Keith Richards

• 1. Introduction

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  Keith Richards, guitarist of the Rolling Stones, began his musical life by stretching toward an instrument he could not reach. His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore "Gus" Dupree, toured Britain with a jazz big band called Gus Dupree and His Boys. Gus kept a guitar on a high shelf and teased his grandson with it. The deal was simple: if the boy could get it down, it was his. Young Keith stacked books and cushions on a chair until he finally held the guitar. His grandfather then taught him the basics of a first tune, "Malagueña". The boy practised it "like mad", and Gus let him keep the instrument, which Keith called "the prize of the century". Richards was born on the 18th of December 1943 in Dartford, Kent. His career now runs past six decades. He is a guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer, and half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in history. How did a boy from Dartford end up shaping the sound of one of the world's best-known bands? Why does he sometimes play with a string missing? And how did a reputation for trouble grow so large that it sometimes outran the music?

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• 2. Dartford Roots

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  Wentworth Primary School put Richards in the same classes as a boy named Mick Jagger. The two families lived near each other until 1954, when both moved away. Richards was the only child of Doris Maud Lydia, born Dupree, and Herbert William Richards. His father was a factory worker, wounded in the Normandy invasion, and he looked down on his son's enthusiasm for music. His paternal grandparents, Ernie and Eliza Richards, were socialists and civic leaders. Both served as mayors of the Municipal Borough of Walthamstow in Essex, with Eliza taking office in 1941. Richards credited them with more or less creating the Walthamstow Labour Party. At home he played along to records by Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. One early guitar hero was Scotty Moore, who played for Elvis.

  From 1955 to 1959 Richards attended Dartford Technical High School for Boys. He never sat the eleven-plus exam because of illness. The school's choirmaster, R. W. "Jake" Clare, recruited him into a trio of boy sopranos. The trio sang on several occasions, including at Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II. In 1959 the school expelled him for truancy, and he moved to Sidcup Art College. There he met Dick Taylor, and he spent more time playing guitar with other students in the boys' room than on his coursework. By then he had learned most of Chuck Berry's solos.

  A chance meeting on a train platform brought Richards back together with Jagger, who was on his way to classes at the London School of Economics. Jagger was carrying mail-order rhythm and blues albums from Chess Records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. That shared taste renewed the friendship. Jagger was singing with Taylor in an amateur band, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, and Richards soon joined. The band folded after Brian Jones, who shared their love of the blues, invited Jagger and Richards to the Bricklayers Arms pub. There they met Ian Stewart. By mid-1962 Richards had left art college and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced around the same time, and he stayed close to his mother. He remained estranged from his father until 1982.

  The Rolling Stones signed to Decca Records in 1963, and their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, set out to rework the band's image. Oldham told Richards to drop the s from his surname. In Oldham's view, "Keith Richard" looked more pop and echoed the singer Cliff Richard. The change was only ever a stage name. In 1978 Richards went back to his legal name in all public and private contexts.

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• 3. Weaving and Open G

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  Chris Spedding calls Richards's guitar playing "direct, incisive and unpretentious". Richards plays both lead and rhythm parts, often within a single song. The Stones are known for trading these roles with a second guitarist, a style Richards calls "the ancient art of weaving". Brian Jones filled that seat from 1962 to 1969, then Mick Taylor, and since 1975 Ronnie Wood. Richards and Jones had picked up the idea from Chicago blues. Robert Johnson's countermelodies once made Richards assume two guitarists were playing on his records. Richards says he avoids flashy, competitive speed and does not want to be the "fastest gun in the west". He prefers at least one other guitarist beside him and has almost never toured without one.

  Mick Taylor's arrival in 1969 changed the balance. Taylor's skill on lead guitar split the rhythm and lead jobs more sharply, especially onstage. Before that, Jones's shrinking contributions in the late 1960s had pushed Richards to record all the guitar parts himself on many tracks, including the slide guitar. In the studio he also played every guitar part on "Paint It Black", "Ruby Tuesday", "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Gimme Shelter". Ian Stewart once called Richards the bandleader, while Richards says his job is merely "oiling the machinery". Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood both say the band followed Richards rather than the drummer, Charlie Watts. In Wood's and Wyman's account there was "no way of 'not' following" him.

  A pause in touring during 1967 and 1968 gave Richards time to experiment with open tunings. He developed a ringing, syncopated style of chording, heard on "Street Fighting Man" and "Start Me Up". His favourite tuning is a five-string open G, GDGBD. He often takes the lowest string off entirely, because it "gets in the way", and leaves those notes to the bass player. He says banjo tuning inspired the approach. Several of his Telecasters are set up this way, including a butterscotch 1953 model he acquired in 1971. He nicknamed it "Micawber", after a character in Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield. Songs built on this sound include "Honky Tonk Women" and "Brown Sugar".

