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Keith Richards just became a grandfather. “This is true! he cheers, playing videos from somewhere in the Hit Factory, the New York studio first run by the Rolling Stones 46 years ago when they were making Emotional Rescue. “It’s been a few weeks, it’s something new for me, but I’m amazing grandpa,” he confides. I’ve been doing a lot of grandpas 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. Or four. Or one, or five.”
Wait, that seems a little strange. He is disgusted and bursts out with shaky laughter. “I’ve lost track, you know.”
It feels like a legal requirement to realize how impossible all this could be: there was a time when the general consensus was that Richards would probably not live until the end of the year, let alone the birth of his great grandson, such was the chaos of drugs and alcohol that he insisted on creating for himself. And yet here he is, no doubt outliving some of the people who predicted his early death: 82, hale and hearty, welcoming the arrival of the beautiful Luna Richards-Von Bismarck.
“I used to listen to my body when it cried out for help,” he says about his long life. I mean, I wasn’t far from the end of the runway before I yelled for help. He quit smoking six years ago. “Suddenly, I felt like after all these years of smoking – because, you know, a person smokes – I sat around with this stupid thing in my mouth thinking: what a child. It was more embarrassing than anything else, even though I smoked a lot of weed. ” He’s not drinking this week, he says, “but no, yeah, slowly.” Another laugh. “So, yeah, that’s a lot of heroin a day now.”
In addition, there is a new Rolling Stones album to promote, another situation that would seem impossible. The last time I met Richards was in 2015: he had just released a solo album called Crosseyed Heart but he was a big part of our conversation telling me that he didn’t want to make a solo album and had no interest in being a solo artist. He was “doing this to save my hand” because the Rolling Stones were “in hibernation”. This did not please him so much that he told his colleagues that he would retire in order to shoot them – “to hit them in the back of the head”, as he put it. When I asked him what he would give up to achieve, he spoke a little wistfully, perhaps making another Rolling Stones album.
Instead, they’ve made three more: 2016’s unexpected comeback early-blues outfit, Blue & Lonesome, then 2023’s first single, Hackney Diamonds, released a few years after drummer Charlie Watts’ death. Now, less than three years later, there’s Strange Tongues, some of which predate Watts’ death, including Richards’ amazing song Some of Us, which he says dates back nearly 20 years but was “cherry-picked” by writer Andrew Watt. Some songs were recorded in the most recent activities of the month of London in London: a song called Ringing Hollow, which. Mick Jagger has described it as “a love letter to America”, it offers every possible criticism of the US under the second term of Trump: “There is always a bad guy who tries to whip a group of people…
“Mick’s been on a lot lately,” Richards says, “and that’s one of the reasons this album came out so fast, because it’s not going to bleed.” And the strength from Hackney Diamonds was that it continues to breathe the same way.
He credits Watt – 35 years old and the most preferred producer of the rock aristocracy, as his recent work with Paul McCartney, Elton John, Iggy Pop and Michael Stipe proves – for “being a breath of fresh air and chasing ass. He knows his stuff very well and professionally, and he doesn’t put up with everything that’s difficult for him – he just finds it easy. Sometimes he’s impulsive, but so what?”
When you say that he can’t stand it, has he ever given you an interview with him? He narrowed his eyes and said: “No, but he would have given it.” someone talk to.”
In fact, Richards says, there’s not much you can do about it either. Over the years, it seemed to add up: The Rolling Stones’ albums were often produced in very difficult environments, often due to disagreements between Richards and Jagger. “I’ve known Mick, I think, since preschool, let’s say about four years,” says Richards, “and when you’ve been in a relationship that long, you always say: ‘Listen, boy, I’ve known you since I was four . . .’
But these days, the Jagger/Richards relationship seems to be averse to what Richards calls “playing”, even based on his self-proclaimed opinion that Jagger sings on his own, including collaborations with others he likes. Skepta or Tame Impala, what Richards recently called “entering the modern world”.
“No, it’s not much of a joke. He broke his sword, he broke his sword. It’s another thing that Mick and I stopped, maybe because of old age. Or he didn’t come to me for a while, so I guess we did. But you never know – I can get off my horse and raise my shield and stab me in the eye…” he says … laughing.
In the past, part of the problem was Jagger’s desire to modernize against the established nature of his songwriting partner. For everything the Stones have in their latest video, and the fact that Jagger “still wants” to join the ranks of today’s superstars while happily documenting his life on Instagram, Richards “did it with skill”. And when it comes to celebrity culture, don’t get him started: “Even my grandchildren,” he beams, “are not well-known.” He cries through the cassette tape – “If it wasn’t for the cassette, there would be no Satisfaction, because I found a riff in my sleep, hit the record and then the next day he played it back and it was Satisfaction in a very raw form” – and it seems that he cannot say the word “synthesisers” without an adjective. Needless to say, our video call was set by an assistant because Richards’ daily relationship with tech goes beyond what he calls “an electric kettle and that’s what it is, pal”.
“I follow the old ways, as my father would say. I’ve seen records running from two-song tapes stuck to the wall, suddenly eight songs, then 16, 24, then digital and it didn’t really help the music. But that’s what you’re living with. music? I fear the future of everything. They I don’t know what it does, so now we all waited and waited.”
In fact, Foreign Tongues does an excellent job of juxtaposing the two conflicting passions at the heart of the Rolling Stones. On the one hand, there are songs that resemble the disco revival of the Stones of Miss You and Emotional Rescue, a cover of Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good and an unexpected appearance from the Cure’s Robert Smith, which Richards claims to be completely unaware of. I don’t know, I wasn’t there, Andrew said: ‘Would you let me put this and that?’ And I said: ‘No, man, if it’s an important piece, do it.’ That’s why he escaped.”
On the other hand, it has a cover of Chuck Berry’s Beautiful Delilah, translated, as Richards says, “like it was 30 or 40 years before Chuck did it”, which ends the song when the Stones started in 1963: their first song was a cover of Berry’s Come On, and Richard Berry was always there.
He said: “There’s something about those early records. “He’s so relaxed about them and leading the way, especially in the lyrics, that always made me think that rock’n’roll music wasn’t supposed to be what everyone thought it was” – i.e., it wasn’t teenage trash. “I loved his instincts when he played, the way he moved – his whole body became part of the guitar. He made me think about what was possible for me, at that time, which made my mother pick up the electric guitar. I just felt like I was related to 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 looking at his guitar and I was about to touch it, and he said: ‘Nobody’s touching it!’ And bam! Well done, Chuck! I would have done the same. I have not done anything, but I have never caught anyone doing that.”
As a 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 fact that this may be the last song of the group and is eager to end things cleanly around. But Richards scoffs: “I can’t say it was intentional.”
Oh, come on, you’ve been in the Rolling Stones for 64 years. Sometimes you’ve got to think… “Could this be the last time? I wrote it, mate! No, I think it might cross your mind now and then – you’d be a fool to do that. But it’s not something you live with. For now I’m set on my path and I’ll just see where it goes.”
However, he says, he has been thinking a lot about the past lately. “I mean, you suddenly turn around and say: Christ, I’m 82 years old. It’s a long thing to look back on. But it’s an interesting thing, especially now that we’re going into all the grandkids stuff. They suddenly give you another mirror to look at where you’re coming from. I don’t know: is it called maturity or something like that?” But again, he explodes with difficulty. “God forbid,” he says.
