The Last Decadent

"This is the book that every Brian Jones fan has been waiting for, the most sensitive and honest portrait of Brian yet. Finally justice is done."-The Official Brian Jones Fanclub

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"An intelligent, lyrical exploration of Jone's complex psyche and persona."-The Washington Post

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"Jeremy Reed offers a new slant on things... A study of Jones as a decadent."-Uncut

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Brian Jones, rock 'n' roll godstar; founder member of the Rolling Stones, the murdered androgyne whose fragile psyche was ultimately broken by an industry which, nonetheless, provided him with the means to luxuriate in the bizarre and unorthodox.

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Jones's alcohol and drug excesses, his tormented and often psychotic states, his dandified propensity to cross-dress, his love of literature, privileged background and expensive speaking voice all placed him in the decadent tradition, the last of a rarefied aesthete's lineage. His tragic murder at the age of twenty seven further substantiated his place in the Byronic legend of the chosen one who dies young.

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In Brian Jones: The Last Decadent, author Jeremy Reed locates in Jones's obsessive fantasy world a terrain firmly aligned with the opium visions of Charles Baudelaire, the sartorial extravagence of Oscar Wilde, the sybaritic indulgences of Count Stenbock. Reed vividly recolours Brian Jones's brief, but incandescent and extraordinarily subversive life amidst the pop and fashion whirlwind of the Sixties, and in doing so presents perhaps the most illuminating and evocative portrait yet written of a fallen rock 'n' roll angel.

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Includes 16 pages of photographs.

An intelligent, lyrical exploration of Jones's complex psyche and persona.