The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’m not going to heaven any time soon’
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards on why he loves literature, hates rap – and still can’t resist taking the mick out of Jagger
A warm chuckle precedes him into the room, then here he is – Keith Richards. Almost half a century since the New Musical Express named him “the world’s most elegantly wasted human being”, the Rolling Stones guitarist looks surprisingly fit at 79, in black jacket and T-shirt, his wayward grey hair tucked under a fedora. By way of greeting, he claps me on the shoulder. His hands are big for his 5ft 9in frame, all leathery skin and gnarly knuckles – “working hands,” he calls them, the fingertips hardened by a lifetime playing guitar. “I could put a blowtorch to these things and still play,” he laughs, sniffing the air as if imagining such a scene. “The smell of burning flesh!”
There is one thing everyone wants to know when you tell them you are meeting Richards: after decades of unparalleled rock’n’roll notoriety, how the hell is he still alive? “I wouldn’t recommend the way I’ve handled everything to anybody else,” he shrugs. “But I’ve handled myself the way that I felt was necessary. And I think everybody else, if they did the same thing, might benefit from Keith’s advice: don’t worry too much!”
In conversation, Richards has always been the most entertaining of the Stones – eloquent, honest and quick-witted. Seated in the library of an exclusive London hotel, he is on fine form, apparently energised by the imminent release of the band’s first album of new material in 18 years. Hackney Diamonds was largely written at speed in December last year, recorded in January in the Bahamas, New York and Los Angeles, then mixed by February. “I’ve never ever not had fun recording, but this one had real urgency and energy,” says Richards. “We blitzkrieged that thing.”
I have interviewed Richards numerous times over the decades, most memorably in Los Angeles in 1992, when he practically kidnapped me for two days during a video shoot for his solo album Main Offender. “The three-legged dog!” he says, eyes lighting up at the memory of a mangy hound that strayed into shot while the cameras were rolling and threatened to steal the show. I tell Richards that my own abiding image from that trip is of the two of us being driven around the city at night in a limousine stocked, according to his whim, with champagne, vodka and bananas. Motown played on the radio while Richards toyed with a huge flick knife, spinning it deftly between his fingers.
“The ratchet!” he cries. “That’s what the Jamaicans call it. It was a new one. I was breaking it in. I’ve still got it.” Can he still handle it with such dexterity? “If I have to. These days, I mostly use it for sharpening pencils.” Today, the knife has been replaced by a bandana, which Richards twists and turns between his fingers as he speaks.
His drinking habits have also changed. Back then, I’m not sure I ever saw him sober; his preferred tipple was a vile concoction of vodka and orange soda. “Oh, the Nuclear Waste,” he nods, fondly. “I’ve given that up.” I remember him consuming it in industrial quantities. “Enough,” he corrects me. “Always just enough.”
Yet, despite personifying rock’n’roll extravagance – the full bingo card of hard drugs, car wrecks, house fires and run-ins with the law – Richards would somehow always emerge unscathed. In more recent decades, he has embraced clean living, up to a point. “The cigarettes I gave up in 2019,” he says. “I haven’t touched them since. I gave up heroin in 1978. I gave up cocaine in 2006. I still like a drink occasionally – because I’m not going to heaven any time soon – but apart from that, I’m trying to enjoy being straight. It’s a unique experience for me.”
Rather than sustaining damage during his decades of hard living, Richards seems oddly fortified by them. “I’m blessed, maybe, that physically this thing just keeps going,” he chuckles. “This thing” being the body on which he has inflicted so much punishment. “So far, I have no real problem with getting old. There are some horrific things that you can see in the future, but you’ve got to get there. I’m getting along with the idea of being 80, and still walking, still talking. I find [ageing] a fascinating process. But then if you didn’t, you might as well commit suicide.”
Although he oozes warmth, Richards’s natural affability has its limits. He talks about music with real joy but is on guard against questions that pry too far into his private life; his smile fades when I ask about a typical day in his life, starting with what he has for breakfast. “Who wants to know that?” he snarls. When I attempt to explain that the question had been suggested by my editor, he grumbles under his breath then fires me an intimidating stare that makes it instantly clear this particular line of enquiry is closed.
Richards’s domestic arrangements are fairly prosaic for a rock star with an estimated worth of at least £400million. He still owns Redlands, the 15th-century West Sussex estate he bought in 1966, where he and Mick Jagger were arrested during a notorious drug bust the following year. (Richards was initially sentenced to a year in prison for “allowing cannabis to be smoked on the property”, a verdict that caused public outrage and was overturned on appeal). He also has a home on the private Parrot Cay Island in Turks and Caicos, but spends most of his time at Weston, Connecticut, in a mansion set on eight acres.
For the past 39 years, he has been married to former model Patti Hansen; their two daughters, Theodora (38) and Alexandra (37) both now work as models and DJs. He also has two children from a previous 13-year relationship with the late model and actress Anita Pallenberg: Marlon (54), who has been a gallery curator and photographer, and Dandelion Angela (51) who runs a horse-riding school near Chichester. There are numerous grandchildren in the mix, and Richards seems to be on good terms with everybody. “I love my families. I have several – extended,” he says. “And they all love each other.”
