Life by Keith Richards (with James Fox)
Ghost writer James Fox has admitted that it was a tough gig to get Keith Richards to stay still and focused long enough to tell his life story. Organising his rambling and random memories into a coherent narrative must have been a mammoth task.
There’s a fair bit of padding in these 500+ pages but Fox has done a pretty good job in showing what makes Richards tick and helping to explain how he has managed to survive the junkie lifestyle of scoring, tripping and going through “more cold turkeys than there are freezers”.
There are a few lapses such when Luc Godard is clunkily introduced as “the great French cinematic innovator” but there’s no mistaking Keef as the author of the vitriolic put down of Brian Jones as a “rotting attachment”. Similarly, only Richards could have described his guitar technique as “a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing”.
Richards puts his survival down to the fact that he is good at reading his own body and for following a principle of only using the finest cocaine and purest heroine, refusing what he calls “Mexican shoe scrapings”.
While, ultimately he’s unambiguous in stating that “the life of a junkie is not recommended to anyone”, the chances of him being used in a ‘just say no’ anti-drugs campaign is remote. Continue reading
