There was the Stones concert in Hyde Park, when the pop group mourned the death of Brian Jones, one of their number. Jagger, in lipstick, rouge and eye-shadow, quoted Adonais, Shelley’s lament for Keats, and hundreds of white butterflies were released which presumably perished immediately in the exhaust fumes of London. I was there. What, again, I didn’t know until I read this book was that the Stones had already sacked Adonais, and the concert, according to Philip Norman, who knows about such things, was ‘possibly the Stones’ worst musical performance ever’. You tend not to notice such things when you are a witness to history.
But the trouble with White Heat is that it is too ambitious. When you read a chapter about politicians, followed by one on pop stars, then a third on politicians, you tend to confuse the two, given the author’s distaste for all of them. You end up like Nabokov’s Pnin, who found he could not distinguish between adverts and articles in colour magazines. But perhaps this was Sandbrook’s intention.
At 250 pages this could have been a comic classic on either species, especially when the Cabinet minister George Brown is running around. His entry in the index alone is a masterpiece:
Dances the frug; fights Eli Wallach; fights Richard Crossman; becomes Foreign Secret- ary; insults Belgian Army; insults President Sunay; leaves National Plan on back seat of a Mini; threatens to hit Wilson; tries to dance with the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.
The entries under ‘misbehaviour and drinking’ are long. A companion volume on the even more absurd pop stars, especially the Beatles and the Stones, would have been just as comic, if more ambitious.
As it is, I found this book, at 878 pages, very long. Sentences like the following, on Edward Heath and the sea, did not help:
His sailing interests were regularly mocked by both his colleagues and newspaper commentators, but in an age of one-track career politicians, they gave him an unusual sporting hinterland.
Sort of.
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