{"id":504076,"date":"2026-03-30T21:19:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T21:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/504076\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T21:19:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T21:19:13","slug":"the-oral-sex-incident-that-doomed-brian-jones-in-the-rolling-stones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/504076\/","title":{"rendered":"The oral sex incident that doomed Brian Jones in The Rolling Stones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Bent Rej \/ Alamy \/ Constantin Film)<\/p>\n

Mon 30 March 2026 19:30, UK <\/p>\n

\u201cNobody was really that surprised,\u201d Keith Richards said when Brian Jones<\/a> died. That\u2019s not something you often hear when someone is found dead, at the tender age of 27, in a swimming pool in Hartfield.<\/p>\n

But strangely, for a long while, Richards had foreseen the black dog of death lingering on Jones\u2019 wearying horizon. \u201cThere are some people who you know aren\u2019t going to get old,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

When he formed The Rolling Stones<\/a> in 1962, his drive was inextinguishable. \u201cBrian was very instrumental in pushing the band at the beginning,\u201d the late Charlie Watts once reflected. \u201cKeith 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

So, how, in only a handful of years, did he go from that vigorous impetus to the point that his own frontman said \u201che wasn\u2019t functioning as a musician\u201d, and his fellow guitarist claimed that by the time he recorded his fleeting final contributions on Let It Bleed, he was \u201calready in Bye Bye Land\u201d?<\/p>\n

The demise<\/p>\n

\u201cHe created the band,\u201d bassist Bill Wyman affirms, \u201cIt was his idea to play blues when blues was unheard of in England.\u201d But that defiant nose-thumbing at convention would become both his triumph and his undoing. He was on a \u201ccrusade\u201d to be daring in every sense, not just when it came to music.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeith and I took drugs<\/a>,\u201d Mick Jagger later reflected in Crossfire Hurricane, \u201cBut Brian took too many drugs of the wrong kind.\u201d 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\u2019t have the will or the wherewithal to save their wayward former captain, who was getting through acid like a Duracell factory.<\/p>\n

That became clear on a treacherous road trip<\/a>. 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 \u201cthe best blues band in London\u201d. With hits like \u2018(I Can\u2019t Get No) Satisfaction\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

So, it came as little surprise that Anita Pallenberg was drawn into their orbit. She would later recall, \u201cI\u2019ve been called a witch, slut, and murderer\u201d. While many of those labels might have been applied retrospectively, as a model and enigmatic member of the Living Theatre crowd, these tags \u2013 no matter how troublingly misogynistic they may be \u2013 would not have been far from the bingo cards of those who knew her in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n

\"Brian<\/a>(Credits: Bent Rej)<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, where, in the cult ran Satan\u2019s Cavern coffee shop, talk of the pair\u2019s whipping, Stasi-clad sex life was all the rage.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A drug bust followed two years down the line<\/a> in \u201967, 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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You could argue that Jones\u2019 days in the Stones were done as soon as the chauffeur turned the engine over. By the time the road trip hit Toulouse, France, Jones 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.<\/p>\n

It takes roughly nine hours to drive from Toulouse to the Costa C\u00e1lida, which illuminates the startling realities behind the following anecdote in Richards\u2019 memoir. \u201cWith 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,\u201d Keef writes.<\/p>\n

\"Anita<\/a>Credit: YouTube still<\/p>\n

It seems Jones was quickly out of sight and mind for the pair, with Richards instantly pivoting to discourse detailing his muted courtship techniques. \u201cI have never put the make on a girl in my life,\u201d he recalls. \u201cMy instincts are always to leave it to the woman.\u201d But with Pallenberg quite literally in a relationship with Richards\u2019 ailing \u2018best friend\u2019 and bandmate, she was, naturally, very slightly reluctant.<\/p>\n

According to Richards, this quickly led to \u201can aura of insufferable tension\u201d. It was one he was unwilling to break, explaining, \u201cI just could not put the make on my friend\u2019s girl, even though he\u2019d become an asshole, to Anita too. It\u2019s the Sir Galahad in me.\u201d On this occasion, Sir Galahad fell on his sword fairly quickly. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe got closer and closer,\u201d he continues, \u201cAnd 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\u2019s giving me a blow job. The tension broke then. Phew.\u201d <\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cSuddenly we\u2019re together. You don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The betrayal<\/p>\n

\u201cI still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia,\u201d Richards, in rare Byronic fashion, recalls of the next page of their love affair. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d The names might have been comical, but the implication was clear: they were already a couple.<\/p>\n

Jones would eventually recover and join them in Morocco a few days later<\/a>. 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 \u2018kif\u2019, 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).<\/p>\n

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: \u201cYeah, hope he croaks\u201d. Pallenberg\u2019s main fear was for the future of the band, \u201cthat this was the big betrayal and it might bring it all down\u201d. But in truth, Jones\u2019 role in the unit already looked unsustainable.<\/p>\n

Things had been perilous before Morocco<\/a>, 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\u2019s room and began hurling food at her, she raced to Richards. <\/p>\n

\"Brian<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ Bent Rej)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Square of the Dead for some field recordings of the local musicians with whom he had become mildly infatuated, while Richards\u2019 driver fired up the Bentley and everyone fled.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my plans of rebuilding my relationship with Brian are obviously going straight down the drain,\u201d he recalled of this testing moment. \u201cIn the condition he was in, there was no point in building anything with Brian. I\u2019d done my best.\u201d Quite what his \u2018best\u2019 entailed was up for debate, but he was only 23 himself, and things were getting hairy.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cCome quickly! They\u2019ve all gone and left me. Cleared out! I don\u2019t know where they\u2019ve gone. No message. The hotel won\u2019t tell me. I\u2019m here all alone, help me. Come at once!\u201d<\/p>\n

When he arrived, Jones was clearly intoxicated. Fearing that he would jump \u201cdown those ten stories into the swimming pool\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

The writing was on the wall the moment Pallenberg laid her plump lips around Richards\u2019 member on the backseat of the Bentley, but somehow, Jones would defiantly soldier on with the Stones for a little while yet. He even embarked on what must have been a painstakingly awkward tour with the group. But while he was there in a literal sense<\/a>, from the Marrakesh moment onwards, it was clear that he had checked out of the band, and the band had discarded him.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s sordid history.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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