Keith Richards: A users' manual

A couple of months ago - and not for the first time - Keith Richards got seriously out of his tree. Which got Nick Coleman to thinking... What exactly does it take to be Keith, aka the Human Riff? Is it the sound? The look? The chicks? The drugs? Or just a certain je ne sais keef?

What goes through the mind of a rock colossus as he falls from a coconut tree? Depends on your rock colossus, of course. So let's be specific. What passed through Keith Richards's mind as he made his short, as-the-crow-plummets journey to the beach last April? Did the whole of his life flash by in that second and a half? In what order did it flash? Did the flash begin with Spitfires circling over Dartford, or end there? Did he flash on the good he's done or the bad (or are ethics not relevant in the moment of life's consummation)? Did he re-dream the riff to "Satisfaction"? Did his cheeks smart again to the sting of Mountie palms? This time, did his toy Colt 45 have real bullets in the magazine? Or was that second-and-a-half a riot of cold, slapping, material panic? Jesus, man, this is it! Who'da thunk it? Rolling Stone stone-dead in the sand in his smalls, his bald patch an arbour for crabs.

How's that gonna play in the papers? How's that gonna look? We can be confident that his descent would not have been fraught with questions of the self-doubting kind.

For a man whose life has been a continuation of his style by other means (and whose style is absolutely continuous with the doings of his surprisingly long life), the question "who or what or why am I?" will not have been asked in that moment of crisis, because the answer is so bleedin' obvious: I am Keith Richards therefore I am. Keith Richards is Keith Richards is Keith Richards. Boom! The man is a fully achieved realisation of the idea of the man.

At least that's the way he'd like to see it. It's certainly the way we like to see him. Richards - the Human Riff - is what you get when you have the time, the money, the status, the talent, the luck, the wit, the resilience, the selfishness, the modesty, the arrogance and, crucially, the diehard romanticism to, in the words of every Big Brother contestant, really be yourself. Camille Paglia may analyse her "role model for 40 years" in academic terms - Keith Richards is a tortured Dionysian poet gifted with the courage to explore the dark places - but what she really means is that Keith, unlike most of us, has been gifted with the bollocks and the wherewithal to do what we'd all like to do: to carry on responding to the world as we did as children, and get away with it.

O tempora, o mores! Michael Jackson was not the late 20th century's Peter Pan; Keith Richards was. And guess what? Peter Pan in the real world is Captain Hook.

And we oblige Keith. We certainly enjoy suspecting that some deep, authenticating honesty lies coiled at the heart of that pirate fantasy. What was it that Bob Dylan wrote? "To live outside the law, you must be honest." That is where our fantasy of Keith meshes with his fantasy of himself. It's because of his perceived "honesty" that Keith "gets away with it".

Let's be clear about this. Doris Richards' little boy is not a self-deluding twerp, pursuing the rock'n'roll lifestyle as a career option. He is not a moron. He has charm and sophistication. And when he's not in a kingly bait, he has really rather nice manners. In fact, as cartoon pirates go, he has quite a balanced personality. This Byronic decadent's prefered meal is shepherd's pie. The louche transgressor has always, as a matter of course, discouraged others from doing hard drugs. The drug-addled waster is a devoted father to his children. And he plays guitar just like ringing a bell.

So how does one go about being Keith Richards? With great difficulty, my dear. Here, for those daft enough to want to try, is a basic user's guide.

The Background

No aspirant Keith Richards is going to find this part easy. If you're old enough, you should have grown out of such aspirations anyway. However, if you are of an age, you are ideally placed to advise your grandchildren, who should be ripe for the fray at some point in the next 15 years. What advice should you give them? Why, to live their lives to the max, of course, and to take responsibility for their actions.

Most of them, anyway.

You see, if you really want to be Keith Richards you need to have been born in the 1940s, preferably during the war. Ideally, you'll have been raised in a sub-industrial suburb of a major city, with easy access to an estuary. You need to have experienced rationed austerity to a point just short of malnourishment - your generation is going to be the shortest in stature since the 19th century. You will also feel constant indignation at the dire shortage of confectionery. Class? Doesn't matter so long as you're not a toff.

Keith Richards' background was by no means hard-core working class. But neither was he as middle class as his best pal Mike Jagger, who wasn't exactly Hampstead Garden Suburb himself. So forget that class shit, man.

The point is to have it basic but loving. Dad might not register your existence as a sentient creature but Mum will, in spades. And hey, being an only child doesn't hurt any. Self-sufficiency is an important quality in both cowboys and pirates (especially when Mum's forked out for a Stetson, six-guns and holsters, and lets you wear 'em to bed).

