Stephen Woolley has spent the past 10 years preparing to direct a film about the short, glamorous and pathetic life of Brian Jones. Now he has decided that I have the right look to play the chauffeur of Andrew Loog Oldham, the original manager of Jones's band the Rolling Stones.
I'm on location for a 1963 scene at the filthy flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea, that Jones shared with Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and their friend James Phelge. Oldham is arriving to congratulate Jagger and Richards on their first songwriting effort, symbolically and physically pushing Jones to one side in the process. I came to interview Woolley and a few cast members about the film, but in a cost-cutting process that is no doubt common in the impoverished British film industry, Woolley's got me multi-tasking.
"His hair's too long for 1963!" point out the hair and makeup department. "Didn't you know that Andrew Loog Oldham hired an American driver in 1963 for the specific reason that he had long hair?" retorts Woolley. "He didn't care whether the guy could drive or not. It was the hair he was interested in."
Andrew Loog Oldham did no such thing and Woolley almost definitely knows it, but it's the kind of thing that Oldham should have done, so my minor role is at least in keeping with the spirit of authenticity that the director is mining.
The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones has been something of an obsession for Woolley, who is fascinated by the 1960s: he produced Scandal, the story of the Profumo affair, and Backbeat, which dramatised the life of Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the original Beatles. Brian Jones was the original Byronic pop idol: an upper-middle-class rebel from Cheltenham who fathered two children by two women before he was out of his teens, with an ability to play any musical instrument within hours and an outrageous flamboyance. He was also a deeply insecure man, too weak to cope with the wild lifestyle he invented. At 27 he drowned in the swimming pool at AA Milne's former house in Sussex; it was either through excess of drink and drugs or at the hands of a disgruntled builder named Frank Thorogood. Whichever is true, the death has helped fuel the myth of Brian Jones that has been growing ever since that night on July 3 1969, three weeks after Jagger and Richards fired him from the band.
"In the early days, Brian was way ahead of the others," says Woolley, a long-haired bohemian in a brown leather coat and tinted glasses. "When Mick and Keith first saw Brian, he was doing a perfect rendition of Elmore James's Dust My Broom, and they were amazed. He was very much the leader when the band started. But as soon as Andrew Loog Oldham came along - and Andrew hated Brian - it was obvious that Brian was going to be pushed to one side."
When I'm not too busy getting into character for the crucial task of sticking my head out of the driver's window as the actor playing Loog Oldham gets out of the car, Woolley takes me on a tour of the Edith Grove flat. The room that Jagger, Richards and Phelge shared is tiny and shabby, with the three single beds leaving only enough space for a bar heater in the middle of the room. Across the landing is the room that Jones had all to himself. "He said that he needed it for all the girls he had," explains Woolley. "Brian, Keith and Mick would take every piece of furniture out that could be sold and use the money to buy instruments, and the last thing that got paid was the rent. They would come back late at night and James Phelge would be standing at the top of the stairs with his underpants on his head, pissing on them. It was all very Withnail and I."
The scenes at Edith Grove depict a time when the landscape of Britain was on the cusp of enormous change. As the fresh-faced, cheerily cocky actors playing the young Rolling Stones swap banter outside the grey, soot-encrusted house, you begin to see how much of a threat the Stones's long hair and arrogance must have been. In the early 1960s, life was not swinging for the vast majority of the population. The pubs were shut by 10.30pm, there was little money, and everyone dressed the same. Brian Jones emerged to symbolise a new gilded life in which drink and drugs, peacock fashions, casual sex and very late nights at private London clubs such as the Scotch of St James put up a huge barrier between the young elite and the rest of the country.
"When I grew up in Islington, there were five of us in one room. We weren't particularly poor; everyone on our street lived like that," says Woolley. "Most of Britain was in bed by 10 because there was nothing else to do. Unless you were very famous, very rich or had a very short miniskirt, you weren't getting into the Scotch of St James."
In a break between scenes, the actors playing Jones, Richards and Jagger bunk off for a pint and a game of pool in the local pub. Leo Gregory, in his blond wig and cuban-heeled boots, makes such a convincing Brian Jones that it it comes as something of a shock when he admits that he prefers hip-hop to the Rolling Stones.
"I only got cast about a week before shooting began and I had never even picked up a guitar," he says. "It's quite hard to play with the nonchalance of one of the great 60s guitarists when you don't even know how to hold the thing. Then you have the problem of portraying someone as contradictory as Brian Jones, who was very charming but also a bit of a shit: he called his first two sons Julian Mark and Mark Julian because he couldn't be bothered to think of different names for them. When you throw loads of drink and drugs into that equation, it doesn't make for a very stable personality."
At the heart of The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones is the ongoing mystery surrounding Jones's death, and the clash of two worlds it symbolised. Woolley bought the rights to three books that provide sinister answers: Paint It Black by Geoffrey Giuliano, Who Killed Christopher Robin by Terry Rawlings and The Murder of Brian Jones by Anna Wohlin, his then-girlfriend who was at the Sussex house at the time of the death.
The builder, Frank Thorogood, was a former paratrooper from north London hired to carry out renovations on Jones's house. Woolley compares Jones and Thorogood to the roles that Mick Jagger and James Fox play in Nicholas Roeg's 1970 film Performance: a washed-up, decadent and reclusive pop star sharing his home with a tough, working-class traditionalist. "This guy would have had no idea of how to behave around Brian Jones," says Woolley. "Even people of his own ilk didn't know how to behave around Brian Jones, let alone someone used to telling blokes to build a wall. But he was spending every evening getting drunk with and becoming a butler to a weird little blond version of Oscar Wilde."
Woolley isn't saying, but it seems likely that the film will finger Thorogood as Jones's killer. Terry Rawlings goes one further and links the murder to the Rolling Stones's brief flirtation with the London underworld. But Thorogood and Anna Wohlin were not the only people present on July 3 1969.
Janet Lawson, a nurse from London and Thorogood's girlfriend, was also there. She has never been quoted in any of the books about Brian Jones and, even after the case was reopened following Thorogood's death in 1993, she was never tracked down. The police assumed she was dead; in fact she simply changed her name to distance herself from the entire affair. Woolley hired a private detective to find her. She agreed to talk.
"For years I was worried about the ending," says Woolley, once he has exhausted my limited acting skills. "There were too many questions left unanswered. But Janet Lawson turned out to be my ace in the hole. From what she told me about what happened that night, I have my ending." So what did she say?
"She said loads of things, and they're all in the movie. But you will have to see it to find out."