All language subtitles for 27.Gone.Too.Soon.2018.1080p.WEBRip.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]

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[rhythm and blues music]

- The 27 Club is a
name popularly given

to six particular musicians
who died at that age.

- You got Brian Jones,
Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin,

Jim Morrison all died within
under three years

of each other. This gave rise
to this mythology.

- And then leap a couple
of decades and Kurt Cobain

and finally Amy Winehouse.

- The industry is very ephemeral
and exploits people’s

cravings for stardom and
picks you up and then moves on

to the next thing.

- By 27,
they’ve either made it

or they’re at that difficult
stage of their careers

where actually they may
get dropped by the label.

- If you haven’t made it by 27,
you’re not gonna make it.

- Look at the whole of 20th
century and 21st century music.

There’s actually 50 famous
musicians who all died

at the age of 27, and if you
look at 26 and 28, then there’s

100, and if you look at everyone
who died in the field of

popular music, at the height
of their fame, there’s

well over 1,000 who died
before the age of 35.

[lively music]

- I remember I was
at an awards dinner one night,
and this manager came up

to me and he said "That artist

"isn’t in your control,
he’s in mine.

"I’m the one that gets him the
drugs at three in the morning."

- I mean, some drugs
are very destructive.

And the trouble’s
when you get strung out on drugs

you loose your reason,
your balance,

you only hear
what you want to hear.

- This is the thing:
musicians are so sensitive.

- When you are on stage,
you are inherently vulnerable.

But I think it’s mainly what
people project onto you.

- It comes in the end,
the three Ds.

Drink, drugs, and depression.

- And we now know that trauma
can run through family trees.

And if it’s not addressed,
it can repeat itself.

- If you’re not reasonably,
very strong up here,

and you can take all of this,
then you really should

get out, it’s not the right
business for fragile people.

- When I was the head of
[mumbles], an artist came in,

he was not in a very good state,

he was gibbering,
he wasn’t well,

you could clearly see
there were some issues,

he stood up and his heroin
needle dropped on the floor.

- Does this horrific thing
really exist?

Rock songs are
typically [mumbles].

- It’s a willing collusion
between the artist, the public,

and the people making the money.

- We lost so many important
rock stars at such a young age.

Why, at this particular age?

The mythology, it’s the Loch
Ness monster of rock and roll.

- I managed to live beyond
the 27 club, but only just.

[lively rock music]

- The music business
in the 60s suddenly made
a massive change,

and it became
very introspective in a sense.

- [Announcer] This, ladies
and gentlemen, is London!

Swinging London
it’s been called.

- And people such as Hendrix,
Janice Joplin,

Jim Morrison started in a
sense exploring their own

subconscious, the music
business became
intellectualized in a way.

[lively music]

- When I was a student
at Oxford University,

coming into London for
Rolling Stone Magazine,

and in those days, the music
business was like a village,

there was no social media,
so you had to meet at receptions

and concerts and
launches and so forth.

Everybody got to
know each other.

- So it’s the beginning
of the consumer society.

It was the beginning of
young people looking like

themselves rather than
looking like their parents.

- I’m told that to be at
the height of trendy fashion

these days, you’ve got
to wear shoes like these.

- Music was evolving to be

an incredibly important
cultural force.

- What the post-war music
collective was suddenly able

to realize was that all this
suffering that people

went through in the privacy of
their own miserable bedrooms

could suddenly be drummed up
in the zeitgeist.

You could turn on the radio,
you could buy an album

or a single and suddenly
there’s somebody in your room

giving extraordinary expression
to exactly what

you’d been suffering alone.

- And I think this is a
generation of people

who were seriously indulgent.

Never before, in living memory,
had there been a generation

whose main sort of purpose in
life was indulging themselves.

[psychedelic music]

- The record companies
were picking up on what was

going on in the world,
that they were smoking dope

and it was
then moving into acid.

The relationship between
the music and dope

was explicit, but
implicit with drugs.

- Of course, psychedelic
drugs can put you into

a state of altered
consciousness, but
we go in and out

of different planes of
consciousness all the time.

Successful artists or really
good artists are the ones

who are able to identify
those states and use them

and get into them and create
in that state and when they’re

in the fully conscious state,
rationalize it into

a piece of work that has
both sides, both the wild,

irrational bit that has come
out of that deep state of

consciousness and something
that’s got the craftsmanship.

- If you look back other the
previous era when people were

excessive, jazz era, there
was no money involved in jazz

so people didn’t really care.

There was a lot of money
involved in rock and roll

and there was no precedent,
so if people wanted to

party all the time and take
a lot of drugs and become

addicts, obviously now
people are far more careful

and far more circumspect, but
we’ve had a 50 years history

of rock and roll
and also 50 years of
rock and roll casualties.

- This was coincident with
the arrival of cocaine.

- It happens frequently and
it happened again last night.

A cocaine arrest, this one at
Miami International Airport,

a Canadian accused of trying
to smuggle three pounds

of cocaine into this
country in three pairs
of platform shoes.

- If you’ve seen the film Blow
with Johnny Depp, you know

that the distribution routes
of cocaine didn’t reach

the northeastern United States
and Europe on the wide scale

until the early 1970s,
but when it did, it did.

- Cocaine is such an
insidious, pernicious drug,

because it’s so instant that
the transformation in your
mood is so quick

and it gives you this illusion
of unlimited energy.

- I mean, some drugs are very
destructive, and the trouble

is when you get strung out and
drugs you lose your reason,

you lose your balance, you only
hear what you want to hear.

- The relationship with
the record companies to the

artist was to become
the artist’s friend

and you did that by
getting them what they wanted,

so if they were drinking,
you bought them drinks,

if they were smoking dope,
you bought them dope,

and if they wanted heroin,
you bought them heroin,

if they wanted cocaine,
you bought them cocaine.

- They were earning 10s
of thousands a week.

So your bank balance increases
dramatically and people

thought that therefore,
their physical tolerance

would increase correspondingly.

- It was obviously that
everyone was doing enormous

amounts of cocaine because,

since it was new, nobody knew
what the right serving was.

They were just doing
what they could afford,

which was too much.

