Unlikely lessons from wheezy Keef on growing old gratefully

It can be an unnerving experience, tuning into Radio 4’s Desert Island

Discs to hear your idol pick his or her eight favourite records, punctuated with a little light quizzing from Kirsty Young.

Sublime talent doesn’t necessarily mean great niceness, and on several occasions my hero-worship has been badly dented by an incautious 45 minutes of Sunday morning listening.

So there was some dithering over the off button at 11.15 yesterday, as the strains of the Archers theme tune died away and the Desert Island seagulls squawked a welcome to the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Keith Richards. His 2009 memoir,

Life, was great stuff – sharply self-aware, fiercely funny and full of intricate, fascinating detail on the technicalities of musicianship. But, lately, there has been a certain tetchiness about the

obiter dicta of some of the racier icons of my youth: Chrissie Hynde tutting about provocative clothes inviting rape; Grace Jones moaning that Madonna and Miley Cyrus had made fortunes by imitating her style.

According to one teaser ahead of the Desert Island

Discs broadcast, Kirsty had actually elicited from the great man a major recantation on the subject of drugs and their role in the creative process. It’s a lie that drugs help you to make great music, he had apparently admitted. Crikey! What if the Prince of Darkness had gone all Victor Meldrew?

In the end, of course, I simply couldn’t resist. I left the radio on, and there he was: Keef, wheezing like a basketful of kittens. He has the most expressive wheeze of anyone I’ve ever heard, including Joe Grundy and his Farmer’s Lung (that virtuosic instrument of expectoration).

Had he ever thought of stopping smoking, inquired Nurse Young. Hur hur hur. Yes, sometimes Patti Hansen [his wife of 30 years] suggested he cut down, wheezed Keith, aimiably.

His promised recanting over drugs and creativity proved to be a misquotation. What he actually said was (characteristically) more nuanced: “I should say that there is no correlation between drugs and music and how you perform it. But this is a lie. Some people can handle things and some can’t. If the drugs become more important than the music, you’ve lost the battle.”

As Kirsty reminded us, Keith has had an intense series of flirtations with the Grim Reaper; luck and a remarkable constitution helped him survive while scores of others just as talented, but more fragile or less fortunate – succumbed. But how good he seems at being old(ish).

Hearteningly uxorious (asked how Patti dealt with groupies he replied with some pride that she would simply blast them out of the room); stoical about the physical indignities of ageing (“boxers have better hands than me”); image-conscious, but not vain (quizzed as to how he’d feel if he had to go onstage without his rock god accessories, he said, “I’d feel a bit undressed, but I’d just do what I do – get my guitar and sling the hash”).

He seems enviably at ease with himself. “I do love old Keith,” he wheezed. “But I’m evolving.”

Keith is surely the last person on earth to write a self-help book, but he does seem to have the formula for the final stages of life down in some style: love, work, family, a dash of swagger, a twist of self-mockery.

Class A drugs strictly optional.