Stop the presses. Hold the front page. MOJO’s Guest Editor is on the line, quite literally phoning in his copy for a Rock’n’Roll Lifestyle Exclusive. Ever wondered how Keith Richards maintains that chic physique? Behold, his very own hot-bod workout programme.

“I get up. Ummm. And then, uh, you know, I sit down. I don’t do none of this trotting around, I think it’s bad for you. It’s bad on the joints, especially on concrete. I don’t go with that. It’s just not for me. It works for some guys, but y’know, it’s just… Mmm.”

That’s all there is to it, folks.

“Oh, and when I go to the islands, I do quite a bit of swimming. It’s not a regime, it’s just very nice to be in the water, and, uhh, you know… float about a bit.”
 

Long before rock’n’roll plugged in and made gods out of mortals, it was electricity itself that got the blood pumping. In 18th century Europe, people flocked to city squares and salons to witness this elemental wonder in quasi-scientific demonstrations, like Georg Matthias Bose’s Venus Electrificata, the “electric kiss of Leipzig”, whereby a woman standing on an insulating block of resin was given a moderate charge from Bose’s generator. When a male audience member accepted the invitation to kiss the woman, whose lips were coated with a conductive substance, he received an electric shock – complete with vivid blue flash.

In due course, this primal energy was domesticated and channelled into what we now take for granted as the invisible elixir for 21st century life. As French philosopher Tristan Garcia writes in his recent book The Life Intense: “It was as if Leipzig’s kiss, which sealed the modern alliance of desire and electricity, had never ended.”

Garcia traces the history of the “intense or electric person”, those who “fight to the death against boredom, petty manipulations, normalcy…” After 18th century libertines and 19th century romantics, he declares the apotheosis of “the electric person” to be “the rocker, electrified adolescent”: a universally available ideal, thanks to that supreme democratising weapon, the electric guitar.

Rock’s verbal and visual iconography is littered with shrines to this life-force, be it Samuel Hopkins metamorphosing into Lightnin’, Marc Bolan summoning the Electric Warrior, the holistic electrosphere of Kraftwerk, or the infernally plugged-in Angus Young on the sleeve of AC/DC’s Powerage. But perhaps its purest representation, the form’s ultimate electrified adolescent, the human jumping jack who personified rock’s osculatory flash and defined its rage against conformity, is now greeting MOJO at Germano Studios in downtown New York. Keith Richards arranges himself on the sofa, a cloud of dishevelment amid this pristine control room where almost every available space is filled by analogue recording gear made by the likes of Neve and Chandler and API – output attenuators, limiters, compressors, distressors. It is six days before his 75th birthday. Keith lights a cigarette, sloshes the dregs of an iced drink around a red plastic cup, and considers the notion of Tristan Garcia’s “electric person”.

Germano is familiar territory for Richards. His 2015 solo album Crosseyed Heart was part-recorded and mixed at this quintessential space-at-a-premium Manhattan facility. More recently, he and Mick Jagger have been meeting here during 2018 to plot the contours of the next Rolling Stones album. Following 2016’s blues covers set Blue & Lonesome, this would be the band’s first record of new material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.

“Mick and I get together in this studio for a couple of weeks throughout the year,” Richards nods. “After the blues album, we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, what do we want to do now?’ But there are new songs coming along, and if you feel there’s still juice in it, you want to squeeze it. I wouldn’t wanna bother with a dried lemon, but it felt like: why not? Rather than ‘why?’, ‘why not?’”

Did Blue & Lonesome help re-stoke the fire?

“That would have been our setlist in 1962 in the clubs, and there was a certain satisfaction in tying that up. Maybe it’s changed our attitude or the way we think about what we want to do next. So it’s all in its early stages, but there’s some interesting stuff coming out that isn’t necessarily…” Keith rubs his chin, inadvertently knocking a long stack of cigarette ash onto the sofa. “It ain’t the Stones *trying to be the Stones. It’s the Stones still trying to be. Heheheheh!”

The fact of The Rolling Stones’ ongoing existence no longer feels particularly worthy of note. 2019 will see their No Filter tour creak into its third consecutive year, calling at 13 US stadiums in a leisurely two-month stroll through the early summer, during which time Charlie Watts will turn 78 and Ron Wood 72. Age has apparently soothed 75-year-old Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ barbed relationship into a benign state of respectful co-existence.