- It was a very different
ballgame and you would see

quite a lot of pretty
abusive kind of manipulation

of artists and the coke culture
throughout our industry

was driving an awful
lot of that mania.

- The most public case of
personality warping due to

cocaine was David Bowie
who gave the fascist mood

at Victoria Station.

In retrospect acknowledged
that he had overdone it,

but then again,
what was overdoing it?
You didn’t know yet.

You had to have the people
who overdid it

to know what
overdoing it was.

- [Announcer] Screaming,
frenzied teenager idolizers

of pop stars without a
sensible thought in their
long haired heads.

- When you’re in this, you're
wanting a lot out of life.

You want to be famous and rich,
and all these people

screaming at you, and you
want all this stuff, but you

can’t be feeble minded,
that’s a big thing

you want from the world.

Well, you got to earn it
for a start,

and you want a long career,
you got to keep on earning it.

- Of course, the ephemeral
nature of pop success

is such that if you don’t
write the follow up hits,

then you’ve already quickly
start getting bad reviews,

the audience starts
staying away in droves

and then the validation
that you’ve

pinned on that
success evaporates.

I had a stock of soluble
distalgesics in my cupboard

with which a friend of my
mine had successfully

killed himself a few years
earlier,

just as my kind of
escape strategy.

- And you couple that
with all the kind of craziness
of the business,

of the readily available drugs,
women, anything else
they might want.

- It’s like well I'm having
sex with lots of people and

there are all these drugs and
it’s kind of amazing

and I’m gonna go on this journey
now and I’m gonna take drugs

for 18 months and
have a fantastic time.

- Is there a direct link

between music and addiction?

You know, actually what music
offers all of us is a release

from anxiety, from just being
kind of trapped in your own

head with your own thoughts,
your own sort of

cognitive distress,
it’s a release from that.

- I think artists find it
very hard to be on one hand,

on this intense high, often
very late at night and then

having to go and sleep and
then how do they manage it

without taking too much drink
to dampen it down

or stimulants to keep them
going and it’s dangerous,

of course, when you start
using too many drugs to try to

control your daily living,
it’s okay to dabble a bit

every now and then but,
you know,
if it becomes a habit,

it starts to control
your life and the trouble is

you need to take more
and more to get the same effect

and ultimately
it gets destructive.

- One of the things that define
this phenomenon

and in fact they’re all things
that these people
have in common,

they’ve all had a
dysfunctional childhood.

They’ve all had some
terrible thing happen to them

very early on in their life
that they haven’t been helped

to process, so they’re all
full of angst and creativity

is the outlet for that.

They’re generally
highly intelligent people

who’ve been misunderstood
at a young age.

They all have a
rebellious nature.

They’ve been outcast, they've
been misplaced, they’ve been

misguided, and ultimately,
because they make a lot of money

doing the thing that they try
and use to heal themselves

from that, they indulge in
drink and drugs and those are
the things that kill them.

- I think you’ll often see
in history great artists,

I’m not saying myself,
but have

probably have had some trauma.

My father died at 13
and when he passed away,

you know, I think for me,
a void needed to be filled.

I was a teenage kid growing up
without a dad

and it’s like
I needed to create something.

- I think I was 14, 15,
can’t remember for sure, 14.

It was early, it was suggested
that I had Asperger’s.

So they put me on drugs,
they put me on Nidal and Valium

for a year or two to
keep me calm,

I used to get very
agitated about things.

Because of Asperger’s
I have a ridiculous level of

concentration and obsession
where we go obsessive

about things and if you
choose music as a career,

then that’s the thing
you become obsessed about.

[slow music]

- Brian? Well, how long have you
been with the Rolling Stones,

you one of the original members?

- Yes, one of the
original members.

- What were you doing
before you joined?

- Well, just bumming around
waiting for something
to happen, really.

- Brian Jones had
a difficult start.

He was three when his 18
month year old sister died.

Cognitive function of course
is developing throughout

our whole childhoods,
so even if we haven’t got

a sophisticated way of
conceptualizing loss, we have it

imprinted onto our being
by the experience.

- Every artist is fucked up
in some way in their childhood.

Often, what fucked them up in
their childhood leads to their
greatest piece of work.

- [Announcer] These apparent
hitchhikers, so blandly ignored,

are five of the
most famous young men

in show business,
The Rolling Stones.

Some of these motorists
will be kicking themselves

when they learned they missed
the chance of a lifetime

of getting to know them.

- Brian Jones was acting
out a lot way before he met

Mick and the rest of the Stones.

He was taking drink and drugs.

He’d had three children
with three different women

by the age of 19.

- The first child was
when he was about 14 or 15,

but it’s almost like he's trying
to create another family.

- He dropped out, he went
traveling, he became a busker.

It wasn’t until he came to
London and met Alexis Corner

that he began to become
interested in the blues and

started to immerse himself
in that crowd of people.

- Brian Jones was really a
bad boy right from the start,

so it’s often said that
Andrew Oldham invented
the kind of

bad boy mystique of the Stones,
it wasn’t, it was Brian Jones,

he was the one where
Mick and Keith walked

into Ealing Blues Club and
saw him, this is the real deal,

we want to be like this,
he had the whole thing.

He had it down
because it was innate.

- At the time, I was so madly
in love with Brian

that I didn’t think of
the consequences,

and to be honest, even when I
was about seven months pregnant,

I wouldn’t have believed
that I was pregnant.

- I felt very sorry
for Brian Jones.

It appears that he was the
intellectual of the band.

He started the band.

- He decided single handedly
that they would move

from being a kind of
blues plagiarist

type of outfit
to rock and roll individuals.

- Brian meets Anita Pallenberg
in Germany, I think.

And they quickly become
the golden couple of Europe.

They had the most glamorous,
the coolest looking,

the best dressed rock and
roll star that Britain

has ever had.

They’re the archetype
of rock and roll couple.

When Keith Richards takes
Anita Pallenberg from him

in 1967, I think that’s like
he’s losing his sister again,

he’s losing his mother again.

- Extremely insecure, so there
was this shell of bravado

and strutting and he fell in
with the Stones and

very quickly it became clear
that there was something
about Mick

that was more magnetic, that
the spotlight was moving from

him onto Mick, so I think that
he became extremely jealous.

