Keith Richards Born December 18, 1943

Biography

Keith Richards grew up fascinated by guitars and - when rock 'n' roll emerged as a new musical expression in his early teens - with the American Blues genre. A chance meeting with infant school associate Mick Jagger on the train station at Dartford revealed a shared interest in this music, which led to friendship and then to the formation of The Rolling Stones with Brian Jones and Ian Stewart.

The rest is quite literally history. A lot of that history emanates from Keith Richards’ extraordinary ability to develop rhythm and harmony through his guitar, often in collaboration with another player – variously Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood.

This technique of double play – which Keith refers to as ‘the ancient art of weaving’ – is based on the principle that the separation of lead and rhythm guitar play is unnatural. Those ‘roles’, commonly adopted in two guitar bands, divide and separate the harmony and structural chords from the melody lines between the two players.

For Keith, this is absurd: 'You don’t go into a guitar shop and ask to buy a lead guitar or a rhythm guitar – it’s a guitar.’ It was this, as much as anything else, that led to a breakdown in communication between Keith and Mick Taylor in the mid-seventies: ‘If you want to fuck around with the top three strings, fine, but my guitar’s got six strings and they’re all there for a reason’.

The arrival of Ronnie Wood in his wake, a guitarist more at home with playing song lines and harmonies with equal enthusiasm and facility, restored the weaving of The Rolling Stones sound.

Then there’s the songwriting. Having started their career as a cover band, copying and creating versions of their favourite artists – Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed – The Rolling Stones started writing their own material at the insistence of manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw that this was a massive and untapped source of revenue.

It also turned out to be a massive and until then untapped source of classic rock and pop tunes from the fertile musical minds of Jagger and Richards. Their compositions have sold hundreds of millions, and continue to get extensive radio play worldwide.

Of the other part of Keith Richards’ glorious life to date, there’s not a lot to say, true or untrue – and most of it is, obviously, untrue - that hasn’t been said elsewhere already. We’re all about the music over here, and we’ll leave the Pirate sideshow that goes with being the musical genius in The Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band In The World to others.

For the moment anyway.