I mean, I'm not going to put it on one guy or the other. We've been doing the Stones for a long time, and everybody wanted to spread their wings a bit, I guess. Except Mick wanted to do it before I did. I want to go back to that period in your life because, as you mentioned, the Stones were off. But it was a fascinating and pivotal period for many reasons: You'd recently gone off heroin, you'd reunited with your father, you became a family man with Patti, you were on the outs with Mick.
How do you look back on that time now, 30 years later? It was just a matter of energy, I suppose. Hey, I got kids and a new band. Why not have a new band? There was this feeling of rejuvenation. I felt it a few times in Jamaica later on, working with other guys.
You feel a sort of roll of energy going amongst guys that you can't quite put your finger on, but I'm glad I'm here and I want to take part in this. What has your day-to-day been like this year? How are you spending your time at home? Well, I take the mask off. It's all a bit strange this year. No matter who you are. And I'm just doing my best and writing some songs, because I do that anyway.
That sort of happens without even trying. Not that they're any good, but, you know, it's what you do. Still working on the Stones album, which was halfway in the works before shit hit the fan. I was trying to progress a few things along, but there's not a lot one can really do except wait for the vaccine. Has the pandemic changed the process of how you and Mick write songs? Do you send ideas or lines back and forth, or full songs? What's that process like? I listen to other people.
Most songs are written by being observant and just hearing what somebody else says. And it might be taken totally out of context as a certain phrase. I didn't hear that word a lot. You become susceptible to the way people react to each other.
The tough thing about being a songwriter is, once you start, you can't stop, even if they're lousy songs. Do you still get song ideas in your dreams? How I wish. That was the most superb, lucky song ever. No, I've never quite dreamt up another one in the middle of the night. But that was very early days for me writing, and just the idea that that could actually happen was incredible. I'm still waiting for the next dream, you know. Many people have been comparing the year to , and the Stones were very much at the center of culturally.
I was so embroiled in recording, writing songs. I guess I picked up on a bit. I was also, unfortunately, going into my blue period, which took me 10 years to get out of. Also, I was with Anita Pallenberg; it was our first year together.
Really, when it comes to it, I was just overworked and overloved. I just miss it because it's almost like a physical need. While performing 'The Last Time' he was almost fatally electrocuted after hitting his mic stand with the neck of his guitar. Apart from burned guitar strings and a bit of unconsciousness he was fine.
He blamed the fire on a mouse chewing through wiring not from a cigarette like the last time. He sadly lost his Redlands Estate home after a horrible house fire in ' In he broke three ribs after being hit by books when he stood on a chair to reach a book and slipped. In in Altamont a member of the audience was killed during The Rolling Stones set.
It turned into a violent show and Mick Jagger got punched in the head. Them's fighting words, and they're what we've come to expect from the old road warrior who's always been the heart and soul and guts of "The Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band in the World". But exactly what shape is Keith Richards in, after a lifetime of drug abuse and gnarled guitar riffs? More to the point, how come he's alive at all, when sturdier men have been felled in their prime by the extracurricular activities for which he is notorious?
And, by the way, wouldn't he in fact be a lot cooler if he were, you know - dead? The Rolling Stones have always been polarised between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: Jagger the greedy, social-climbing "face" of the Stones, the rubber-lipped Narcissus you love to loathe; Richards the skeletal spirit of rock'n'roll on leather legs, indifferent or oblivious to money and fame.
At least, that's how we've been set up to see them, mainly by a music press quick to distrust shameless exhibitionism and even quicker to celebrate the dark genius of the sidekick in the shadows. Both Jagger and Richards were born in Dartford, Kent; Richards on 18 December , Jagger the following July; and both went to the same primary school.
Bonding as blues-besotted teenagers in the late Fifties, they formed the Stones with Brian Jones in By they were every mum's worst nightmare of delinquent youth, a punk counterpoint to the mop-top wholesomeness of The Beatles.
Their songs were soaked in black Americana, and it was only a matter of time before they were recording at the legendary Chess studio in Chicago. After an unconvincing flirtation with flower power, they hit their real stride with the astonishing sequence of albums that began with 's Beggar's Banquet and climaxed with the magnificent double set Exile on Main Street The fact that this period coincided with Richards' descent into full-tilt heroin addiction only makes his achievements - the anchoring of the band in his playing and his debauched, malevolent persona - the more incredible.
Exile, recorded in the French mansion where he and his charismatic consort Anita Pallenberg by whom he has two children held court, was never to be equalled in all the years that lay ahead for the Stones. But here's the real point: Keith Richards has managed to extract more soul and poetry from the electric rhythm guitar than anyone else in rock's history.
Richards' riffs - from the Pop Staples slither of "The Last Time" through the eerie glassiness of "Gimme Shelter" to the cranked combustion of "Start Me Up" - are so viscerally "right" that they almost transcend rock'n'roll altogether. Richards took the boxy, compact riffing of Chuck Berry and turned it into something loose, menacing and intensely sexual.
We stay loyal to Keith Richards - or, at least, to the idea of Keith Richards - because he continues to embody the dirty glory that fired the Stones' finest hours, from The Rolling Stones to Exile on Main Street eight years later. Around him swirls the mega-circus that is the Bridges to Babylon tour, cocooning him in its giant pod; behind him flap the logos of the tour's sponsors Tommy Hilfiger in America, Castrol GTX in Britain.
Does he care? Should he care more about Mick Jagger's unapologetic mercenariness? Somehow none of it seems to touch him. When he shuffles up to the lead microphone to sing the sneeringly bitter, hopelessly tender "All About You", isn't he simply lost in his music?
When you surprise yourself, you rise about three feet off the ground and you see Charlie Watts rising above his drum kit, and for a minute you get that buzz where a band just gels for a magic few moments.
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