[screaming]

♪ I said the joint was rocking

♪ Going round and round

♪ Reeling and a rockin’ ♪

♪ What a crazy sound

- But then their manager,
Andrew Loog Oldham came along

and said right now,
Keith and Mick, you gotta start
writing songs

because this is the
way to make money and Brian
was sidelined a little bit.

- The journey through life,
the journey through success
creates different pressures,

sometimes the songwriters
become incredibly wealthy,

sometimes the other members
of the artists

don’t the split's
on how that all works.

- And he resented that deeply
because he’d founded

this band, this was his baby,
and it was ripped away from
underneath him.

- Brian Jones, his death and
the Brian Jones story

is a tragedy really,
because he had his group
taken away from him

and even though in terms of
the iconography of the group

and the look of the group,
he was still very important.

He hadn’t contributed musically
for a very, very long time.

And his death, I suppose
there was a certain amount

of inevitability about that.

- Being a pop star’s a
very dangerous business.

You are putting yourself out
on a limb, you’re actually

unleashing a lot
of psychic energy

and I think Brian Jones
is a good example of that,

because if you look at

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards,
they grew into that role.

If you look at Keith early on,
he’s a bit of a geek,

these big ears, he’s not
really very cool and over time,

you see him actually become
Brian Jones

because Brian Jones was
the archetypal rebel,

but he couldn’t
take that mask off
at the end of the evening.

When he kind of came up with
rejection, then he would

just drug himself into oblivion,
so he hadn’t really worked
how to play those roles.

- Some of those issues go
back to family and childhood

and the environment with which
they grew up, and some of

those issues also come from
kind of an abusive relationship

with the internet which is
often never really talked about.

- The future as a Rolling Stone
is [mumbles.]

My ultimate aim in life
was never to be a pop star.

I enjoy it with reservations

but I’m not really
sort of satisfied.

- He really began
to alienate himself.

So he would, for example,
when they were on the road,

he would travel separately
from the others.

He would stay in
separate hotels,

he wouldn’t interact or
socialize with the other guys

and he made it very
difficult for himself.

- You know, they’re creative
souls, they’re delicate,

they don’t necessarily say
or communicate exactly how...

what they want to do
or what they feel.

- Brian had apparently
just become impossible

to work with they thought,

I think it’s
probably more complex

than that, they were probably
making it, I mean,

when they were in the studio,
they’d turn his
instrument down or off

and he wouldn’t
be aware of it.

- Bands are like gangs and some
gangs have dominant members

and artists or bands have
dominant members within them and

that does actually come down,
sometimes to kind of bullying.

- He obviously started drinking,
taking a lot of drugs,

got busted a couple of times.

The Stones wanted to go on
the road down in 1969

to America, Brian couldn’t get
a visa because he had

a drugs conviction,
by which time they were fed up
with him anyway

so they ousted him.

- And so after they recorded
what became Biggest Banquet,

I think the whole situation
just becomes untenable.

I was shocked when he left,
I think all fans were shocked.

Because when you thought of
the Rolling Stones, you didn’t

think of Mick Jagger,
you certainly didn’t think
of Keith Richards,

you thought of Brian Jones,
he was the
public personification.

- When Mick developed his Mick
Jagger persona in performance

it was based on mainly
Brian Jones with a little bit

of Keith Richards, but of course
Keith Richards if you start

to look at him over time,
he’s starting to wear Brian's

clothes literally, not even
metaphorically, he’s wearing

the same scarves, the
same outfits and the hats.

And it’s kind of strange
because he doesn’t ever look

very good doing it until Brian
Jones is defeated and then

dies and almost is like they
picked the best bits of Brian
and then tapped into them.

- So you know,
he bought Cotchford Farm,

which was the home of A.A. Milne
who wrote the wonderful
Winnie the Pooh stories

and that says it all.

This is a boy trying to
reclaim his childhood.

- [Announcer] About midnight,
Jones went for a swim

with his Swedish girlfriend,
Anna Wohlin, and another friend,

Mr. Frank Thorogood.

After a time,
Mr. Thorogood and the girl

went back to the house.

When they returned, they saw
Jones at the bottom of the pool.

- [Lesley-Anne]
You’re always surprised.

She found him on the
bottom of the swimming pool

at around midnight,
presumably he’d gone missing,

gone for a swim and had conked
out from drink and drugs,

and they pulled him, he was
still barely alive when they
pulled him from the pool,

but he died soon afterwards
because she couldn’t
speak very good English,

she couldn’t get anyone to
come and help and by the time

they got him to hospital,
he was dead.

- So Brian drowns, of course,
in his swimming pool.

This is suppose to be the
start of his new existence,

but within a week, the
Rolling Stones are playing

Hyde Park to at least a
quarter of a million people.

♪ So love me, hold me

♪ Love me, hold me

- And Mick Jagger got up
and read some verses
from Shelly’s Adonis.

- Peace, peace, he is not dead,
he does not sleep.

He has awakened from
the dreams of life,

it’s we that are lost in
stormy visions and keep with

phantoms and
unprofitable strife.

And in a mad trance,
we strike with a spirit’s knife.

- So Mick was obviously casting
himself as Brian Jones’s

big, best friend although
he hadn’t been there for him
in life.

- Mick Jagger is suddenly
clearly in charge of
the Rolling Stones,

he’s Mr. fish, man's dressed,

he’s he looks astonishing
and even though
when they released

the butterflies in tribute
to Brian, half of them

were dead because they were
kept in cardboard boxes,

even that kind of moment
kind of works.

[guitar music]

[indistinct]

♪ Somebody here

With the Stones’ Hyde Park
concert, it’s like

death and rebirth,

and the symbolism of the
butterflies is very interesting.

[soft music]

[lively music]

- Hendrix was a one off,
whereby he embraced

the psychedelic
generation of the 60s.

He was an enigma in that sense.

- When you realize how
damaged Jimi’s upbringing was,

how ghastly, it was ghastly
beyond Dickensian proportions.

- In the case with Hendrix,
he was very young, and he used

to say he was knocked
around an awful lot.

