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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]