  A 1957 Gibson Les Paul Custom, hand-painted with psychedelic patterns in 1968, was probably stolen in the Nellcôte burglary of July 1971. A custom five-string Zemaitis, nicknamed "Macabre" and decorated with skulls, a pistol and a dagger, was destroyed in a fire at his rented Los Angeles home in 1978. Richards owns approximately 3,000 guitars, and he joked in a 1986 Guitar World interview that on any of them, "give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same." Acoustic guitar remains the basis of his playing. He fears that without it he would "lose that touch". On the studio versions of "Street Fighting Man" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash", acoustic guitars were overloaded onto a cassette recorder, then played back through a loudspeaker. In 1965 he used a Gibson Maestro fuzzbox on the riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", and every unit in stock had sold out by the end of that year.

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• 4. Songs and Antennas

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  In 1963 Andrew Loog Oldham pushed Richards and Jagger to start writing songs, convinced the band could not rely on outside writers. Their earliest efforts were recorded by other artists. Gene Pitney's version of "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday" became their first UK top-ten single. In 1964 they had another top-ten hit with "As Tears Go By", the debut single written for Marianne Faithfull. The first top-ten hit for the Stones with a Jagger and Richards original was "The Last Time", in early 1965. Later that year came "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", the band's first international number-one recording.

  Richards says the riff for "Satisfaction" came to him in his sleep. He woke just long enough to record it on a cassette player beside his bed. From the album Aftermath in 1966, most Rolling Stones albums consisted mainly of Jagger and Richards originals. Their songs absorbed blues, R&B, rock and roll, pop, soul, gospel and country, with detours into psychedelia and Dylanesque social commentary. Later decades brought funk, disco, reggae and punk. Richards also wrote slow, torchy ballads, among them "You Got the Silver" in 1969, "Coming Down Again" in 1973, "All About You" in 1980 and "Slipping Away" in 1989.

  Richards does not claim much credit as a creator. "I don't have that God aspect about it. I prefer to think of myself as an antenna," he has said. He adds, "There's only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme." He believes songs written by two people are better, because "You get another angle on it." On his own records, that second angle has often been the drummer and co-producer Steve Jordan. Richards entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993. Rolling Stone lists fourteen songs he wrote with Jagger on its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.

  Richards and Jagger also became the band's main producers, credited as the Glimmer Twins from the mid-1970s, often alongside an outside producer. The 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request credited the entire band as producer.

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• 5. Beyond the Stones

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  The 1972 single "Happy" gave Richards a new job in the Stones' live show. Since that year's tour, he has sung lead on one or two songs a night, which gives Jagger time to change outfits. He often opens his turn with routines borrowed from the comedian Max Miller, such as "It's nice to be here - it's nice to be anywhere". He has sung backing vocals on every Rolling Stones album. Since Between the Buttons in 1967 he has also sung lead or co-lead on nearly every studio album. During the 2006 and 2007 tours he sang "You Got the Silver" without playing any instrument.

  In 1978 Richards released his first solo single, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Run Rudolph Run". Then Jagger started a solo recording and touring career in 1987, and Richards formed the X-Pensive Winos with Steve Jordan, whom he had gathered for his Chuck Berry film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll. Members included guitarist Waddy Wachtel, saxophonist Bobby Keys, keyboardist Ivan Neville and bassist Charley Drayton. Their first record, Talk Is Cheap, went gold. Main Offender followed in 1992, and Crosseyed Heart arrived in September 2015.

  Tom Waits appears on three Richards sessions: Rain Dogs in 1985, Bone Machine in 1992, and Bad As Me in 2011. In 1968 Richards played bass for the Dirty Mac, a one-off band with John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell, at The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Richards added guitar and vocals to "Careless Ethiopians" by Toots & the Maytals, from the album True Love, which won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. He duetted with George Jones, and in 1986 he produced Aretha Franklin's version of "Jumpin' Jack Flash". In 1997 he released "Wingless Angels", a recording of nyabinghi Rastafarian chanting and drumming, on his own label, Mindless Records.

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• 6. Mad, Bad and Dangerous

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  Music journalist Nick Kent pinned Lord Byron's phrase "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" on Richards. Jagger felt the image had "contributed to him becoming a junkie". In 1994 Richards said his image was "like a long shadow", and that some people would never believe he was not "a mad drug addict". He was tried on drug-related charges five times: in 1967, twice in 1973, in 1977 and in 1978.

