed by an extrovert nature. You take the knocks and you can deal with it. And you're still out there doing it. But Brian wasn't really like that, and there are a lot of other people like that, and they try and handle it by drinking, or being rude, and they suffer. They're basically in the wrong business. They have to alter their personalities to be what they perceive they want to be.