Pageia Obscura: A Degree of Murder...

Sometimes referred to as "The Lost Brian Jones Album", the soundtrack to the film "A Degree of Murder", is one of the great unknown pieces of rock and roll history floating in the haze. For our purposes, it is important to know that this now forgotten film and soundtrack featured the expert guitar work of a young studio ace named Jimmy Page. "A Degree of Murder" was a West German film released in 1967 and starring Anita Pallenberg, Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones' girlfriend, and later long-term partner to fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards. Of course, dating a Rolling Stone has it's priveleges, and Pallenberg was able to convince Brian Jones to write, perform, and record the soundtrack to her new film.

The plot of the film follows the story of a woman who shoots her ex boyfriend with his own gun, after he attempts to beat her. Instead of reporting this to the police she hires two men to help her dump the body in a construction site near an autobahn. While doing this she becomes romantically involved with both men. The film was modestly successful, and was selected as the representative film for Germany in the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.

Anita Pallenberg & Brian Jones

Volker Schlondorff, the director of the film described in an interview Brian's approach to the project, and how intimately he was involved in it:

"I liked Brian and trusted him. You could feel that he had a lot of creativity. He was very much in touch with his time and he was also very much in love with Anita, the only actress in the movie - and its soul. She was bound to inspire him, if he was to write the music for her. And it wasn't just that his music was special, it was that the score was so spontaneous, vital. Only Brian could've done it. He had a tremendous feeling for the lyrical parts and knew perfectly the recording and mixing techniques required to achieve the best sound for drums, his guitar or flute etcetera."

"When the editing was done, Brian came back to Munich and sat in the editing room with me as we discussed, just as with any other professional movie composer, where to put music and what kind of music. It was just the true story of a girl who accidentally kills her boyfriend with his own gun, but instead of going to the police she hires two men for a few hundred marks to drive the corpse to the country where they bury him in the construction site of an autobahn. No moral implications, no guilt trips. It's more like an outing on a beautiful autumn day. Brian's score then was to provide a reflection of those rather callous feelings, while somehow managing to hint that of course she was mourning her boyfriend's death."

Volker Schlondorff

The soundtrack was recorded at IBC Studios between late 1966 and early 1967 with all music composed, arranged and produced by Brian Jones. Glyn Johns served as the engineer for the sessions, who as you know would go on to assist Led Zeppelin in recording their first album. Jones couldn't play the entire soundtrack himself, and thus enlisted the aide of some of London's top studio musicians including , Nicky Hopkins (piano), and Peter Gosling (background vocals) and none other than Jimmy Page on guitar. Brian Jones would in a press release in 1967 would describe his selection of studio musicians: "ranging from one musician to ten. I ran the gamut of line-ups - from the conventional brass combination to a country-band with Jew's harp, violin and banjo. In the main the musicians were established session men - though some of the boys from the group also played." 

The soundtrack and the film didn't exactly set the world on fire, but it does stand out as one of the first film soundtracks to be written, arranged and performed by a Rock and Roll musician. It's also notable for being the only musical effort released by Jones apart from The Rolling Stones. Like so many other events in the history of popular music, our own Jimmy Page was their to witness and contribute.