When I interviewed Keith Richards, I was going insane writing How To Be A Woman, and working seven-day weeks for months on end – but couldn’t let pass the opportunity to meet the man who, more than any other on Earth, could claim to be rock’n’roll on two, very thin, legs. I mean, really thin legs. It’s like two bits of string covered in denim.

This was another time I was attempting to give up smoking, but was derailed by someone legendary offering a fag. The next time I tried to give up, it was when Benedict Cumberbatch, dressed as Sherlock, offered me a Marlie outside 221b Baker Street. WHO WOULD EVER SAY NO TO THESE CIGARETTES?

I meet Keith Richards on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It feels only right to inform him of this.

‘International Talk Like a Pirate Day?’ Keith says, with his wolfy grin, wholly amused. ‘ARRRGHH! ARRRHHH! Oh, I can’t do it without the eye patch,’ he sighs, mock-petulantly. ‘I can’t speak like a pirate without an eye patch. Or being pissed – HARGH! HARGH!’

Keith Richards.

But of course, he can: to be frank, everything Keith Richards says is in the cadence of Pirate. With his black eyes, bandana and earring, even at sixty-seven, he has the air of a rakish gentleman forced to steal a frigate and abscond from polite society – due to some regrettable misunderstanding about a virgin daughter, a treasure map and a now-smouldering Admiralty building. You can see why he was the inspiration for Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Richards apparently taught Depp how to walk around a corner, drunk: ‘You keep your back to the wall at all times.’

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Today, Richards is a pirate in on-shore mode. The mood is tavern- ish. Even though we are in the Royal Suite of Claridge’s, which has a grand piano (‘Shall I have a go? You can bootleg it – HARGH HARGH HARGH’), and so many rooms we never even go in half of them, Richards still brings an air of a man who’s left his parrot, cutlass and Smee in the hallway – lest he need to make a quick getaway. On walking into the room he spots me, and does a double-take.

‘I had no idea I was going to talk to a lady,’ he says, ordering a vodka and orange. ‘I need a drink when I do that.’

Spotting a packet of Marlboro on the table, he eschews them, and brings out his own supplies.

‘Those are the ones that say they’ll kill you,’ he says, pointing at the pack on the table, with their large ‘SMOKING KILLS’ label. ‘They are English, and they would kill you; they’re bloody awful.’

‘Are they different to American ones?’ I ask.

‘Oh yes. You take them apart, if you’re going to roll a hash joint, and there’s bits of stalk and crap in there. It’s unacceptable to a smoker.’

Keith Richards and Charile Watts.

He takes one of his own out of his pocket, and lights it. The smell of the smoke mingles with his cologne.

‘What have you got on?’ I inquire.

‘I’ve got a hard-on – I didn’t know you could smell it,’ he says – and then starts laughing again, in a fug of smoke. ‘That’s a rock’n’roll joke – one of Jerry Lee Lewis’s,’ he explains, almost apologetically. ‘We’re at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, and Jerry’s got his rig on – frilly shirt and tuxedo – and he’s coming down the steps and this chick rushed out and was like, “You smell great – what have you got on?” And Jerry says, “I’ve got a hard-on – I didn’t know you could smell it.” Pure rock’n’roll.’

Keith takes another drag on his fag, beaming.

‘’Ere,’ he says, suddenly concerned, looking at the cigarette smoke. ‘I hope you’re not ... allergic.’

Keith on stage in 1990 with the Stones. Image via Facebook.

Apologising for a hard-on joke, and worrying that a journalist might develop a tickly cough from passive smoking is a long way from Richards’ interviews in his outlaw hey-day – he once spent forty sleepless hours with the NME journalist Nick Kent, ‘pinballing’ around London in a Ferrari, and consuming ferocious quantities of cocaine and heroin – a cocktail quaintly referred to, by Richards, as ‘the breakfast of champions’.

But then, Richards has mellowed considerably, over the years – possibly out of necessity, if one considers how difficult it would be to parallel-park in modern-day London on a 1.5mg speedball. Giving up heroin in 1978, after his fifth bust, Richards reveals today that he’s finally given up cocaine, too – in 2006, after he fell from a tree in Fiji, and had to have brain surgery.

‘Yeah – that was cocaine I had to give up for that,’ he says, with an equanimous sigh. ‘You’re like – “I’ve got the message, oh Lord.” He raps on the metal plate in his head. It makes a dull, thonking sound.

‘I’ve given up everything now – which is a trip in itself,’ he says, with the kind of Robert Newton-esque eye-roll that indicates how interesting merely getting out of bed, sober, can be after forty years of caning it. Not that Richards is disapproving of getting high, of course:

‘I’m just waiting for them to invent something more interesting, hahaha,’ he says. ‘I’m all ready to road-test it when they do.’

Richards’ image is of the last man standing at the long party that was the sixties – and the man who’d invited everyone over in the first place, anyway. During his junkie years, Richards spent over a decade on the ‘People Most Likely to Die’ list – ‘I used to read it, check I was still on there. I was on it longer than anyone else. Badge of honour, hur hur.’

Keith Richards was sentenced to one years imprisonment for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his premises, 1967. Image via Getty.

