There’s been no shortage of Rolling Stones tomes over the years, but when the band’s A Bigger Bang tour came to a halt in 2007 and Keith Richards decided to at last write his memoirs, the man he chose as his collaborator was not Stanley Booth or Robert Greenfield or Stephen Davis, but White Mischief author James Fox.
“The reason I became friends with Keith really was I wrote about him when I was on the Sunday Times in the early ‘70s,” Fox explains. “I play the guitar so I was curious – I just wanted to work out how he played the guitar, the idea that you can tell from one chord that it’s Keith. And I wrote this piece called ‘The Sound of the Stones’, which actually gave the nuts and bolts of what he does, how he tunes it, dropping the sixth string and all that stuff. And I think he felt that almost nobody had ever taken him seriously as a musician, all the stories were about the Prince of Darkness and stuff, or about Jagger. So I guess he trusted me. And over the years I kept on nudging him, saying, ‘We’ve gotta get these stories down.’ Not, ‘I want to write your autobiography,’ but, ‘This stuff can’t be lost.’ And there were long gaps, but every time I saw him or his manager Jane Rose, I would say, ‘Let’s do it.’ And for some reason four or five years ago it seemed that the time was right.”
The result, entitled Life, is an honest and unpretentious book that veers from the scabrous to the profound. Kicking off with the riotous tale of a 1975 drug bust in the deep south – an episode worthy of Thompson and Steadman – the book then diverges into a pungent postwar history of London suburbia before re-telling the hallowed Keef myths – Altamont, Exile, the heroin hell, the Glimmer Twins’ fractured brotherhood – with salty style. Above all it is the portrait of an aesthete. Richards seems to appreciate rigour and dedication in any discipline – architecture, law, literature or music. The sections where he talks about his craft are utterly compelling.
“That was my aim, because I knew he could do it well,” Fox says. “He talks about painting like that – not pretentiously, but about the silence, the canvas, the whole thing. He has got that sense of awe of the people that he learned from, and the humility. This will sound very pretentious, but I was reading a fantastic book the other day which is a biography of the painting of Guernica, and it tells that Picasso had a very short deadline to do this, it was right at the end of the Spanish Civil War. And what he did was slap down every reference he had in his head, from Leonardo to whoever else, a virgin, a horse, because he was so close to the roots of his art. And in a way that’s very like Keith, he’s so close to all that stuff. That’s why he talks so well about it, because he knows it backwards.”
As with Dylan’s Chronicles, it’s fascinating to read the reverance with which Richards speaks of his masters, in this case Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.
“My rule was to follow the music,” Fox says. “I knew that if we went down that road we would get these stories that have been baking in his head for all this time, and his emotional memory, not the chronological memory that Bill Wyman is supposed to have, but this emotional memory of the incidents that have given him pleasure. I remember him saying, ‘We were so obsessed by Chicago blues and Mississippi Delta blues, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have played it just as well at that time, since we didn’t do anything else.’ They were trying to get to the bottom of Jimmy Reed. I think that’s very moving, that way of learning your craft for so long. He’s a great listener. We were listening to the radio all the time while I was working with him in the Turks & Caicos, and for about three days we were listening to this ‘50s radio station, and I can’t remember what song it was, but at one point he said, ‘That’s the tempo – I must call Pierre’ (De Beauport, Richards’ guitar stringer and collaborator). His ear was always listening out for these things.”
Some aspects of the book must have been painful to recount, particularly the deterioration of his relationship with Anita Pallenberg and the cot-death of his infant son Tara in 1976. How did James broach those subjects?
“It was difficult. He had some approach resistance on the days that we were working, and I had to judge the day very carefully, when I was going to strike. In the end what I used to do was sidle up to him at a certain point and start talking, and it would go on. There’s no good saying, ‘Okay, we’ll start talking at six this evening.’ If I tried that it would be, ‘Ah, it’s hot, let’s wait,’ or whatever. But he didn’t want to talk about these things. The first time I talked to him about Tara I knew he had to deal with it and it had to go in, because it’s an honest book. And he literally couldn’t talk about it – he got five or six words out and left the room basically. We had to come back to that, as we had to come back to certain periods with Anita, and there were certain stories that he either omitted from his memory or flattened or denied, or didn’t want to hear. He’d definitely created some versions that he could live with of things that were very painful, but he was prepared to accept it when I said, ‘Actually, I think this is what happened.’ Then we’d talk about it or we’d put it in or wouldn’t put it in or whatever. But it’s a very painful and black and dark story at times.”
Indeed, there are many points where one wonders how Keith is still functioning not just on a physical but psychological level.
“That’s a mystery. I think it’s maybe a mystery to him. In terms of drugs, he explains it by the fact that he was in a very privileged position, he always had the money to buy the best quality. But there is another ingredient, which is that he has got an extraordinary measure of control which you don’t often see in addicts. He has this survival/control thing. It’s quite well known among his entourage that he is measured, which is not often the case. And also, he’s never going to let it seriously get in the way of the music. He told me that when he realised he actually wasn’t free to move about and tour and play for people, he gave it up. And also I think it was incredibly painful, all these cold turkeys. But he’s never wavered. You see Keith with all his mates, the roadies, these are his mates, it’s not put on. He’s shared experience with these people, they’re close, and he’s got the right attitude. He knows it’s the NCOs who actually run the army, not the officers.”
Richards has a legendary temper. Did he get shirty at any point?
“Yeah, he once got shirty with me, which is quite interesting. There was a huge amount of work, I put out a lot of bait with this book, all the people in the acknowledgments I actually talked to for some time to get context stories, things to trigger Keith’s imagination. And one thing he wanted me to do in order to describe brotherhood, cameraderie, was read Master And Commander by Patrick O’Brien. And in all this time I didn’t get around to reading it, and he said, ‘Well read it, you cunt!’ That was the rudest thing he said. But being Keith, it had it’s own particular timing and wasn’t as crude as it might look on paper. That kind of timing runs in the family. Like his grandfather hailing people cheerily with, ‘Don’t be a cunt all your life!’”

Life is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.