‘I’d listen to my body before it screamed for help’: Keith Richards on life as an 82-year-old great-grandad – and jousting with Mick Jagger
Keith Richards has just become a great-grandfather. “This is true! This is true!” he enthuses, video-calling from somewhere in the depths of the Hit Factory, the New York studio first patronised by the Rolling Stones 46 years ago when they were making Emotional Rescue. “It’s been a couple of weeks. It’s a new thing for me. But I’m a fantastic grandad,” he confides. “Great-grandadding is … I try to let them hang with me for as long as humanly possible, then I hand ’em back. I’ve been doing a lot of grandfathering in the last year or so. I’ve got three or four new ones, you know. When I say new, I mean … two or three years old. Or four. Or one, or maybe five.”
Hang on, that seems a little vague. He shrugs and explodes in a wheezy chuckle. “I lose track, you know.”
It feels almost like a legal requirement to note how improbable all this would have once seemed: there was a time when the general consensus was that Richards probably wouldn’t live to see the end of the year, let alone the birth of his great-granddaughter, such was the chemical and alcoholic havoc he persisted on wreaking on himself. And yet here he is, having doubtless outlived some of the people who predicted his early demise: 82, hale and hearty, welcoming the arrival of the splendidly named Luna Richards-Von Bismarck.
“I tended to listen to my body just before it screamed for help,” he says of his longevity. “I mean, I wasn’t far from the end of the runway before I screamed for help. But you tend to slow down if you want to keep going; you pace yourself.” He quit smoking cigarettes six years ago. “Suddenly, I felt like after all these years of smoking – because, you know, a man smokes – I was sat around with this silly thing in my mouth thinking: how childish. It was that that put me off more than anything, although I smoke a lot of weed.” He’s not drinking this week, he says, “but otherwise, yeah, in moderation’.” Another wheezy chuckle. “So, yeah, it’s only a ton of heroin a day now.”
Moreover, there’s a new Rolling Stones album to promote, another state of affairs that would once have seemed fairly improbable. The last time I met Richards was in 2015: he’d just released a solo album called Crosseyed Heart but spent a substantial portion of our conversation telling me that he didn’t want to make a solo album and indeed had no desire to be a solo artist. He was “only doing it to keep my hand in” because the Rolling Stones were “in hibernation”. He was so sorely displeased about this that he’d told his bandmates he was going to retire in an attempt to galvanise them – “punching them in the back of the head”, as he put it. When I asked what ambitions he might possibly have left to fulfil, he talked, a little wistfully, about perhaps making one more Rolling Stones album.
In fact, they’ve made three more: 2016’s unexpected return-to-first-principles collection of blues covers, Blue & Lonesome, then a 2023 album of originals, Hackney Diamonds, released a couple of years after the death of drummer Charlie Watts. Now, not even three years later, there’s Foreign Tongues, some of which predates Watts’s death, including the surprisingly tender Richards-sung Some of Us, which he says dates back about 20 years but which producer Andrew Watt “cherrypicked from the can”. Other songs were recorded in a more recent month-long flurry of activity in London: a track called Ringing Hollow, which Mick Jagger has described as “love letter to America”, gives every impression of actually being a critique of the US under Trump’s second term: “There’s always a scoundrel trying to whip up the crowd … there’s always a king trying to pick up the crown … Lady Liberty don’t look so good when she’s wearing a scowl.”
“Mick’s been very prolific lately,” Richards says, “which is one reason this album has come out so quick, because he won’t bloody stop. And the momentum from Hackney Diamonds was such that this is basically carrying on in the same breath. I was just letting it roll – we had enough stuff if we wanted to keep pushing, and so Mick and I gave each other the usual wry look and said: ‘Yeah, let’s keep pushing.’”
He credits Watt – 35 years old and very much the rock aristocracy’s current producer of choice, as his recent work with Paul McCartney, Elton John, Iggy Pop and Michael Stipe attests – with “being a breath of fresh air and a kick up the ass. He knows his stuff musically and technically, and he doesn’t put up with any bullshit – he just gets on with it. So I found him very easy to work with. He’s a bit impetuous at times, but then so what?”
When you say he doesn’t put up with any bullshit, has he ever had to give you a talking-to? He narrows his eyes: “No. But he may have given somebody a talking-to.”
Actually, Richards says, there isn’t much of the aforementioned bullshit to deal with any more. For years, it certainly seemed to be in plentiful supply: Rolling Stones albums were frequently made in a very strained atmosphere indeed, usually as a result of disagreements between Richards and Jagger. “I’ve known Mick, I think, roughly since preschool, so let’s say about four years old,” Richards says, “and when you’ve known a chap that long, you always say: ‘Listen to me, boy, I’ve known you since you were four …’ And that seems to have an effect.”