“Everybody wants to work as long as they can and feel good about it,” says Keith. “Our [2018] tour in Britain and Europe was fantastic, the band was rocking. Until we got to Warsaw and somebody said, ‘That’s the last show…’ Oh no man, it was just getting going! So when the proposition came up to play America in 2019, everybody jumped at it. It’s what you do. If you give me 80,000 people, I feel right at home. There’s something also about the harmless joy in turning loads of other people on. I wouldn’t want to disappoint those people, doing the ‘Ohh, I don’t feel like it’. If I didn’t feel like it, I wouldn’t do it. Nor would any of us. The roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowd – it gets ya! You can’t stay away.”

The Rolling Stones’ are currently a far more solid proposition than they were 30 years ago. In October 1988, Keith Richards released his debut solo album, Talk Is Cheap, a belated riposte to Mick Jagger sidelining the Stones in favour of a solo career that launched in February 1985 with the Nile Rodgers-produced She’s The Boss. In Paris later that same year, the Stones had struggled through sessions for the album Dirty Work, widely regarded as their lowest low (Steve Lillywhite later breezily noted: “I produced the worst-ever Rolling Stones album!”). Believing that Jagger had held back his best material for She’s The Boss, Richards raged in his lyrics for the song Had It With You: “Moaning in the moonlight/Singing for your supper… It is such a sad thing/To watch a good love die… You’re a mean mistreater/You’re a dirty dirty rat scum.” Possibly relishing the opprobrium, or just aware that Keith already had two lead vocals on the record, Jagger sang it anyway.

Richards and the other Stones wanted to tour in 1986, but the singer demurred. In March 1987, however, Jagger declared he would go on the road in support of Primitive Cool, his second solo album in three years – “a move that seemed almost deliberately designed to close down The Rolling Stones,” Richards later reflected in Life, his 2011 autobiography. Jagger stoked the sense of a band terminally sundered in a November 1987 interview: “I don’t particularly want to go on tour when things are not going well. Fifteen years ago, I could have just sat around… hoping it would blow over. Now I think, I’ll get on with my life… I respect [Keith], and I feel a lot of affection for him… We’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of heartache together. [But] I have much more I want to do. The Rolling Stones is just a straight-ahead rock’n’roll band.”

For Richards, the “slap in the face” came when Jagger toured Japan in early 1988 with a band including guitarist Joe Satriani. By the time the show reached Tokyo, the 22-song set was three-quarters comprised of Stones material. Initially, Richards fired off insults in the press: “slit his throat”; “Disco Boy”; “Jagger’s Little Jerk Off Band”… But then he changed tactics. Such was the extent of the Stones’ inner malaise during the Dirty Work Paris sessions that even the rock-steady Charlie Watts had slid into a drug-and-alcohol funk and was momentarily replaced by Steve Jordan. With this New York powerhouse, mainstay of the Saturday Night Live house band, Keith Richards would build a new creative identity for himself, distinct from The Rolling Stones.

“I never decided, or expected, to put another band together,” says Richards. “I’d never written with anybody else except Mick. Being a Rolling Stone is a full-time job, you know… Or so it should’ve been at that point. Both Steve and I got off on just the fun of songwriting. Suddenly I realised, God, it’s like I’m at the beginning of The Rolling Stones again. Hanging out with Steve opened up all these possibilities of making a really good rock’n’roll band, without any pretensions. Then, of course when Bobby Keys joins in, it’s, uh, a-heheheh… it’s just like being at home.”

Saxophonist Keys was Richards’ old partner in crime and misdemeanour from the Stones’ 1969-72 imperial flush until Jagger fired him from the 1973 European tour, and he would play on two Talk Is Cheap tracks. The core of the band, however, had a more studiedly professional calibre. Jordan brought in Charley Drayton, a young drummer and bassist with serious jazz pedigree, while Richards picked ace session guitarist Waddy Wachtel (Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt) and keyboardist Ivan Neville, a cousin of the New Orleans Neville Brothers. Collectively, they became the X-Pensive Winos.

“We started to come up with some interesting songs,” says Richards.