- The mother who’s like a
baby having a baby, she’s 17

when she has him, a party girl,
so she’s the archetype

of the electric lady.

-[Lesley-Anne]
His mother had him while

his father was fighting
in World War II.

- Then there’s the succession,
there’s the third brother

with serious birth deformities
and then the two sisters,

one of whom was born blind and
another one who also has serious

birth deformities, one assumes
this is because of some

kind of consumption by his
mother during pregnancy.

And the mother disappears,
he’s having to look after

the younger brothers, that’s
where his drive came from,

his creative drive came form.

- It’s fascinating
to think of Jimi

going through these series
of transitions

from absolute chaos
to being the extreme opposite,

the restrictions
of the military,

and then from there into a
swing band where it’s this

corporate body where you have
to be absolutely listening

very carefully to your fellow
musicians and you have to

give over to the power
of the collective.

- And I think Jimi, contrary
to the apparent craziness

of his existence, I think
there was a great discipline

that was behind his hard work
and all these people

worked incredibly hard
and they’re also
all incredibly bright.

- And from there, that
wonderful experience of playing

in sync with people,
he suddenly takes off
on this trip to England.

- In a way, I do wonder, maybe
after the experience working

with those really tough bands,
if you make one mistake

you’ll get your wages docked,
this guy off and playing

on his own, he’s like
a boy with a fast car.

He was just going crazy.

- He was having an affair
with a girl from Linda Keith,

who Keith Richards thinks is
his girlfriend and she even

lent him one of his guitars.

Chas Chandler brings him
to England, seen him
in the Cafe Wha?

in New York and the rest
is sort of history,

he did take off
incredibly quickly,
I was almost surprised

at the way he took off
so quickly,

but he obviously absolutely
hit the zeitgeist.

- He’s establishing himself

and discovers this whole other
world where he can suddenly

take all the brilliance
of the musical discipline

that he had in a swing band
and find a new way
of expressing it.

- The way he looked,
the way he played, I mean,

he was the sort of avatar
I mean, of underground
music really.

That’s how he emerged
absolutely at that point,
the end of ’66.

[lively music]

- Hello, and good
afternoon, everyone.

[in German]

[applause]

[mellow guitar music]

♪ Hey Joe, where you going

- The artist I grew up with,
Hendrix, who had this

phenomenal creativity and
free flowing musicality

who was supported by
a few people but
he broke free from them

and then went on auto-destruct
very quickly,

before he went off the boil,
his artistic flair
was still there.

- [Interviewer] Tell me,
Jimi, do you smoke?

- No.

- But there was nothing ever

conventional about this man,
he played a guitar
with his teeth.

Played a guitar without
touching the strings.

[guitar music]

This was a showman, a natural
entertainer who wanted to do

a little more than just go
out there on stage

and play music, which
he did love, worshiped music

but he wanted to show off.

- Jimi, how much do
you rely on gimmicks?

- Gimmicks, there we
go again, gimmicks.

I’m tired of people
saying this, gimmicks.

The world is nothing but
a big gimmick, isn’t it?

War, napalm bombs and all that,

people get burned up on TV
and it’s nothing
but a bit gimmick.

[explosions]

[blues music, explosions]

- When the group that he
assembles for Woodstock,

I think his performance
was fantastic.

- It’s gone down in history,
it’s legendary because

he played the Star Spangled
Banner it was thought that

perhaps this was his statement
to the world how proud

he was to be an American,
in fact he was castigating

the American government
for their part in Vietnam.

He was saying to
the whole world,

the whole world was watching,

"I loathe my country and
I don’t want us to occupy

"Vietnam any more, I want
an end to this suffering."

It was a very important
statement and that has gone down

in history and that
isn’t ever gonna go away.

Perhaps for that sole reason,
we remember Jimi Hendrix.

[playing Star Spangled Banner]

Success will bring you
the adoration,, i.e. love
of the many, many people,

millions of people
in the extreme cases,

but the more you get that and
the more people adore you,

the less likely you are to get
that one person who loves you
just for yourself.

- He was a genuine musician
and I think he really cared
about playing

and he was a flamboyant
player and he just wanted to
take guitar to such an extreme.

- With Jimi Hendrix,
you had a...

medium term disintegration.

You had this incredible
genius artist

who is surrounded
by people who are abusing.

And now has the money
where he can do it

and he just slid into it
as far as I can see.

Until what for anyone on
normal wages would be abnormal

becomes normal.

- I thought that when he was,
I think it was ’68, 69,

when he was busted with heroin
in his bag going into Canada,

there were apparently, the
world he was mixing in New York,

it was very, very druggy.

It was much more druggy
than anything

he could mix in London.

- Jimi had a girlfriend,
Monika Dannemann,

who was a German ice skater,
she was an insomniac,

she couldn’t sleep,
she was prescribed some

very heavy weight
sleeping pills.

Jimi got hold of it easy,
being on the booze,

he couldn’t read the label,
it was in German,

he didn’t understand that
you could only take

half of one of these tablets,
half of one.

He took nine this
particular night.

- The Jimi Hendrix
experience is over.

The acid rock musician died
today in a London hospital,

apparently from an
overdose of drugs.

During his short career, Hendrix
flailed his electric guitar

into some of
the most unusual sounds
of an unusual music.

- I was horrified,
I’d seen Jimi Hendrix play.

All of his stunts,
the behind the head, he said

"I guess "this is what
you’ve come to see."

[gobbling noises]

Clearly a genius, who knows
what else he would have done?

But his body was that
of a human being.

[guitar wailing]

[mellow music]

- Janice Joplin, this poor girl
who’d come from

a normal home and had gone to
a normal school

was persecuted and tormented
from the age of five.

- She grew up in the south
in Port Arthur in Texas

in the 40s and it was a
racist state and I think she

instinctively
reacted against that.

I think her parents had liberal
views and it’s quite likely

the bullying of Janice
came from her
expressing these liberal views

in this redneck culture
in which she was existing.

- She started using alcohol
to self-medicate from
her early teens,

so before she became an artist
she was already using alcohol
to try and self-soothe.

- She was once voted
ugliest man on the campus
at her college.

- I didn’t go to the
high school prom.

And...