  The first trial grew out of a police raid in February 1967 on Redlands, his Sussex estate, where he and friends including Jagger were spending a weekend. On the 29th of June 1967 Jagger was sentenced to three months for possessing four amphetamine tablets. Richards received a year for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property. Jagger went to Brixton Prison and Richards to Wormwood Scrubs, and both were released on bail the next day. On the 1st of July, The Times ran an editorial titled "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?", which portrayed Jagger's sentence as persecution. A month later the appeals court overturned Richards's conviction for lack of evidence and gave Jagger a conditional discharge.

  On the 27th of February 1977, Royal Canadian Mounted Police found heroin in Richards's room at a Toronto hotel. The charge was possession for the purpose of trafficking, which could bring seven years to life. Officers confiscated his passport. He and his family stayed in Toronto until the 1st of April, when he was allowed into the United States on a medical visa for treatment of heroin addiction. The charge was later reduced to simple possession. During the next two years he lived under the threat of criminal sanction. He still recorded Some Girls, the Stones' biggest-selling studio album, and toured North America.

  Richards pleaded guilty in October 1978 and received a suspended sentence and a year of probation. The court ordered him to continue treatment and to play a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, after a blind fan testified on his behalf. He played two benefit shows at the Oshawa Civic Auditorium on the 22nd of April 1979, with the Stones and the New Barbarians. The prosecution had appealed the sentence, and in September 1979 the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld it.

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• 7. Family and Friendship

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  A trip to Morocco in 1967 began Richards's relationship with the model and actress Anita Pallenberg. She had been involved with Brian Jones, who was meant to travel too but fell ill, and the news hit Jones hard. Richards and Pallenberg had three children: Marlon, born on the 10th of August 1969, Dandelion, born on the 17th of April 1972, and Tara. Tara was born on the 26th of March 1976 and died of sudden infant death syndrome on the 6th of June 1976, while Richards was on tour. He said the loss haunted him. He played shows hours after hearing the news, and he told The Guardian in 2015 that performing was the only way he could cope. He and Pallenberg split in 1979 and stayed cordial.

  Richards met the model Patti Hansen in 1979. They married on the 18th of December 1983, his 40th birthday. Their daughters, Theodora and Alexandra, were born in New York City in 1985 and 1986. Richards has seven grandchildren. In September 2014 he published a children's book with Theodora, Gus and Me, about his granddad and his first guitar.

  The press often describes his bond with Mick Jagger as "love/hate". In a 1998 interview Richards called their differences a family squabble. He said he shouts at Jagger because no one else has the nerve, and that he is just trying to bring him into line. Eleven days before his autobiography Life appeared on the 26th of October 2010, the Associated Press reported that it called Jagger "unbearable". By 2015 his tone had softened. He still said Jagger could come off as a "snob", but added, "I still love him dearly... your friends don't have to be perfect." Richards and Johnny Depp tried and failed to persuade Jagger to appear in a Pirates of the Caribbean film.

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• 8. Pirates, Honours and Quirks

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  Johnny Depp has said his Captain Jack Sparrow was loosely based on Richards and on the cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew. Disney executives were alarmed, and Michael Eisner feared Depp was "ruining the movie". Richards then played Captain Teague, Sparrow's father, in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in May 2007, and again in On Stranger Tides in May 2011. The first cameo won him the Best Celebrity Cameo award at the 2007 Spike Horror Awards.

  On the 27th of April 2006, Richards slipped off a branch of a dead tree in Fiji and hurt his head. Press reports wrongly called it a coconut tree. He underwent cranial surgery at a New Zealand hospital, and the Stones' 2006 European tour was delayed by six weeks. His statement apologised for "falling off my perch". In a late 2013 video message he thanked the New Zealand surgeons and joked, "I left half my brain there."

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Richards with the Stones in 1989, and the UK Music Hall of Fame did so in 2004. Rolling Stone ranked him fourth among the 100 best guitarists in 2011, and 15th in 2023. In 2023 Dartford honoured him with a statue, and Tom Waits wrote him a poem, "Burnt Toast To Keith". In 2025 he became the first recipient of the Connecticut Governor's Award of Excellence.

  Richards is an avid reader with a deep interest in history and a large library. An April 2010 article revealed that he yearns to be a librarian. He is fond of shepherd's pie, and in his autobiography he advises adding more onions after the meat is cooked. The drummer Stuart Cable recalled that Richards confronted him after Cable helped himself to a slice meant for Richards. Asked in November 2016 how he would like to go, Richards answered, "I'd like to croak magnificently, onstage".

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