The Rolling stones announce devastating News about keith Richards.

There is a meme of Keith Richards bouncing around at the moment, a photograph of Keith, axe in hand, bending down to attend to a little boy. The caption? “Keith Richards teaching Willie Nelson to play guitar.” The inference is the same as it’s been since the mid-seventies: Keith was born before all of us, will outlive all of us, and will no doubt still be around when the earth has finally had enough of us.

 

He’s nearly there, because today Keith is 80.

 

The Rolling Stone is now revered not just as an elder statesman of rock, but also something approaching a national folk hero. An ancient guitar hero with slurred speech, inconsistent playing, and arthritic joints, he remains one of the most iconic musical entertainers of his generation, a man who looks like Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

He no longer falls asleep on stage (which he did once while playing Fool to Cry – “It’s a very boring song,” said Keith in his own defence. “Mind you, I was pretty out of it,” he continued, smiling like Rowley Birkin in The Fast Show), and he no longer stays up for days on end (his record was nine, over two hundred hours).

 

Nevertheless, he still has his quintessential bad boy haircut, these days accessorised with coins and small animal bones. While he is hardly beyond parody, his gift to the world – as well as over a hundred great riffs – is the rock’n’roll blueprint. Affecting a rock’n’roll stance is one of the great enduring clichés of the last 50 years, but Keith Richards will forever be the real deal.

“He’s never changed,” said David Bailey to me once. Bailey, who photographed Keith dozens of times over the last 60 years (and who famously shot the covers for The Rolling Stones No.2, Out of Our Heads, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, and Goats Head Soup), says, “He is just rock’n’roll, that’s what he is. Rock and roll.”

The journalist Nick Kent, who has probably come as close to the real heart of the Stones as anyone, said that Richards, “consumed drugs like other humans consume air, which is to say, unceasingly… There was talk… that he might indeed be possessed of super-human faculties. Roadies whispered in hushed tones about Keith’s latest hedonistic marathon and several firmly believed he was blessed with two lives.”

Nick lived with me briefly in the early Nineties, in my flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and whenever talk turned to Richards – and it tended to three or four times a day – he would become agitated and testy. “Keith Richards, man, now there is a dude who has seen the dark side. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of bad shit – Iggy Pop, Sid Vicious, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed – but never have I see anyone like Keith. All the stories? They’re all true…”

A reductive view of the Stones is simple: Mick Jagger stars as the aloof corporate Svengali; Charlie Watts played the quiet man in a Savile Row suit (who loved jazz and never listened to the band’s records); Ronnie Wood plays the perpetual adolescent, the reformed Jack-the-lad who many people think isn’t even a proper Rolling Stone even though he’s been with the band for 50 years; and Keef, the rock’n’roll axe hero incarnate, a cosseted renegade, a musical gypsy, and a man who has somehow successfully cheated death, time and time and time again.

The most marked difference between Jagger and Richards, according to the latter, is the fact that, “Mick has to dictate to life. He wants to control it. To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you. He can’t go to sleep without writing out what he’s going to do when he wakes up. I just hope to wake up, and it’s not a disaster.”