- [Interviewer]
Oh, you were asked, weren’t you?

- No, I wasn’t.

I don’t think they
wanted to take me.

- Janice Joplin I think was
a very tormented character.

Her Primal Scream I think
was a subject of what
was she screaming about?

♪ Use me now

♪ Please, please

♪ Come down here
and use me now ♪

- I went to San Francisco
in 1963.

- And she goes I think
almost immediately to

City Lights Books which was
owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

the great... and she kind
of loves that existence.

[mellow music]

- And of course, immersed
herself in the drug culture.

Started injecting heroin,
took a lot of cocaine,

other kind of psycho drugs,
was in the music scene,

started to get involved
with musicians, performed at

Martinez and Woodstock,
terribly, Pete Townsend actually

said after her
performance at Woodstock,

"Mind you, even Janice Joplin

"on a bad night is better
than everybody else."

- You know, it’s just music...

[wolf whistle]

Music’s supposed
to be different.

- I think when you look at
someone like Janice Joplin,

I’ve talked to people who worked
with Janice and were close

to Janice and they all sort of
say the same thing, which was

"We could see she
was floundering, we could
see she was in trouble

"but we didn’t have
the vocabulary that we

"have now," no one knew or
talked about rehab or addiction.

You looked at someone
like that and just thought

"Why can’t she drink
a little less?"

Why does she have to drink
a bottle of Jack Daniels?

Why’s she doing heroin?

I wish we could stop this.

- When Janice signed [mumbles]
she is clearly already

you know, an alcoholic.

- [Interviewer] What do you
think it is young people are
looking for today?

[laughter]

25 words or less,
just for radio.

- Uh, sincerity and a good time.

- [Interviewer]
Are they finding it?

- I don’t know about you, daddy,

I’m fine, at least
I’m having a good time.

- Every pop star has
an unexpected moment
when they’re alone.

No matter what kind of entourage
you have, suddenly you are

in a bedroom on your own and
you have a couple of hours

to spend, what do you do?

- If you inject heroin, the
extraordinary transformation

in your physiology
is so dramatic

that you’re catapulted
into a state where you

momentarily are
disconnected from your
miserable emptiness inside.

- I would have been very worried
about what was going on.

Anyone who’s had a serious
heroin addiction like that,

you’ve got to stop it.

- And towards the end,
as you know, Janice took

to drugs, far too often
and far too heavily.

That is a story of tragedy
repeated many times over

with the 27 club or whatever
you wish to call these people.

- Janice Joplin once said
that she was a victim

of her own insides.

That there was too much feeling,
and many artists,

as anyone who thinks deeply
about the artistic nature

have a layer of skin missing,
they feel things more than
other artists.

- I was a painter

and sort of a recluse
in high school.

I’ve changed.

- She tried to clean up,
she moved back home,

she’s sort of wearing a beehive
and normal clothes
and got engaged

to some bloke but even there,
she knew that this wasn’t her.

This wasn’t Janice.

Poor Janice,
she got her act together,

she was back recording,
she was back in Hollywood.

She’d checked into this motel,
the Landmark.

This motel was pretty near
to the recording studios

that she was booked into
where she was going to go in

and rehearse and record
and create a new album

and she had her head around it
and she decided

"No, clean up,
go and stay in a motel,

"stay away from these people,
can’t get

"the drugs out to me there,
and I’m gonna make this
album properly.

Trouble was, the drugs
always found Janice

and she overdosed on heroin
in her hotel room.

[applause]

[lively music]

- We know that Jim Morrison
was extremely rebellious

against his very,
very military authorities,
his father was an admiral

and very strict with everything,

and he found it
extremely claustrophobic.

Jim Morrison’s parents were on
record as having decided

that when they brought up
their children, they would not

use corporal punishment, they
would not hit their children,

but what they did instead
was a military dressing down.

Which involved the
father standing one or more
of the children

in front of him and yelling at
them until they were reduced

to shame ridden, quaking,
crying wrecks,

which is another form
of violence.

- Using a persona is a
dangerous business if you can’t

control it and of course Jim
Morrison was a prime example

of developing himself
into this poet.

- The significant thing for
Jim Morrison seems to be,

and I think at the age of four,
in New Mexico I believe it is,

driving somewhere with his
parents and they come across

an overturned truck

which today,
there are a lot of
American Indians

and this is a vision
that comes back

to haunt
Jim Morrison insistently.

It appears in some
of his lyrics.

America was absolutely riven
in two by people in favor

of the Vietnam war and by
young people essentially

who were appalled by the notion
of it, so the Doors of course

personified and embodied
that sense of protest

and it must have been very
confusing for him at the time.

The Doors are becoming
actually the biggest group

in the United States,
his father is in charge

of an aircraft carrier
bombing north Vietnam.

That would suggest conflict
that is unavoidable.

- If you’ve read his biography,
you know that his behavior

in parties or social situations
was sometimes antisocial.

And he had this knack for
poetic metaphors and images

and sometimes they were
expressed in a commercial form,

others in an artistic form
like horse latitudes.

But the point is that...
one of the reasons

he was popular was because
he was antisocial.

And he was antisocial
because he was unhappy.

Jim Morrison goes
to UCLA for sport

and while he’s there, discovers
LSD and in fact the first

Doors songs are written
during that period.

The Doors are first very druggy.

- When I was a teenager,
everything Jim Morrison did

was amazing to me, and his
sort of nihilistic excesses,

it’s almost a celebration
of that unsustainable,

thoroughly impractical
way of living your life.

And so I enjoy it in a way
for different reasons

to the reasons I enjoyed it
when I was a teenager.

- And of course the women
come flocking, so what do
the boys do,

they don’t say no, do they?

So tons and tons of girlfriends.

At one point, he had 20
paternity suits pending.

- It kind of goes
LSD, marijuana, booze,

is topped up with heroin,

the heroin starts late 60s.
It’s before he goes to Paris.

- [Lesley-Ann] When he
escaped Paris for a while
with his girlfriend, Pamela...

- He kind of flees,
really, to Paris.

But Paris is not a good place
to go to if you’re trying

to overcome a hard drug problem.

- And they just got immersed
in the whole

drug scene in Paris.

