Whole lotta love

Just what is the strange fixation that rock fans have with their idols' last resting places? In a bid to discover the truth, John Harris set off on the ultimate UK rock-grave odyssey.

Friday March 9, 2007
The Guardian

'Sleep safe, daddy of them all, too young did you fall," reads one note. "Lewis Brian, I'm back and ready to fight for your truth - always yours, Gerry," says another. Next to them are an array of tastefully funereal objects - candle-holders, bunches of flowers - as well as an empty Stella Artois bottle, a couple of cigarette lighters, and a sodden copy of a Japanese rock magazine whose cover features the Rolling Stones circa 1965. The picture is dominated, as Stones pictures still occasionally were back then, by Brian Jones, staring out from under his Dulux-dog fringe.

Jones exited the band he founded in 1969, and the material world not long after. He drowned in the swimming pool of Cotchford Farm, the Sussex pile once owned by AA Milne. Back in his hometown of Cheltenham, because his death was considered a possible suicide, the Church of England declined to find room for him, so he was buried at the municipal cemetery, in a hole said to be 12 feet deep, lest anyone tried to dig him up. In 1997, an empty plot to Jones's right was bought by an ardent fan from Brighton, who paid £450 for the privilege of having his earthly remains buried next to his hero.

That's what David Reynolds tells me, anyway. Reynolds is 63, a semi-retired chauffeur, and founder of the BJFCC, aka the Brian Jones Fan Club (Cheltenham). Thanks largely to Reynolds's efforts, there is a blue plaque on the first house Jones lived in, and a bronze bust of his head in the nearby Beechwood shopping centre. Cheltenham's main Jones magnet, however, is his grave, an attraction for visitors who come in their largest numbers in February and July, to commemorate, respectively, his birth and death.

Cheltenham comes midway through an intermittent rock-grave odyssey spread out over six weeks. It begins with a visit to a council crematorium in Macclesfield, Cheshire, where I spend half an hour or so at the tiny marker - to all intents and purposes, a piece of kerbstone, inscribed with the legend "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - that denotes the passing of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Given that Curtis hanged himself, one could be forgiven for thinking some of the trinkets left here a little inappropriate, not least a deflated Mr Smiley balloon, and a bright orange head-on-stick novelty that defies description. More respectfully, there's also a Tupperware box that contains greetings cards and notes left here to mark what would have been his 50th birthday, on July 15, 2006. "RIP ... Love will tear us apart again," reads a typical example. "You touched us all. But we could only touch from a distance."

A tangle of stuff seems to lie behind these mawkish tributes: from a charitable perspective, a simple devotion to the music, though that element is often overshadowed by slightly warped factors - chiefly, a darkly romantic fixation with dying young. If the central delusion of fandom is the idea that one's idol is close to a different order of being, the tributes left at graves are that idea in excelsis. No matter that many of the stones denote people who exhibited the usual rock-star pathologies: violence, alcoholism, arrogance, misanthropy. In death, all becomes perfection, plectrums and flowers.

That said, the fact that the graves are in Britain means that for all the macabre romance, death remains the great leveller. At the height of his pomp, Jones's life was built around trips to Morocco and musk-scented Chelsea decadence - now, he lies next to the grave of one Albert Twigg. The myth of Led Zeppelin might be partly focused on their crystallisation of the Californian rock dream, but the ashes of their one fallen member were deposited just off the A442, near Droitwich. There is also a very British reluctance to make much of the graves. When I visit the resting place of Nick Drake, in the chocolate-box Warwickshire village of Tanworth in Arden, I can buy upmarket greetings cards, olive oil and cans of Coke, but not a single item of Drake merchandise. They would, you suspect, do it differently in America.

A week after the Cheltenham experience, I make my way to Rushock, the tiny Worcestershire hamlet that was the home of John Bonham, the Led Zep drummer who took his last breath on September 24, 1980. His gravestone is in the grounds of St Michael's church, a compact C of E establishment that hosts one service a month. A few fields away is the Old Hyde Farm, where Bonham raised a family and affected an interest in agriculture. It's not far from Cutnall Green, and a pub called the Chequers - where his last day is said to have begun with four quadruple vodka and oranges and two ham rolls.

Inside the church, there is a visitors' book, stuffed with evidence of Bonham's enduring following. A dozen or so tributes are accompanied by renderings of the three intersecting circles that, thanks to the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, represent Bonham's runic "symbol". Just about every page contains the gnomic passages that denote rock's international reach. "Bonzo, thank you for the best DRUM play around, and every time in world. We are from Vienna, Austria," says one. One Japanese visitor has humbly offered to "come back here after I study you". Someone called Reid chose to go meteorological: "Bonzo, when it thunders, I know it's you playing. So let's have more thunder."

My guides are three local churchgoers: Laurence McCurrich, his wife Diana, and Vicki Jennings, a church warden whose farmer husband, John, once did Bonham's combine harvesting for him. She remembers how the locals knew when he was at home: "On a nice, balmy summer's night, you could hear him practising his drums. It was like ... the sound of Africa." But her most powerful memories are of his funeral: flowers that covered every blade of grass, a motorbike fashioned from carnations, wreathes from Wings and Black Sabbath, and jostling TV crews.

