SHIRLEY ARNOLD: "Then he was with Suki. She made him happy, I think. Maybe she was the next best thing to Anita, I think that's what he was after. She looked like Anita in the earlier days. They looked like sisters. In the office we would see photographs of Suki and think that it was Anita. Suki was goin' with Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, and she was in a car crash and Tara died, and he died in her arms. She was in a terrible state. Brian was a friend of Tara's, and they went to the funeral together, and Brian had just lost Anita, so they started living together. Maybe it was because Suki really loved Tara and Brian really loved Anita that it never worked out for them. She was a nice girl to him. She looked after him. They seemed happy. But I think that was the thing with Brian, losin' Anita."
SUKI POITIER: “He gave me a shoulder to cry on. He picked up the pieces and made me feel like a woman again.”
SPANISH TONY: “I picked him up with his latest girl friend, Suki Poitier, and noticed that yet again Brian had become involved with a woman who was the mirror image of himself. Women seemed compelled to look like Brian; it was as though they were worried that he was more beautiful than they. They’d all cut their hair into long fringes, like his, and they would wear Moroccan clothes borrowed from his wardrobe. Brian had once come out with some garbled theory to me about how he believed most beautiful women were narcissistic and they dug making love to him because it was as close as they could get to making love to themselves.”
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “Brian was obsessed with the thought of going to jail and his relationship with Suki was suffering. They were squabbling all the time. I was in my room one evening, cooling off after a particularly hot day, when Brian rushed in, in a panic, saying ‘Quick, quick, come to my room.’ He was really hysterical. So I went with him to his room and the whole place was a mess. Smashed mirrors, smashed glass, smashed everything, and Suki was lying on the bed, unconscious and bleeding. Brian was saying, ‘What are we gonna do about this?’ He had given her the most terrible beating for one reason or another. I said, ‘No Brian, what are you going to do about this? You phone a doctor now.’ He was completely off the wall by now, saying, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ So I had to do it. Anyway, I managed to get a doctor and ambulance while Brian was pretending he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. He then said to me, ‘You go with her to the hospital, man. I think I’ll just hang around here.’ I was furious. I grabbed him. ‘You won’t just hang around here, now get in there,’ and I pushed him head-first into the ambulance. The Moroccans are very good, no questions asked sort of thing, but Brian really didn’t want anything to do with it at all. He was totally irresponsible.”
BRION GYSIN: "A very funny thing happened at Jajouka. The setting was extremely theatrical in that we were sitting under a porch of a house made of wattles and mud. Very comfortable place, cushions were laid around like a little theatre, like the box of an old-fashioned theatre, and a performance was going on in the courtyard. And at one moment - dinner obviously had to be somewhere in the offing, like about an hour away, everybody was just beginning to think about food - and we had these acetylene lamps, giving a great very theatrical glow to the whole scene, rather like limelight used to be a greenish-white sort of tone. And the most beautiful goat that anybody had ever seen - pure white! - was suddenly led right across the scene, between Brian and Suki and Hamre and me, sitting on these cushions, kind of lying back, and the musicians out in the courtyard about ten feet away right in front of us, so quickly that for a moment hardly anybody realized at all what was happening, until Brian leapt to his feet, and he said, 'That's me!' and was pulled down and sort of subsided, and the music went on, and it went on for a few minutes like that, and moments lengthened into an hour, or two hours, or whatever time it takes to get a great Moroccan dinner together, which sometimes can be three hours or four hours or five hours-"
WILLIAM BURROUGHS: "Long as it takes to kill a goat."
BRION GYSIN: "- and we were absolutely ravenous, when Brian realized he was eating that same white goat."
STANLEY BOOTH: "How did he take that?"
BRION GYSIN: "He said, 'It's like Communion.'"
BACHIR ATTAR: “He is the one who brought beautiful things for Jajouka. We all see him as the one who opened the door of the music of Jajouka to the world. Meeting Brian Jones changed my life. He was a great musician. The greatest musician in the world I can say. Someday somebody will come to bring out this music of Jajouka to the world and to carve the memories of Brian Jones. Somebody will come. I have a feeling for that.”