- [mumbles]
The French Connection,

heroin was a big drug in France.

And Paris was the epicenter
of the European heroin trade.

- Jim Morrison was off
the rails in Paris.

He was, seemed intent on
drinking himself to death,

quite quickly actually,
I think one of the extraordinary

things about Morrison’s
very short career

is how much
he changed physically.

- But you feel that might
be deliberate as well, because
maybe he wanted to destroy

the image of himself, but
he’s clearly in depression.

- Because in 1966, 1967,

there’s no doubt that part
of The Doors’ huge appeal
was the fact that he was

extraordinarily good looking,
great mane of hair,

very good looking man and by
all accounts very charismatic.

By the time he died
in 1971, he was a beast.

And seemed to enjoy that,
that he could bounce around bars

in San Gimignano and Paris,
literally drinking

himself to death and he
died of a heroin overdose

which is accidental,
no more complicated than that.

[applause]

- You got Brian Jones,
Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin,

Jim Morrison, all died
within under three years
of each other.

This gave rise to this mythology
of the 27 club.

Which might have gone away,
and did for a while,

because it was quite
a long time before
it happened again.

Almost 25 years later,
Kurt Cobain.

[rock music]

- He’s just an archetypal
child of his age.

Parents are divorced,
in fact all the parents

of all the members of
Nirvana were divorced.

- He was ashamed of the fact
that his parents had gone
their separate ways.

He was angry with them
for leaving.

His mother had custody
for a while, but she
couldn’t cope with him,

so he packed him off
to live with the dad

who couldn’t cope with him,
so he left him to be

looked after by
family members and friends.

He started to rebel at school.

- In Kurt Cobain’s family,
suicide was common.

- Kurt Cobain came from
a family with a history
of mental illness.

Two of his uncles had killed
themselves by shooting

themselves and one of his
great uncles had also
shot himself,

and we now know
that trauma can run
through family trees.

And if it’s not addressed,

it can repeat itself
intergenerationally.

- He started drinking
very heavily when he was 13.

There was an old wino living
in the village that

they used to bribe this old guy
to go and buy drinks for them.

- When he was an early teenager,
comes across a boy

in a forest hanging
by the neck and he would say,

"Do I have the suicide gene?"

- [Interviewer] How would you
define the music of Nirvana?

[pounding rhythmically,
humming along]

- With a twist of lemon.

- Now, you’ve get a very
handsome, very small, very frail

little music fan,
completely taken by punk rock

and the Sex Pistols and
the Beatles and the Monkees

and a weird sort of array
of musical influences.

- I think that Nevermind is
kind of a brilliant...

and it’s a rock album but
it’s also a brilliant pop album.

Those songs are just gorgeous,
they are just perfect

three minute pop songs with
a complete twist harmonically

and with that rage and
that kind of energy.

- It’s interesting that Kurt
Cobain loved others so much.

They made these incredible
songs that were so dense
with melody

and they did them in the
most boring way imaginable,

by just going to
a small studio

and just working sort of
office hours, often very long
office hours.

- I think Kurt had been
doing heroin for a long time.

I think he’d been doing it
before Nirvana was successful.

- You know, as I expected
before I started doing heroin,

I realized that I knew at
the beginning that it would

become just as boring as
marijuana does, like all drugs

after a few months it’s just
as boring as breathing air.

- All artist have to,
in order to sustain,

they have to pass
an initiative test.

Kurt Cobain’s challenge
would have been to have just

shifted from this kind of
incredibly cathartic,

raw music that he made.

- Nirvana made euphoric misery
and sang it to the world

and the world sang it back.

- Kurt Cobain changed the
way harmony worked for rock.

Nobody else was doing those
changes, nobody was using

those flat fives and
those amazing sequences

that were just so original,
and somehow he had a melodic

ability to make sense of
really discordant sequences.

- The material success that
Nirvana enjoyed certainly

allowed him to destroy
on a grand scale

both himself and in terms
of cultural destruction,

I interviewed him
and I asked him,

"What are your hopes
for the next decade?"

and he said "I want to debase
every known form

"of popular music
that ever existed."

I think he was very ambivalent
about his status as it was

and the bigger he became,
the more he tried to neutralize

his guilt about being
a kind of corporate rock star.

I think he was a very
conflicted individual.

He wanted it both ways, he
wanted to be rich and famous,

he wanted to be successful,
but also he wanted to appear

like he hadn’t had
anything to do with it.

He wanted to maintain the
credibility

within the artistic community
from which he sprung.

- Punk rock should mean freedom,
liking and accepting

anything that you like,
playing whatever you want.

As sloppy as you want, as long
as it’s good and has passion.

- In Utero, the final Nirvana
album, which was produced

by Steve Albini--
and Steve Albini
is very much the producer

you go to if you want to prove
to the wider world that

you’re no longer
a corporate whore.

- He gets involved
with Courtney Love,

was a very intuitive woman,
but difficult,

with her own demons.

But she’s tried to
get him to clean up.

- So he really did set off on
a path to be a decent parent.

Put himself into rehab,
but couldn’t stick to it.

- He goes back to Seattle,
the part where you go to get

heroin and hookers and Kurt
really liked this world.

- Tonight, word of an untimely
death, Kurt Cobain was

the lead singer of
the group Nirvana.

Their albums were best sellers,
their songs filled with

images of despair and violence.

One lyric, "The sun is gone,
but I have a light,

"the day is done,
but I’m having fun.

And then this morning,
his body found at home,

another casualty of success.

- He couldn’t handle it
because he wasn’t equipped,

he didn’t have any
infrastructure, there was no

support system, his girlfriend,
wife, she was

as addicted as he was.

So there was nothing
to cling to,

there was no link for him,

there was no yardstick
to measure himself by.

- It was obvious this man
is dead from a shotgun wound

to the head, now there
was a suicide note

left inside the house.

[rock music]

- I was really shocked when
I saw the front page of

The Independent reporting
the death of Kurt Cobain.

Why was I shocked?

Because it was on
the front page!

He’d only had one big hit.

But he had become
such a totemic person.

Such a symbol for his
generation that to these people,

it didn’t matter that he hadn't
had more than one big album.