The grave itself is around a metre tall, and inscribed with the legend, "He will always be remembered in our hearts - goodnight my love, God bless." (A few days before my visit, on an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen, the Guardian's photographer is spooked by the appearance of an unaccompanied black dog, which urinates on the gravestone and then disappears.) It's festooned with paraphernalia, including 80 drumsticks, a copy of Led Zeppelin II and, strangest of all, an all-areas pass for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' By the Way tour. Such knick-knacks, my hosts tell me, are placed here on what seems to be a weekly basis - with notice served of the latest visitor's arrival by the rumble of a taxi engine. "One little Japanese girl came all the way from London, in a black cab," marvels Jennings. "But she was thrilled to be here. What people usually comment on is how quiet it is."

A couple of weeks later, I am in London, attempting to make the most of surprisingly limited rock grave opportunities. I toy with the idea of going to Kensal Green, but though Joe Strummer and Freddie Mercury were cremated there, their ashes were scattered elsewhere. There is not much doing at the cemeteries of West Norwood, Highgate or Brompton. At the vast west London necropolis of Putney Vale, I have a look at the grave of Sandy Denny, the sometime singer with Fairport Convention, who died, aged 31, of a brain haemorrhage. Beholding her rather sad, solitary marker and listening to the distant whoosh of traffic, I'm moved - but this does not quite seem an iconic enough note on which to finish.

So I take the tube to Golders Green crematorium, and its gardens of remembrance - a world away from the capital's Dickensian cemeteries - so liberally sprinkled with ashes of the famous that they seem almost Hollywood-esque. Within its grand buildings are urns containing what's left of Sigmund Freud, Bram Stoker, HG Wells and Anna Pavlova; outside are rose bushes and plaques commemorating the likes of Peter Sellers, Yootha Joyce from the 1970s sitcom George and Mildred, and Carry On's Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw. I'm here, however, to pay my respects to Keith Moon and Marc Bolan, in the company of 59-year-old Eric Willis, the crematorium's head of maintenance.

He escorts me to the sites dedicated to Bolan: two plaques in the West Memorial Court, one of which was erected in 2002 by his fan club ("25 years on, his light of love still shines brightly"), and a rose bush in the West Statue Beds, marked by a small plastic sign. He tells me about the annual pilgrimage here on September 16, when fans come to mark Bolan's death, bearing "flowers, poems and letters" - and, in tribute to the 1970 hit Ride a White Swan, the kind of bird-shaped vases that line the walls of the nearby tea rooms. He shows me a picture of a Welsh woman called Pauline, who turns up every year. In keeping with the fact that rock-related graveside rituals seem to have little time for funereal etiquette, she is wearing a yellow feather boa and pink flares.

In 1978, a small part of the garden's massive lawn - labeled 3P, though it's not that clear exactly where it is - was scattered with Moon's ashes. His disciples come from all over the world, many of them convinced silent contemplation is no way to remember a man famed not only for his talent, but for being both surreally anarchic and titanically irritating.

"I suppose they think he was eccentric," says Willis, rather wearily. "Some do the windmill guitar thing; other people will stand there, and then do a silly jump. The thing is, you're standing on people's ashes, aren't you? So we'll politely ask them to leave the lawn and go back to the path." To finish, he asks me to climb aboard a golf cart, on which he transports us to a summerhouse at the gardens' southern tip, where there is quite the most humble rock monument I have ever seen: a small wooden plaque dedicated to the Free guitarist Paul Kossoff, who died of drug-related heart failure in March 1976. It features simply his name, dates, and the words "All Right Now".

Back in Cheltenham, I end the morning at the home of David Reynolds and his wife Marian, in a living room whose walls are festooned with a quixotic selection of autographed photos of the famous - Victoria Wood, Tom Conti, Matt Damon - along with a couple of photos of Brian Jones. Reynolds says Jones's parents are alive, and aware of his work. "I know that through the director of the crematorium," he says. "He's our sort of contact source. I think they know we're here for the right reasons. We're about positive things."

Towards the end of our conversation, we chew over one of the more remarkable aspects of the Reynolds' activities: selling tiles from the pool in which he drowned. Of 320 tiles, they've managed to find buyers for more than 200; the going rate is £130 each, plus post and packing.

Marian goes upstairs to fetch an example: a standard-issue aquamarine square. It could have come from behind someone's cooker, though they assure me that purchasers of the tiles receive documentary proof of its authenticity. "They're all numbered when they go out," says David. "I write on the back, in indelible ink. And they come with a certificate."

Doesn't he think it's a bit macabre?

"Oh, I see past that," he says. "And anyway, these are from above the water line. Maybe if they'd been from the bottom of the pool - which I'd have dearly liked to have got hold of ..."

"But there weren't any, poppet," says his wife. "It was just concrete."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2007-03-09 05:37 by Seajade.