But these days, the Jagger/Richards relationship is apparently less inclined to what Richards calls “jousting”, even accommodating for his famously dismissive attitude towards Jagger’s solo career, including collaborations with the likes of Skepta or Tame Impala, which Richards recently characterised as “fairying off into the modern world”.
“No, there’s not as much jousting. He’s broken his sword, he’s broken his lance. It’s another thing that Mick and I gave up, probably down to age. Or at least he hasn’t come at me for a while, so I presume we have. But you never know – I could be off my horse and have my shield up and have him stab me in the eye with …” he says, the end of the sentence consumed by yet another wheezy laugh.
In the past, at least part of the problem was Jagger’s desire for modernity clashing with his songwriting partner’s staunch traditionalism. For all that the Stones are digitally de-aged in their latest music video, and that Jagger still “fairies off” to collaborate with contemporary pop stars while cheerily documenting his life on Instagram, Richards has “had it up to here with technology”. And as for celebrity culture, don’t get him started: “Even my grandchildren,” he glowers, “are not quite as imbecilic.” He mourns the passing of the cassette tape – “If it wasn’t for a cassette, there wouldn’t have been a Satisfaction, because I got the riff in my sleep, hit record and then the next day played it back and it was Satisfaction in a very raw form” – and seems incapable of saying the word “synthesisers” without prefacing it with the adjective “damn”. Needless to say, our video call has been set up by an assistant on the grounds that Richards’s daily relationship with tech extends to what he calls “an electric kettle and that’s about it, pal”.
“I stick to the old ways, as my dad would have said. I’ve seen records go from being made on two-track tapes stuck to the wall, to suddenly eight tracks, then 16, 24, then digital and it hasn’t really helped the music at all. But it’s something you live with. I mean, personally, I think the world would be better off without the damn phone. AI is killing me, you know. Do I fear for the future of music? I fear for the future of everything. They don’t know what the hell it does, so now we all dangle and wait.”
In fact, Foreign Tongues does a pretty great job of melding the two conflicting impulses at the heart of the Rolling Stones. On the one hand, there are tracks that resemble a 21st-century reboot of the disco Stones of Miss You and Emotional Rescue, a cover of Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good and an unexpected guest appearance from the Cure’s Robert Smith, about which Richards winningly professes total ignorance. “How did it happen? Don’t know. I wasn’t there. Andrew said: ‘Do you mind if I put in so-and-so?’ And I said: ‘No, man, if it’s a piece that’s necessary, do it.’ So that’s how he got slipped in.”
On the other hand, it features a cover of Chuck Berry’s Beautiful Delilah, rendered, as Richards notes, “as more of an old acoustic blues, like it was made 30 or 40 years before Chuck did it”, which concludes the album pretty much where the Stones started in 1963: their debut single was a cover of Berry’s Come On, and Richards has always cited Berry as his formative inspiration.
“There’s something about those early records of his,” he says. “They have an ease about them and a sophistication in a way, particularly in the lyrics, which always made me think that rock’n’roll didn’t always have to be the way that everyone used to think about it” – ie that it wasn’t just trash for teenagers. “I loved his naturalness when he was playing, the way he moved – his whole body became part of the guitar. He made me focus on what was possible for me, at the time, which made my mother shell out for an electric guitar. I just felt a natural affinity for him, even though he was a cussed bugger.” He laughs.
“He punched me once, years ago, in the 60s, I think. We were in his dressing room, I was having a peek at his guitar and I was just about to stroke it, and he went: ‘Nobody touches it!’ And bam! Quite right, Chuck! I would have done the same. I’ve never had to, but then I’ve never caught someone doing that.”
As with the cover of Muddy Waters’ Rollin’ Stone on Hackney Diamonds, Beautiful Delilah comes at the end of the album – as if someone, somewhere is working on the principle that this might be the band’s final album and is keen to end things in a neatly circular way. But Richards demurs: “I wouldn’t say it was intentional.”
Oh, come on, you’ve been in the Rolling Stones for 64 years. You must sometimes think … “This could be the last time? I wrote it, mate! No, I think it might cross the mind occasionally – you’d be an idiot not to. But it’s not something you dwell on. By now I’m fully set on my path and I’m just going to see where it goes.”
Still, he says, he’s been thinking more about the past recently. “I mean, you do suddenly turn around and say: Christ, I’m 82. It’s a long thing to look back on. But it’s a fascinating thing, especially now we go into the whole great-grandkids thing. They suddenly give you another mirror to look into where you’re from. I don’t know: is it called maturing or something like that?” Yet again, he erupts in a wheezy chuckle. “God forbid,” he says.