- [mumbles] sort of inspired
him and I really like Nirvana

and I really think it’s
a real shame that he did it.

- Everybody is real upset
about it and it’s a shock.

We can’t believe that it
happened, it’s unbelievable.

- Kurt Cobain actually
invented a whole new style

of guitar playing in the sense,
the inversions, the guitar,

inversions on the chords
are brilliant.

And he was almost as influential
as the Stones and Beatles
in many ways.

- I was quite amazed,
but I was used to people

having an impact in their death
who had major catalogues,

from Bing Crosby to
Elvis Presley,

but no, this was the
ultimate proof

that in pop music,
we had now reached the stage

where you can have
one giant record,

and people take you as
seriously as they would someone

who has had 10 years of it.

- And his mother Wendy, when
he died, she gave an interview

to the local paper and she
said "He’s gone and joined that

"stupid club, I told him
not to join that stupid club."

Which was taken to mean
the 27 club.

But in fact, what she
really meant was the uncles

who’d committed suicide,
so the press really got

a hold of this and the whole
myth of the 27 club exploded
all over again.

[applause]

[soft music]

- The person...

who a record company
tried to save but failed
was Amy Winehouse.

Because you know Lucian Grainge
spoke to her and sent her

to the West Indies
to get it together.

- People were talking about
Amy’s problems and I know

Island, the head of Island
Records was thinking

"We’ll drop her just so
she can sort herself out."

But it’s too much, I mean,
back to back, sold millions,

are you gonna drop
your major talent?

- If you really sort of scratch
the surface

of the lip service
given to "Of course we want
to help her

"and we don’t want them to be
unhappy or drug addicted,"

you know, I think you do find
that there is some investment

in chaos, there
is some investment

in the car crash narrative.

- Um... Prescription drugs! No.

What makes me crazy, alcohol
doesn’t do those things to me,
I’m quite a horrible drunk.

Quite a horrible
drunk, actually.

- She was fascinating
because she was imploding.

- When she stood on that stage
with a microphone in front

of 50,000 people at the
Isle of Wight Festival,

she was exposed, she was frail,
and she was amazing

because of all the
different emotional contexts

that were happening
to her experience.

♪ Plus one of all
them girls you kiss ♪

♪ You can’t keep lying
to yourself like this ♪

♪ Yourself

♪ Can’t believe you played
yourself like that ♪

- The pain that Amy was
suffering and whether it was

the alcohol issues
or the substances issues
or the environment issues,

whatever her issues
specifically were that day

or as she was performing,
that’s what made her great.

- Amy was the apple of her
dad’s eye, her father Mitch

was a cab driver, east
London Jewish family,
mother a chemist.

- Amy’s angst obviously
stems from when her
mum and dad split up,

because it was this happy,
this girl just sitting there

listening to her dad’s records
and dad would pick her up

and the grandma,
she was very close to,

lovely little Jewish family
going on, no cares in the world.

- She adored her dad, but her
dad was cheating on her mom.

And so therefore,
it must be Amy’s fault.

She couldn’t work out that
this was for any other reason

than something
she had done wrong.

- There was no slow burn,
Amy just sort of
burst on to the scene.

- Every so often, somebody
comes along like
an Amy Winehouse

who’s truly talented.

- By the time it got
Black to Black

in 2006, she’d found
the voice, she was angry,
she was reacting.

She knew that she had
to loathe her father

for what he was
doing to her mother.

She’s known throughout
the world by this time,
for 20 odd songs.

- And she obviously has
an addictive personality,

starts off on drink,
then goes to weed,

then went on to coke.

- She’s in pain, she's hurt,
comes out in all of her songs,

but she’s proud of her age
and proud of her culture,

she kind of enjoys, she really
enjoys getting off her head.

- She tangled her hair up in
this terrible, ugly beehive.

She had herself tattooed.

She was showing all the signs
of self-harm, and what is

self-harm but self-loathing?

- The world publicized
problems around the tragic

early death of Amy Winehouse,
certainly made everybody

kind of sit up and think
"Okay, we really need
to be doing more."

- The extent to which
she was in the public eye

I think was quite
unprecedented,
we forget that,

so there’s a certain amount
of death by celebrity culture.

- The thing that made Amy’s life
different was that she was

doing all this in
the information age,

so every breath she took,
every drug she overdosed on,

every bottle of wine
she consumed

was splashed all over
the front pages

and on people’s blog,
she never stood a chance.

- I mean, I had some pretty
horrific times

when I first started
with the press,

I had a very bad relationship
with the press
for a very long time,

but having Asperger’s,
I often said the wrong things

at the wrong time and
I couldn’t understand

and it was all a nightmare
for quite a few years.

- Because as soon as
you’re out there,
you’re out there now.

There’s no hiding from it.

You either are this person,
there is no kind of mystique,

the camera everywhere.

- That Belgrade show
with the one with the footage

from that went viral,
that’s when people thought,

"This is a car crash,"
so if you’re her father

or her mother or
her circle of friends,

would you have let your daughter
walk out on that stage?

♪ Well, sometimes
I go out by myself ♪

♪ And I look across the water

♪ And I think of all the
things, what you’re doing ♪

♪ And in my head
I paint a picture ♪

- I...

have hosted the Ivor
Novello awards for 29 years.

The saddest event

in those 29 years
was watching the deterioration
of Amy Winehouse,

who won three years in a row.

In the first year,
she goes up on stage,

she’s perky and young and all
this is so exciting and

it’s your typical
what you want to see
pop star reaction

to being honored by her peers,
her fellow writers.

Second year, she gets up there,
she’s a little hazy,

she’s not altogether,
but she’s still happy.

Third year,
her name is announced,
and she’s not there yet.

Now this is a lunchtime
award ceremony.

Her name would have been
called at around 2:30,

but she hadn’t gotten it
together yet.

- [Announcer] She may not have
been at the glitzy luncheon,

but all talk was on
Amy Winehouse,

who’s leading the pack with an
impressive three nominations.

- And I thought, "Man, if you’re
so messed up that you can’t

even get somewhere by 2:30,
you’re in deep trouble."

And I thought, "Oh, my god,
unless somebody stops this,
it’s over."