Musical input? It is of vital importance to have had a cool grandpa with a cool name: Theodore Augustus (Gus) Dupree, saxophonist, guitarist, fiddle player, band leader, "the funkiest old coot you could ever meet". And it is an advantage to have been a decent boy treble and sung for Queenie in Westminster Abbey. Once you've nailed Stainer's Crucifixion, the intro to "Tumbling Dice" is a piece of pizza.

But above all, you must have timing. Ideally, you should turn 13 in 1956. Elvis has his first UK hit in May of that year. Blam! Everything changes. America, blackness, loudness. Suddenly, the Spangles shortage doesn't seem quite so life-threatening. After that it's a short step for the inquiring mind: Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson - watch those blues boys export their wares up that estuary like so much contraband.

Hmm, smuggling - now there's a way of life...

The Look

Keith Richards did not always look like that. In fact, until 1965 - two years after the Stones' first hit - he was a spotty herbert with sticky-out ears. Sure, Sidcup College of Art had taught him a thing or two about the fetishising gaze; yeah, a pair of Cuban heels give you a lift. But a spotty herbert is a spotty herbert is a spotty herbert, until... well, until you take charge of the situation.

Keith begins to become Keef around the time of "Satisfaction", his first great authorial moment. It is also around this time that Brian Jones, nominal leader of the Rolling Stones, starts to lose the plot in the face of Keith's colonising creative relationship with Mike (now Mick) Jagger. Keith is now the fulcrum of the group. Over the next three years, as Brian slides into disorientation and complete uselessness, Keith assumes Brian's role as director of musical operations, nicks his girlfriend and pinches his style.

There's a famous photograph of both Brian and Keith, out for a mince in early '67, the one looking ripe for a good slapping in his frock coat, broached cravat and floppy hat; the other, dressed almost identically, looking decidedly sinister (slap him at your peril - surely that can't be a Maltese Cross hanging off his breast pocket!). One of these men will be dead within 18 months, the other widely considered the coolest white man on the planet.

Hard-ass androgyny is the key. From the moment Richards "rescues" the German model/actress/countess Anita Pallenberg ("Glenda Hindenberg" to her best mate Marianne Faithfull) from Jones's trembling clutches, the die is cast. It has been argued that to all intents and purposes Pallenberg becomes the sixth Stone at this point, taking over the aesthetic-directorial reins relinquished by the group's first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Whatever the truth of the matter, Keith starts wearing Anita's clothes. His hair goes native. His jaw goes Cro-Magnon. The Byronic-Dionysian Pirate Prince of Darkness forms orc-ishly in the druggy penumbra of No 3 Cheyne Walk. Forever afterwards rock'n'rollers will express their alpha-malehood in the floaty deployment of silk scarves and 18th-century wrists.

The Sound

To Keith, this is the most important part of the trip.

Keith's sound is his where his soul resides. It's not an easy thing to replicate. First, you need a crisp, straight-backed drummer who presses up against the beat with hygienic precision. It helps if he dresses sharply. You then need to hang off that pulse like a monkey off a branch, pushing, pulling, subtly shifting your centre of gravity as you go, so that the whole tree starts to develop its own internal groove. Let's call it intra-swing. It's all about "feel". Yet central to that groove is a rigorously controlled and balanced tonal weight - you are both ballast and drive. How technically tricky is that? Eat your oaky hearts out, you 18th-century frigate-builders.

But Keith has another sound too. His voice. When he speaks, a tramp steamer lugs up the estuary to your brain. The steamer is freighted with hipster air so fugged up with fag smoke, Bourbon fumes and dragged-out vowels that it is sometimes only comprehensible several seconds after the hissing stops. Yet in that fug you can hear its provenance, clear as a bell: art school, Chicago, drugs, Jamaica, the range, the Thames estuary. It is a kindly voice, funnily enough.

The Mates

Loyalty is a key value. But to be Keith Richards you also have to be able to ditch your mates at the drop of a cowboy hat, especially the ones who let you down by compromising the integrity of the Stones. Let's face it, there's only ever been one true mate (apart from Woody, and Woody only when he isn't being a twat) - he's shorter than he thinks, he's a tremendous snob, he's up himself, he's manipulative, breadheaded and camp as a row of tents. But hell, man, he's still my favourite singer and - go on, twist my arm - I love his bony arse.

He is an arsehole, though.

Peter Rudge, Seventies tour manager: "Mick would die for Keith, and I think Keith would die for Mick."