The last time we spoke, in 2018, Richards was already in the thick of the Rolling Stones’s No Filter tour of Europe and North America; when I asked what it would take to bring the band’s long run to an end, his answer was unequivocal: “Somebody keeling over.” In 2021, it came to pass – with the death of stalwart drummer Charlie Watts – yet the three surviving Stones have kept on rolling. It helped that Watts had already anointed a successor, Steve Jordan, who drums on the new album. “It’s like he came with Charlie’s blessing,” explains Richards, who says he thinks about Watts often. “Charlie’s so much a part of me, and we’ve been so much a part of the same thing, that although he’s passed, I still talk to him every time I’ve got a question. I’m like: ‘Now what would Charlie say?’ And I wait for the reply. Just because you’ve croaked don’t mean you’re over.”
As if to prove it, Watts even makes a posthumous appearance on the new album, playing on two tracks recorded over a 10-year period during which the Stones kept threatening – but never quite delivered – a new set of original songs. Bassist Bill Wyman – who quit the band in 1993 – pops up alongside Watts on the rambunctious Live By the Sword, briefly reuniting the Stones’s original rhythm section. “There’s a bunch of incredible stuff in the can,” says Richards. “There’s always [unreleased recordings] left over, whether we make anything of them or not, who knows? I’m just happy to have this record out. I kept waiting for the wheels to fall off. But here it is.”
‘I still talk to Charlie Watts. Just because you’ve croaked don’t mean you’re over’
The heart of the Rolling Stones has always been the songwriting duo of Richards and Jagger. They attended the same primary-school class in Dartford, Kent, in the 1950s, then reconnected as music-mad teenagers on a railway platform in 1961, when Richards spotted Jagger carrying a Muddy Waters album. In a letter written at the time, 18-year-old Richards hails Jagger as “the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe.”
Richards chuckles at the memory. “I spotted his talent pretty early on,” he says, “and I’ve been nurturing it ever since. He’s grown into the best frontman any band could ever hope for.”
The new album features an acoustic cover of Muddy Waters’s Rollin’ Stone – the 1950 recording from which the band took their name – with Richards on guitar and Jagger on harmonica. “Mick’s playing is above and beyond,” says Richards. “But he doesn’t think he’s so great – which is funny, cause he thinks he’s great at everything else.”
This jovial, blink-and-you’d-miss-it jab at Jagger’s ego is a gentle reminder that the duo haven’t always got along. There was a particularly unpleasant
schism following the publication of Richards’s 2010 autobiography Life, which included disparaging remarks about Jagger’s “swollen head” and “inflated ego” and revealed that the rest of the band would refer to the lead singer as Her Majesty. Richards was said to be furious that Jagger accepted a knighthood in 2003, dismissing it as “a shoddy award” and adding “I wouldn’t let that family near me with a sharp stick, let alone a sword.” But it was his snidely juvenile comments about Jagger’s private parts that really upset the singer and, for a while, it seemed touch-and-go whether the Stones would ever play together again.
Richards privately apologised, then later remarked “I’d say anything to get the band together, you know. I’d lie to my mother.” By 2012, the Rolling Stones were back on tour, the rift apparently healed.
“The thing with Mick and me is that people only hear about the squabbles, and they forget there’s like 15 years between one squabble and another,” says Richards now. “We’re sewn together at the hip. And now and again, you know, we try to break the stitches. But we love each other.”
Richards doesn’t hesitate to give Jagger full credit for the existence of the new album. “Sitting around during Covid, doing nothing, Mick stocked up a lot of lyrics and ideas,” Richards explains. “He said: ‘Let’s make a record, find a deadline, take it from A to B’. Which is very un-Stones like. I was a little sceptical, but I said, OK, if you think you have enough stuff, I’m with you all the way.”
Whatever its blips, the Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership is among the most productive and enduring in pop history. Like Lennon and McCartney, the two men write both words and music, separately coming up with material, then
shaping it together. Richards was the driving force behind many of the Stones’s most celebrated rockers (Satisfaction, Gimme Shelter, Jumpin’ Jack Flash) but also some of their tenderest ballads, including Ruby Tuesday, Wild Horses and Angie. However, on Hackney Diamonds, he says, “I had very little input in the lyrics, but a lot of input in how the tracks were shaped, building riffs around what Mick had. I was interested in capturing his enthusiasm. The urgency and speed with which we did this amazed me. Bam! There’s a good take, next!”
Richards’s contribution is typically unshowy. His instincts have always veered away from the screaming lead solo towards something more indefinable and economical: squeezing every possible nuance out of his instrument. When I ask how his guitar playing has changed over the years, he laughs. “Very little! It creeps along. I feel like part of the rhythm section… I just do what feels right at the time, and what fits with what everybody else is playing. It’s an endless task. But, you know, I got the riffs!”