One of the most interesting was You Don’t Move Me, clearly aimed at Keith’s erstwhile Glimmer Twin. “Why do you think you got no friends/You drove them all around the bend… Now you wanna throw the dice/You already crapped out twice… What makes you so greedy/Makes you so seedy… It’s no longer funny/It’s bigger than money/You just don’t move me anymore.” Hearing the lyrics read back to him today, Richards laughs.

“I’m pissed off with Mick and I couldn’t hide it! I’ve been stood up! It’s a jilted song. Yeah, I was venting, basically. The songs were coming out like that. That’s the way it is. So you do it.”

Recorded initially in Canada, then the Hit Factory in New York, with a detour South to record the Memphis Horns with Willie Mitchell, Talk Is Cheap saw a stellar supporting cast queuing up to help Keith open the vents: Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Maceo Parker, LaBelle’s Sarah Dash, the E Street Band’s Patti Scialfa, auxiliary Stones pianist Chuck Leavell, former Stones guitarist Mick Taylor. Even Keith’s dad Bert, with whom he’d become reconciled after two decades’ non-communication, came to hang out.

Most notable of all the contributors, however, especially in the specific context of Richards’ life trajectory, was Johnnie Johnson. The pianist who in 1953 hired a young guitarist named Chuck Berry to join his band, was by the mid-’80s a bus driver in St Louis. Berry had named Johnny B Goode in his honour, but Johnson’s writing and arrangements on the likes of No Particular Place To Go, Sweet Little Sixteen, Roll Over Beethoven, Rock And Roll Music and many others went uncredited, and his alcoholism eventually led to a split with Berry in 1973, after which his inimitable playing was confined to the St Louis blues clubs. But kismet offered him a rascal’s smile in 1986, when film director Taylor Hackford approached Richards to be the musical producer for his Chuck Berry concert documentary Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll. Beyond corralling Steve Jordan, Richards admits he was floundering, until he remembered a piece of information given him by Ian Stewart, the Stones’ recently deceased co-founder and consiglieri.

“Stu had said, ‘Never forget, Keith, that Johnnie Johnson is alive and playing in St Louis’. So I just found the right moment with Chuck, to say, ‘Uh, do you know if Johnnie Johnson is still around?’ Chuck says, ‘Yeeeah man, I think he’s in town.’ Now, we both know, but we’re jousting around. ‘What about the chance of getting Johnnie in on this thing?’ Chuck’s like, ‘Yeeeah, I’ll give him a call…’ It was one of the best things I ever did – because out of that, Johnnie Johnson resurrected his career.”

Years later, Richards recalls, he suggested to Johnson that he seek recompense from Berry for his input to rock’n’roll’s foundational canon. “Johnnie told me how those records were made. ‘Chuck would have all these words, and I would…’ I said, That’s called ‘co-writing’, Johnnie! It did go to court, and it went in Chuck’s favour, but I think there was a substantial readjustment in studio fees, which I was very happy to help out on. Of course, me bringing that up really pissed Chuck off. Chuck’s not used to having anybody telling him what to do. But we got over that. We’re both prickly creatures. Heheheheh…”

Keith brushes a little cigarette ash from his black and white patterned scarf, then lights up another. He’s rocking the headband, but that piratical chic of Keef legend is dialled down these days in favour of more sober, albeit no less idiosyncratic, apparel: combining wedge trainers and black trousers with a flesh-coloured top and a navy blue shirt adorned with red hearts; more a blouse, really, quite possibly from the ‘old lady’s drawer, as per longtime tradition.

For an electric person less than a week away from turning 75, Keith Richards is in remarkable shape. This could very well be related to the fact that his birthday also marks the 35th anniversary of his marriage to Patti Hansen.

How do you feel about birthdays?

I bury the birthday bit these days in lieu of the anniversary. Or I try to. The family will be arriving in the next few days. So I shall have to pretend to be happy to be 75. Actually I don’t mind. It’s just weird to be 70-odd. You wait until you try it on, spring chicken!

Has age brought wisdom?

Oh, to a certain extent I think it has to. I mean, you didn’t get all this far by learning nothing. *(Leans in, conspiratorially) I said some of the wisest things when I was very young. Heheheh.

What might be an example of that young man’s wisdom?

“Not guilty, your honour” *(laughs) – and getting away with it. Wisdom? Hmm. *Experience. Obviously you collect it, but probably the best way of dealing with that is not to get totally locked into your own generational time frame. Luckily for me, I’ve always had kids and now grandkids. I know what the little buggers are up to. So I’m always getting feedback from loads of different ages, about what’s happening.

