BRIAN AND BILLY

Thank you for top features on Brian Jones’s soundtrack to A Degree of Murder and Billy Bragg’s album-by-album review of his career (both RC345). Has anyone ever tried to release the Jones soundtrack on CD? Obviously of massive interest to Rolling Stones fans, it would help a larger public to decide whether he had a musical identity of his own. Perhaps Brian was like Ry Cooder, who seems to have found it easier to write mood pieces for films than to write songs. Drummer Mickey Waller, of Jeff Beck/Rod Stewart fame, was definitely in Jones’s plans for his post- Stones band. Waller is the only person to have depped for a member of the Stones on stage (in 1964) and would be well worth a chat if he’s still around.

An omission from the Bragg piece was the soundtrack to Walking And Talking, a 1996 relationships film about over-articulate New Yorkers, featuring Anne Heche. Though not obvious Bragg territory, his four songs are superb. Ditto four instrumentals written with Greg Wardson,including one memorably described by a male character as “vagina music” while it plays on the car radio. The bard’s views on this would be welcome.

Barry Winton’s review of Island Records’ output was affectionate and informative. Smith, Perkins & Smith is indeed an album of dull soft rock, but probably I was not the only mug to seek it out when Wayne Perkins came within a whisker of joining the Stones in 1976, being rejected as a) American and b) sounding too like Mick Taylor. See Christopher Sandford’s Keith Richards biography for poignant detail.

by Harry Robinson
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