- From: The Australian 18 October 2010
Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at a screening ealier this year of the documentary Stones In Exile in New York Source: AP
Keith Richards has managed to wring more soul and poetry from the electric rhythm guitar than almost anyone else in rock'n'roll.
Now the ancient, marinated Rolling Stone is letting rip with a memoir that blows the lid off one of the most enduring and tormented relationships in popular mythology.
As you would expect for a reputed advance of £4.8 million ($7.7m), Richards's autobiography is a compelling account of his helter-skelter life with the Rolling Stones at the height of their fame, from the copious consumption of drugs to the parties with John Lennon. At the heart of the story is his relationship with Mick Jagger, who angers and fascinates Richards in equal measure.
"It was like two alphas fighting. Still is, quite honestly," he writes.
Richards's book is wielded as a new weapon in a protracted battle. He reveals that his bond with Jagger, his childhood friend and co-founder of the Stones, has deteriorated to the point where he has not set foot in the singer's dressing room for 20 years.
"I used to love Mick," Richards writes in Life, his autobiography, serialised in The Times. "Sometimes I think: I miss my friend. I wonder: where did he go?"
It might sound a little harsh, but Richards, 66, is just limbering up. As he gives his account of bedding Marianne Faithfull, Jagger's girlfriend, during the 1960s, he taunts his rival: "I was knocking Marianne man. While you're missing it, I'm kissing it."
For a coup de grace, he claims that another of Jagger's lovers had no fun with the singer's "tiny todger". Richards records mischievously: "I know he's got an enormous pair of balls, but it doesn't quite fill the gap, does it?"
Read the full piece in The Australian.
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