Life: Keith Richards

"Right. This was recommended to me by my old mate, the top drummer Simon Lea. Simon has played with lots of big names, people like Dionne Warwick, Nicole Scherzinger, and… Ronnie Wood. I think it might have been playing with Ronnie that led him to Keith’s book. I’m not a particular Stones fan, but this is great stuff. It’s a big book, a great book. And once again, there are a lot of drugs. Fortunately, Keith managed to get off the smack in the end. It’s an extraordinary story. As was the case with The Beatles, the Stones came from very ordinary backgrounds, and suddenly they’re the coolest people around and everyone wants to know them. They’re suddenly hanging out with the cream of Bohemian aristocratic society and taking it all in their stride. And they managed not to lose themselves; to maintain who they are. I find that extraordinary and impressive. I say that because, in my experience with the label, it was a very common thing to see someone go on Top of the Pops for the first time and come back thinking they were really important. Did I ever tell you about the guy who sulked with me for months because I wouldn’t ok a taxi from Elstree to Edinburgh? He thought he was way too important for public transport! Apparently, Brian Jones went down that kind of road too. Two TV shows and he became insufferable. But Keith is a person you want to spend time with. He’s not like any person I’ve ever met. There’s the junkie side to him, but there’s a fearlessness—like from another century, he’s like a sort of brigand. The world doesn’t seem able to touch him, he just glides down the sides. His life is extraordinary. And he is really into the music. He came across a five-string guitar technique—tuning a bottom A, then GDGBD—all the Stones stuff is played that way. And he was very open. He said something really interesting about reggae music—that you can explain a lot of it by the fact that you’ve only got two types of American radio in Jamaica: country music and New Orleans . He said reggae is an exact fusion of country melodies with a New Orleans groove. The guy really knows what he’s doing. It’s a bizarre story. There are a lot of casualties, a lot of people die. But he really is a pirate. How the hell is he alive? He once stayed up for nine days. Nine days. How? In another story, which I thought was hilarious, he was working in a studio in France. Famously he hardly ever sleeps. Eventually, after a few days, he fell asleep under the mixing desk, and woke up the next day—or probably the next day, he doesn’t know—to see from his vantage point under the mixing desk, lots of legs in the control room. These legs, it turned out, belonged to the Parisian police brass band who were making a charity record. So, Keith is asleep under the mixing desk with a syringe and heroin paraphernalia. I mean, what do you do? Well, he just wrapped it all up, crawled out and said ‘excuse me gents’ and walked through them and out of the door. There are a lot of laugh out loud incidents here. But there’s terrible tragedy too. He lost a child. It’s quite dark. It’s not redemptive in the way Walter’s story is, but he did at least get off the dope. I think maybe you listen more sympathetically when you know what’s going on. But a good song is a good song and a crap song is a crap song, regardless of who wrote it. If John Lennon’s mother hadn’t been killed, would that change the quality of his music? It might have changed what he wrote, I suppose, but I don’t know. You might say something about the immediacy of a singer’s voice: it can communicate all kinds of things about their past. However, some people sound sincere even when they aren’t. In fact, that’s the mark of a great singer. The late philosopher Roger Scruton loved REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’. As you know, Michael Stipe has a superb voice that always sounds sincere. Everything he sings sounds important and meaningful. Roger really didn’t like pop music, but he loved ‘Losing My Religion’. He mentioned it to me when we were having lunch just over the road there at Quod. I asked: “Do you know what that song’s about Roger?” I could guess he thought it was about a man who’d lost his passion; his meaning in life. But that isn’t what it’s about. Losing my religion is just Texas slang for ‘losing my temper’. The song is about having a fight at a party. Not anything important. That changes the conception. So, I don’t know. As I said, my guiding principle in selecting these books was that they had to be interesting, even if you don’t like the music."