Among the superstar guests on Hackney Diamonds are Lady Gaga, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and, most eye-catching of all, Paul McCartney, uniting the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on record – and symbolically ending the greatest rivalry in pop history – with a fuzzed-up bass solo on snappy rocker Bite My Head Off. “Paul happened to be in town,” says Richards. “And we couldn’t keep him away, bless his heart. And hey, if you can get one of the Beatles on your track, you know, you do it.” Besides, he adds, “Paul’s a very amiable cat to play with; we’ve been great friends forever.”
The Beatles versus Stones rivalry was, arguably, always more about the fans than the bands themselves; a question of whether you identified with the former’s melodious songcraft or the latter’s rock’n’roll rebelliousness – a distinction that, says Richards, doesn’t really bear scrutiny. “I don’t think John Lennon would have had much problem fitting into the Stones, or George, if you can imagine that sort of thing happening. We were the same generation, and we all loved the same music. When we first heard the Beatles, we were relieved that there was some other band in England on the same track that we were on. And within a few months, that track was the main track.”
‘Mick and I are sewn together at the hip – but now and again we try to break the stitches’
Since Ronnie Wood joined the Stones in 1976, he has been Richards’s closest musical ally, the two seamlessly weaving a web of notes around one another. “Guitar players, we stick together,” smiles Richards. An upbeat, happy-go-lucky character, Wood has emerged from his own struggles with alcoholism and addiction as a renewed force in the revitalised Stones. In 2012, he got married for the third time, to Sally Humphreys, a theatre producer 31 years his junior, whom Richards identifies as “a perfect foil for Ronnie [who] has probably helped him immensely to stay alive. But then I can say the same about my old lady, and old ladies everywhere. We’re lucky: we’re blessed with beautiful women who put up with us.”
This December, Richards will celebrate both his 80th birthday and his and Hansen’s 40th wedding anniversary. “I got married halfway through,” he laughs. “She thinks she’s taking me to Africa for my birthday, but I’m looking at it as taking my wife to Africa for the anniversary. And the whole family. Either way, we’re going to safari the damn thing through.”
It may appear that Richards has mellowed with
age, but he was never really quite the dissolute rogue that his reputation suggested. “The image is a ball and chain,” he told me all those years ago, during our long weekend in LA. “There’s nobody like Keith Richards that would ever be alive. No way. He’s a one-dimensional thing. But you can’t buck the image.”
The real Richards has always been a big reader, fascinated by history. He’s currently immersed in Stradivarius: Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius by Toby Faber, which he describes as “an incredible story of musical instruments, how they’re made and what people make of them.
“I’ve always got a book on the go,” he adds. “It keeps me sane. And, you know, its possibly somewhere I hide. I’m not cut out to be a pop star, and I have to deal with it, but it is a pain in the ass sometimes, quite honestly. And so, now and again during the day, I just retreat into books.”
Perhaps less surprisingly, he also listens to a lot of music – blues, jazz and classical – but you won’t find him tuning into the pop charts. “I don’t want to start complaining about pop music,” he says, before caving into the temptation to do just that. “It’s always been rubbish. I mean, that’s the point of it. They make it as cheap and as easy as possible and therefore it always sounds the same; there’s very little feel in it. I like to hear music by people playing instruments. That is, I don’t like to hear plastic synthesised Muzak, as it used to be known, what you hear in elevators, which is now the par for the course.”
As for rap, don’t get him started: “I don’t really like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it’s music, AKA rap. I can get enough of that without leaving my house.”
While not wishing to sound “like a grumpy old man” railing against progress, Richards admits that he’s not particularly impressed by the rise of “political correctness” either. Although it’s not something even old rockers can afford to ignore; in 2021, the Stones announced that they would no longer play their 1971 single Brown Sugar, after it was criticised online for its glib take on slavery and rape.
“We’re all trapped in that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s music or not,” snarls Richards, suddenly unsmiling. “I mean, there’s some things you can’t do any more, because people are frightened. They’re frightened of saying the wrong thing. They’re frightened of upsetting anybody. Fear will do amazing things to people.” He gestures at the mobile phone on which I am recording our interview. “That’s the drug. You’re all stuck with it”. For the record, Richards says he doesn’t own a mobile phone – there’s a sense that the soon-to-be-octogenarian doesn’t consider it something on which any of us really has the time to waste. “It’s a strange old world that we’re left with,” he says, “until it washes away and we drown in our own crap.”
Yet, before this inevitable apocalypse, there’s the album release to look forward to and, beyond that, a yet-to-be-announced tour (“I’m dying to get my teeth into some of these songs on stage, God willing and the creek don’t dry”), the thought of which brings a smile back to Richards’s face.
“Musicians are a weird bunch, but if you’re playing with the right people, a life of a musician can be pretty good,” he concludes. “It’s a fascinating trip… and it ain’t over yet.”
With that, he gets up to make his farewells, telling me he’ll see me down the road and pulling me close for one last piece of advice. “Tell your editor, Keith says to f--- off,” he growls. Then, with another laugh, he’s gone.
‘I don’t like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it’s music, AKA rap’