The insane plot to murder Joss Stone foiled by locals in Devon
Even if you’re as blandly inoffensive a musician as Joss Stone, no one who works as a performer in the music industry will ever have a normal life, not ever. It’s just not the kind of life that lends itself to normality, especially if you’re lucky enough (and that’s lucky in some heavy inverted commas) to become a working musician.
Your entire life becomes a treadmill where you’re chained to the studio for six months, then for the next 18 months you’re chained to the road. A life that sounds glamorous on the surface, but then you realise that a working musician is much more likely to have an encyclopedic knowledge of truck stop sandwich brands than any precious memories of Milan or Tokyo. Yeah, hate to break it to you, but touring is essentially an 18-hour commute, followed by two hours of soundcheck, two hours of waiting, then the show.
This is tough enough for anyone involved with it. However, if you’re the hired keyboard player, for example, you can at least hide from the majority of people and just do your job. If you’re the headline act who wrote all the songs and attracted all the fans, you can’t hide from shit. No matter how much you might want to, and if you spend a moment talking to any artist on that level, they will all want to, no matter how much they might say otherwise to save face.
That’s the uncomfortable truth that we fans have to face. Not only are our heroes disgusted by us, but they should also be. Thus, I didn’t just mention Joss Stone simply because she was a successful singer, famous for making inoffensive music; I mention her because she, of all people, has good reason to regard anyone she doesn’t know personally with suspicious and dread, as a truly terrifying arrest from 2011 shows.
One that proves that no matter how innocent you may seem, being in the public eye is never truly safe.
Who tried to murder Joss Stone?!
In the early hours of June 13th, 2011, Kevin Liverpool and Junior Bradshaw went on a road trip. The natives of Longsight, Manchester, got in their Fiat Punto and made the four-hour drive to East Devon.
Even though the two men got into a car accident on the way down, nothing would stop them from making the trip down to the south coast. Once they arrived, they began asking the locals a simple question. “Where does Joss Stone live?” If that sounds like a bad plan, it’s because it was.
Criminal masterminds, these were not. Not only did they get in an accident on the way down to Devon, but they also got lost on the way there, and made no attempt to hide their stash of weapons from anyone they were asking about the whereabouts of the pop singer. Needless to say, folks were suspicious of these two young men with a set of knives, hammers and even a katana in their back seat, asking about where one of Britain’s most famous pop singers lived, and the cops were called before they got to her house. Which, distressingly enough, she was in at the time.
As if the whole story wasn’t farcical enough, the two had written out their entire plan on notes that were on the dashboard of their car when the cops pulled them over. With steps including, and this is a quote, “Once Jocelyn’s dead, find a river to dump her”. The motive? The duo had seen Stone attending the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and assumed she’d have one million pounds in a safe they could rob from her, then kill her and escape.
Needless to say, the duo were caught, Joss Stone was never in any danger, and the two were sentenced a year afterwards. Liverpool to life in prison, Bradshaw to a psychiatric facility. That all came from a musician attending a wedding. Now, can you understand why your favourite artists can sometimes seem a little paranoid?!