But having spent from 1968–1978 with everyone expecting him to keel over in a hotel (the classic Richards quote: ‘Which I never did: it’s the height of impoliteness to turn blue in someone else’s bathroom’), Richards has now, ironically, gone on to be one of those people we now think will just ... live forever. His tough, leathery, indestructible air gives the suggestion that heroin, whisky and cocaine, when taken in large enough quantities, have a kind of ... preservative quality. Richards has been cured in a marinade of pharmaceuticals. He both gives off the aura of, and bears an undeniable physical resemblance to, the air-dried Inca mummies of Chachapoya.

‘Well, I’m not putting death on the agenda,’ he says, with another grin. ‘I don’t want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet, hurgh hurgh. He’s the guy I’m gonna see, isn’t it – I’m not going to The Other Place, let’s face it, HARGH!’

Keith's book.

We’re here today because having – resolutely, persistently and, in many ways, unfeasibly – not died, Richards has finally published his autobiography, Life.

When Richards announced the project, he was subject to a massive bidding war that ended with Richards getting a £4.8m advance – acknowledgement of the fact that, barring Bowie or McCartney deciding to write their stories, Richards’ was the motherlode, in terms of understanding that most incredible of decades – the sixties – from the inside; recounted by one of the very people pinballing the psychedelic charabanc off the bounds of ‘decent’ society.

‘Have you read it?’ he asks – trying to look casual, but unable to suppress an incongruous note of eagerness.

‘Oh God, yes,’ I say. ‘Oh man, it’s a total hoot. Really, really amazing.’

Mick and Keith on stage in the 70's - via Getty.

‘Oh good,’ he says, relaxing. ‘You know, you start off thinking you can spin a few yarns – and by the time you get to the end of it, it’s turned into something much more. One memory triggers another, and before you know it, there’s 600 rounds per second coming out.’

‘Did you want to write your version because other books on you, and the Stones, had got it wrong?’ I ask.

‘I read Bill Wyman’s book, but after three or four chapters – where he’s going [assumes dull, priggish Wyman monotone] “And by that point, I only had £600 left in Barclays Bank” – I was like, “Oh, Bill.” You know what I mean? You’re far more interesting than that; do me a favour. And Mick attempted it once, and ended up giving the money back. It was ten, fifteen years ago, and he’d keep ringing up and going [does Mick impression], “’Ere, what were we doing on August 15th nineteen-sixty- somefink?” I’d be like, “Mick, you’re writing it. I can’t remember.” And knowing Mick, there would have been a morass of blank chapters because there would have been a lot of stuff he would have wanted to put to one side, hur hur.’

Richards is dismissive of Stones books written by non-Stones – claiming the authors would have been ‘too scared’ to write the truth: ‘Who’s really going to put Mick Jagger, or Keith Richards, up against a wall and say “I demand you answer this?”’ he says, eyes suddenly flashing black.

‘Because, you know...’ He takes a drag on his fag. ‘You end up dead like that.’

Image via Facebook.

The reason Life attracted such a bidding war is because the life of Keith Richards and the Stones is one that – even in today’s modern, anything-goes pop-cultural climate – takes in a still-astonishing amount of, for want of a better word, scandal. ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?’, the Redlands bust, Marianne Faithfull in her fur rug, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’, the still-controversial death of Brian Jones, the Hell’s Angels running amok at Altamont, the Marianne Faithfull/Mick Jagger/Anita Pallenberg/Richards four-way love-rectangle, numerous arrests, heroin, cocaine, acid, whisky, infidelity, groupies, Margaret Trudeau, riots, billions of dollars, and four decades of sweaty fans, screaming without end.

And, at the centre of it all, arguably the greatest rock’n’roll band that ever existed. ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Start Me Up’, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Satisfaction’ – each one with the ability to alone answer the question, ‘Mummy – what is rock’n’roll?’, and, when taken en masse, the reason why Keith Richards is referred to, almost factually, as ‘The Living Riff’.

For those expecting an explosive story, Life certainly doesn’t disappoint: it opens in 1975, with Richards in a diner in Fordyce, Arkansas, about to be busted for the fourth time. Written like a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with infinitely more resources for getting wasted – Richards is driving to the next gig because he’s ‘bored’ of the Stones’ private jet – it joins Richards at the high point of his caner years.

Keith, driving in his Bentley. Image via Facebook.

As Richards describes it, he is the sole long-haired man in a room full of rednecks, and is basically wearing a hat made of drugs (‘There was a flap at the side in which I’d stowed hash, Tuinals and coke’), and driving a car made of drugs (‘I’d spent hours packing the side-panel with coke, grass, peyote and mescaline’).

High on cocaine (‘Merck cocaine – the fluffy, pharmaceutical blow’ as he describes it, lovingly), Richards is arrested, dragged to the courthouse, and becomes the centre of an international news incident (‘There were 5000 Stones fans outside the courthouse’) – until Mick Jagger sweet-talks the local governor, and bails him out.

‘Mick was always good with the locals,’ Richards writes, half-admiringly, half-condescendingly – like a pirate captain commending a handsome cabin-boy who has the ability to ‘talk posh’ to the gentry.

The following 620 pages scarcely let up from there. Although things tail off in the mid-eighties – as they invariably do in the stories of sixties icons. By then, they are retired from the heart of the storm to their mansions, and are merely watching Madonna from the sidelines, puzzled – the first half of Life, up u