GEORGE CHKIANTZ: “He beat Suki up right off. He was crazed when we returned from Jajouka. When he couldn’t make the Uher work, he freaked out, woke me out of an exhausted sleep, demanded I stagger naked down the hotel corridor to push the right buttons. A few hours later, Suki called me to come quick. Brian was wrecked, standing on the balcony and insulting Arabs on the street below. I went over to calm him down, and he just blacked out, keeled over, and smashed his head on the iron railing. He looked dead to me, and I began to panic. What do we do now? ‘Nothing,’ said Suki. ‘It happens all the time.’ She covered him with a bedspread and left him on the balcony.”
GEORGE CHKIANTZ: “I needed to get back to London, but before I left the next day, Brian and Suki took me to the famous beach at Cape Spartel. The guard told us not to swim because the current was too strong. He said, ‘If you go in today, next week we find your body ten miles down the beach at Asilah.’ We put our towels down and I took a nap. I woke up twenty minutes later to see Brian swimming a quarter mile offshore, just his head in the waves. He waved to me! Expertly fighting the current, he eventually regained the beach, his footprints coming out at the exact place they went in. It was the strongest swimming I’ve ever seen. It made me think, later on.”
LAURA JACKSON: “While in Ceylon, just before the year’s end, on a visit to an astrologer said to have worked with Adolf Hitler, Brian supposedly received a bizarre warning: ‘Be careful swimming in the coming year. Don’t go into water without a friend.’ Cotchford Farm, his brand new home, had a beautiful outdoor swimming pool.”
SHIRLEY ARNOLD: "Suki told me once that she went back to the flat and Brian was with Linda Lawrence. I mean, that was wicked for a start, to do that, that was really terrible. She said he kicked her out of the flat. She was covered in bruises. And he also kicked the dog. So, you can't understand Brian, because he loved the dog so much, and he even took it out on the dog that night. I don't think anyone understands - understood him at all. I don't think anyone could begin to understand him."
KEITH RICHARDS: “Brian, a cold-blooded, vicious motherfucker.”
IAN STEWART: “Brian was Welsh, you see, and Welsh people are very devious. They are basically dishonest. And another thing that a Welsh person’ll do: if you get in a fight with a Welsh person, they’re always laughing, right up till the moment they take a swing at you. You’ve never got any idea it’s going to come. And it’s not like you’re going to fight an English person, a Scottish person, there’s usually a row first. A Welsh person will be laughing, acting friendly, then bam! a crusher to the jaw. You never knew where you are with those people. I don’t like them at all.”
NICK KENT: “This was the essence of his pitiful nature: he’d plough through the dolly birds with a rapacious, again often malicious, zeal and then agonize fretfully about the loveless life he led, the fact that none of his countless conquests really ‘loved him.’ Suki Poitier, the girl he picked up with briefly after Pallenberg absconded from his life, another doomed blonde sixties beauty, once confided that Brian’s problem was that ‘he basically thought of himself as an utterly useless member of society.’ For though he harboured all the flaming arrogant vanity of a peacock, he possessed the sense of self-worth of a hopeless psychic cripple. Self-love and self-loathing were always in conflict, the latter getting stronger as each blurry barbiturate minute of his life ticked away.”
JIM CARTER-FEA: “Suki once told me that she was convinced that three more men who were in close proximity to her would die. After Tara, Suki had lived with Jimi Hendrix, and after his death she had taken up with Brian. She eventually left him at Cotchford Farm, a few weeks before his death. It was Anna Wohlin whom Brian had installed as Suki’s replacement.”
A.E. HOTCHNER: “Following Brian, Suki became involved with the wealthy son of a notorious Chinese gambler, whom she married and had children with. But when he told her that he planned to divorce her, she was extremely upset at the prospect of coming back to England alone with her two children. Apparently, this disturbed her so much that, while driving with her husband in her car, she drove off a cliff, killing both of them. Her prophecy had come true – Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and her Chinese husband.”