The Chicks

The chicks have had to put up with a lot. For a start, Keith spent a decade in the bog. "He used to spend hour after hour in the bathroom - he used to write and play guitar in there," said Anita Pallenberg once, discreetly omitting to mention Keith's strenuous bath-time fitness regime and flower-arranging.

But despite all that, Richards appears to have treated his women with fierce loyalty - to the point where he was quite prepared to overlap girlfriends, notably Pallenberg, Uschi Obermeier, Lily Wenglass Green and his present beloved wife, Patti Hansen. Even as she fell apart through the Seventies, Pallenberg remained a compelling figure in the Stone's life. Victor Bockris implies in his well-sourced biography that it was only during the shooting of Performance in 1968 - while Anita got down to vigorous thespian business with Mick on a daily basis - that Keith fully embraced for the first time the painkilling fog of heroin.

"I've never been a big fucker," Keith is said to have said on one occasion, of his appetites (NB causal linkage to his excessive flower-arranging has not been proven). Yet the word is Keith has by and large been a gentleman. He has certainly always been a devoted father, if not a very practical one.

The Drugs

Weed, quaaludes, cocaine, heroin, methadone, booze, fags, music. He is no longer a junkie, not since the Eighties, or so we are led to believe, but last time we looked he still drank for England, and it wasn't coconut milk.

If your quest to become Keith Richards is primarily frustrated because you weren't born at the right time and place, it'll ultimately be thwarted by your inability to ingest sufficient quantities of medication to the tortured Dionysian soul. Not without killing yourself anyway. So give it up. He's a one-off. Get a shot by listening to him play the intro to "Tumbling Dice" and leave it at that.

The Stones once gave their recording engineer Keith Harwood, who'd been killed in an accident, a rather strange epitaph on an album cover. "Those whom the gods love grow young," they wrote in pink. It was wishful thinking of course. m

Essential List Of Keith Wannabes

Johnny Thunders

Louche, druggy, slovenly, dead. Thunders was the lead guitarist with the New York Dolls and he did the Keef thing to the hilt (although his hair didn't always make the trip). "You can't put your arms around a memory," he sang, rather affectingly. Credibility undermined by a fatal inability to stay alive.

Lucinda Williams

Tattooed bohemian country-rock as unfettered Rolling Stones parody (Gram Parsons subsection). She really means it too, having just enough substance to counterbalance the look-at-me-bleed theatricalism of her style. "Real live bleeding fingers" indeed.

Chrissie Hynde

She's got the moves, the songs, the romanticism, the fringe, the attitude, the intelligence, the cheekbones, the temper, the Telecaster. The only thing she didn't get was the heroin habit. She knew people who did, though. Just imagine her and Keith having babies. Scary or what?

Ronnie Wood

He's got the hair, he's got the accent, he's got the lovability. And the trousers. He's even got the next-door bunk. But Ronnie's brains are mixed by Windsor and Newton. And he tries too hard.

Joe Perry

Aerosmith were Seventies/Eighties Stones clones with bigger hair and spanglier trousers. Steve Tyler (father of Arwen Morningstar) was their big-lipped Jagger, Joe Perry their Keith Richards. At least, that's what their stylist thought.

Mick Jones

Punk's own Keef, probably to fellow Clash-mates' abiding embarrassment. He had the right kind of chops though, and the hair was good while it lasted. And there flickered in Jones that flame of outsider romanticism without which no man can aspire in a Keitherly direction. "Stay Free" was his Keithiest moment.

Nick Kent

English rock journo as rocker; the original and to some the best. Hung out with Keith, took drugs with Keith, dressed like Keith, wrote about Keith without sentimentality. Even had his own group for a while, the Subterraneans. Awfully scrawny, though. Cecil Beaton would have thrown coconuts at him.

Johnny Depp

Keith was scheduled to play Johnny's dad in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, until more important piratical activities intervened. Now Johnny reveals that Keith and he have spent quality time together dressing up as pirates, with a view to Keith appearing in the third episode of the franchise.

Patti Smith

It should not be lost on you that those who score most highly in this list are women. Smith, right, certainly had the smarts. And she knew the right photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who immortalised her as the ultimate poetic rock'n'roll androgyne: part Baudelaire, part Dylan, part Sinatra, huge part Keith. She rocked. She occasionally rhymed.

The Rolling Stones' European tour begins on Tuesday in Milan; the Stones play Twickenham Stadium on 20 and 22 August. For more information: www.rollingstones.com