Children can be useful – they instinctively know how the TV remote control works.

Oh yeah, on that technical end, I’m pretty illiterate. I rely upon my kids or the wife to… just look it up! Google it or something! I don’t touch those things.

So Keef don’t tweet?

(Grimaces) I’ve never liked phones, you see. Maybe that’s just because, being so-called famous since I’ve been 19, the phone is always ringing and it’s always somebody that wants something. So with the phone, I would only ever phone out. So when they brought in mobile phones, I’m like, Oh no…! At least before I could say, ‘I wasn’t in!’ But now… Everybody who knows me knows I don’t have a phone.

What’s the secret to a long, happy marriage?

I found somebody that could put up with me, man! You don’t run away from that. Bless her heart.

Upon release in October 1988, Talk Is Cheap was warmly received, amid relief that at least one member of The Rolling Stones still knew how a Rolling Stones album ought to sound. Where Dirty Work had fruitlessly aped the era’s synthetic approximation of rock’n’roll, here was the real gristle and spit, an emphatic return to the source. Richards used his abrasive voice as a textural adjunct to his riffs, jabbing out bare phrases like a prize fighter revelling in the grind. But it was a collection of great performances rather than great songs. Just as Mick Jagger’s solo albums offered surface melody but no edge, in favouring feel over function Talk Is Cheap proved the only thing Keith Richards really lacked was what only his estranged partner could provide.

“I think that’s probably true,” he says. “Also, I got a much better understanding of what Mick does and how the front man feels. You gotta be out there singing every goddamn line. I can always duck and dive, given my role in the Stones, but it certainly woke me up to how much the frontman feels pressure. Working with the Winos, I realised that I needed a kick up the arse. There was more to do than just riding the Stones bus all the time.”

Evidently, the lessons learned, and the respect, were mutual. Just three months after releasing his solo album, Richards met Jagger for peace talks at Eddy Grant’s studio in Barbados. Within weeks The Rolling Stones were recording Steel Wheels. It would be the last album with Bill Wyman, but in every other aspect, especially its accompanying megatour, this set the template for all subsequent Stones activity. Interestingly, the reflective ballad Almost Hear You Sigh featured the writing credit ‘Jagger/Richards/Jordan’: a relic from the Talk Is Cheap sessions now became fuel for the rebirth of The Rolling Stones. Had Richards deliberately held this song back, to show Jagger just what he’d been missing?

“I think with the Winos I wasn’t sure how to sing Almost Hear You Sigh,” he says, carefully. “So that gave me extra time, to pass it on to Mick and say, ‘Hey – it goes like this.’ With Mick and I, sometimes it’s the friction – it’s like the oyster and the little bit of sand. Maybe the time apart had given us both time to think. Also, the fact that we’d each done something by ourselves spurred us to see what we could make out of that together. *Steel Wheels was a damn good album.”

It was during the Steel Wheels tour that the Stones first performed Some Girls’ much-loved Keith vocal showcase Before They Make Me Run. Written in the wake of his Toronto bust, the song was Keith’s roistering but rueful adieu to the junked up life that had been his reality for the best part of a decade: “Booze and pills and powders, you can choose your medicine/Well here’s another goodbye to another good friend.” It’s stayed there or thereabouts in the sets ever since – on the No Filter tour’s 2018 European leg, alternating with Happy, his most celebrated frontman spot. But while the latter song’s guileless hedonism buffs up the ‘Keef’ horse brass, the Keith Richards who sits before us today surely owes more to Before They Make Me Run’s survivor’s wisdom.

“It holds a special place in my heart,” he acknowledges. “There’s several reasons, one of them quite mechanical: it’s so easy, and such a groove to play on-stage, that you always wanna play it. You can feel the band loving it. At the same time, it’s one of my best songs, I really enjoy singing it, and it still seems fresh to me.”

It’s you collecting your medal and walking away, bidding farewell to a life that you knew was no longer tenable?

“It is. It was all part of getting that monkey off the back.” Richards seems thoughtful for a moment. “But I’m always bidding farewell, ever since ‘This could be the last time’.” He smiles. “It’s a refrain that runs through this band – it promises to say farewell, but never says goodbye.”