- I don’t know
what I’m doing up here,

but Amy unfortunately
couldn’t make it,

but she is getting better.

- And she said to her dad,
"I need to get away from this.

"I wanna go on holiday,
can we just go on holiday?

"Just you and me, dad?"

So he said "Yeah, we’ll go
to the Caribbean."

They booked a holiday,
just the two of them.

He brought a film crew
and she was horrified
when they walked up.

He turned up with a
film crew and she said,

"What are they doing here?"

And he said, "Well, you know,
I thought we might just

do a sort of "at home
with Amy on holiday,"

and she said
"But that’s not what I wanted,
I wanted to leave it all

"behind and I just wanted
to have some time with you."

And even on holiday,
that time she never got.

- I think when Amy had reached
that sort of state

where everyone could see
how she was,

it just took anyone
just to step in.

- She was let down
by her family,

by the people around her,
possibly by the record company

and she didn’t appear to be very
good at making good choices,

so I think she is
the one who slipped
through the net.

- [Announcer] Amy was more
than five times the legal
drink drive limit when she died

as the coroner inquest
into her death

recorded a verdict
of misadventure.

- I think her dad,
Mitch Winehouse does have a part

to play because he was,
it’s almost like he was looking

to launch his career on the
back of Amy, which he did.

- Instead of looking at these
pictures of his daughter

with the blood seeping through
the valley shoes and the

self-harming going on
and thinking "Amy needs me,

"I’m her father, I need
to save her from this,"

what does he do?
Launches a music career.

Decides to fulfill his
lifelong dream of being
a quasi-Frank Sinatra.

- She was supposed to have
these minders to keep her

away from it, but then
she’d end up alone in her room
with her mobile phone.

- She was in a weird kind
of marriage, or wasn’t it
a marriage,

nobody really knows
about that relationship.

- What can we learn from the
deterioration of Amy Winehouse?

Well, one thing is
it’s hard to stop somebody

when they’re on the way down.

Because you don’t control
their heart, their mind,

their emotions are their own.

- Before her 28th birthday,
she poisoned herself

with alcohol and she died.

- Of her old friends and the
record company was not enough

to stop the deterioration of
someone who suddenly could
afford every vice.

- Why weren’t people
looking after her?

She had a minder,
why wasn’t somebody

watching what she was
continuing?

- No one is really
looking after them.

Why weren’t people really
keeping an eye on them?

I mean, Amy, she’s got the
body guard outside her door

and she’s inside dying.

[applause]

- I don’t go along
with a conspiracy theory.

"The industry," as if it
were the gods of Valhalla

sitting at a banquet table
saying "Okay, who down there
is really messed up?"

For me, I think I pinned
all my sense of self-worth

on the idea of having some
sort of success in music

that it would validate me
as a person

if a lot of
people loved me.

- When I was 21, I did nothing
but get up in the morning,

write songs, think about it,
go with Adrian, go to sleep.
That was it, that was my life.

- And there’s something really
great about no one giving a shit

because you just create,
you just make stuff

and you just play
like a child plays,

you’re not
self-conscious at all.

And then the bubble gets smaller
and smaller as more people

start having opinions
around you and so there’s
money in what you do.

Soon as there’s money
in what you do,
everyone’s got an opinion.

- When a human becomes a
profit source, a cash cow,

most of the people around them
except for a true friend

will cater to their every whim.

- You know, drug abuse
doesn’t just stop at the artist.

Sometimes it comes from the
record label to the artist.

I’d argue quite honestly that
some of the people within

the industry are suffering
from some of the same effects.

- Most artists, you’ve got to
build a link with them first,

you’ve got to build a bridge
with them before you start

telling people what to do.

One of the things
I sometimes do would be say,

"Well, better that I prescribe
for you then bad stuff

or illicitly on the internet."

So the first thing you do
is aim for stability,

whilst keeping my GMC license.

- Obviously as a manager I
sometimes have encouraged people

to do what I thought would
be best for their career.

Was it because it’s best
for their career or because
it’s best for my wallet?

- There’s that line
with commercialism, right?

It’s that line, and for me
there’s a clear line.

- What the industry defines
success as which is selling

records, which we all would
like, but to maintain a level

of kind of cultural relevance
and be part of the radio

and sell your records,
ultimately is kind of
unattainable, I think.

- Fame is traumatic

because everyone thinks they
want it, and then when it comes

knocking at the door,
it’s very difficult to handle.

- Having seen what I see,
I certainly wouldn’t want
to be a star.

It’s a very fragile,
ephemeral existence.

It may be fun for a while,
but I think you very soon
lose your soul.

- It’s not the job of
the music industry to be

a social worker,
but as circumstances have it,

the music industry
is an enabler.

- I think the record industry
has a responsibility.

I think certainly when you’re
working with young talent,
we have a responsibility.

Remember, as a record industry,
we spend a lot of money,
we invest a lot of money

in these artists, so if
I’m gonna invest 300 or 400
or 500 thousand pounds,

which can rise up to
a million and a half pounds
sometimes before we actually

start bringing the money back,
that’s a big investment,

so I wanna know that the
artist that we’re investing

that money into is solid.

- Now, I’ve seen artists crying,
have been dropped,

just in a room on their own
and I walk past,
"What the fuck do I do,

"this is an artist,
nobody’s comforting them,

"nobody’s doing that," and
then that’s how awful the world
has now become.

- You know, if you are going to
take their money, they’re not
going to give it for free,

they’re not a charity,
they are going to want
something back from you.

- There are fewer artists
and there are fewer artists

that make a lot of money,
and in my way of thinking,

the sort of narrative arc of
the rock and roll era is sort of
coming to an end, really.

- The days of record labels
finding unknown artists

and completely molding them
and doing it that way are over.

- Of course nobody
wants to cause harm,

it’s not a deliberate thing
at all, but they’re like

raw materials and assets
for these companies.

- I think you can reasonably
in business expect them to have
a fiduciary duty.

I don’t think you can
reasonably expect them to have
a moral duty.

- I think most artists have,
generally speaking,
something missing.

- The industry knows that
the way to keep them going

is you give them what they want.

[instrumental
rock music playing]