No other band has defined rock music like The Rolling Stones, together for 56 money-spinning, blues-crunching years, and now about to embark on a European tour.
At the creative heart of the Stones are two men — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — who met at primary school and who, as teenagers, formed one of the most enduring partnerships in contemporary music.
And for nearly all that time, they have feuded over everything, from the petty (Richards’s time-keeping and Jagger’s love of camp) to the explosive (Mick accepting a knighthood and Keith’s drug addiction).
At the creative heart of the Stones are two men — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — who met at primary school and who, as teenagers, formed one of the most enduring partnerships in contemporary music – pictured together in 1985
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on tour in Stockholm, Sweden last year
Women, too, have been a flashpoint. They shared the favours of Sixties beauties including Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg (‘It was kind of like that in those days’, Richards once said), and have fallen out over others, notably Jagger’s first wife Bianca, whom Richards heartily disliked.
Today, Richards, 74, who performs a wicked impression of Jagger’s waggling dance moves, can’t help himself when it comes to delivering public put-downs of his bandmate.
In 2010, his observation that Jagger, surely the most celebrated lothario in showbiz, has a ‘tiny todger’ made worldwide headlines and caused gigantic upset in the band.
Love rival: Anita Pallenberg pictured with Mick Jagger (left) and Keith Richards (right)
Anita Pallenberg dated both Brian Jones and Keith Richards. She is pictured with Richards (left) in 1969 and right with Jones in 1965
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood playing ‘Tattoo You’ at Wembley Stadium in 1982
This week he was at it again, telling the Wall Street Journal he did not approve of Jagger fathering a child with ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick, two years ago, at the age of 73.
‘Mick’s a randy old b*****d,’ Keith said. ‘It’s time for the snip — you can’t be a father at that age. Those poor kids!’
Within hours Richards was back-tracking: with a tour imminent his comments have made an already difficult situation all the more tricky.
‘I deeply regret the comments I made about Mick in the WSJ which were completely out of line,’ Keith tweeted. ‘I have of course apologised to him in person.’
Mick Jagger fathered a child with ballet dancer Melanie Hamric (left) two years ago, at the age of 73. His ex-partner, Marianne Faithfull (right) once said: ‘Of all Mick’s relationships, the only one that really means anything to him is with Keith’
In an interview in a British newspaper yesterday, he went further to suggest at least a veneer of camaraderie. ‘Mick and I live off the fire between us,’ he said. ‘We were made for each other. It’s like putting on an old glove, man, you know.’
But he concedes they ’stay away from each other’ when not on Stones business.
Those close to the band tell the Mail they expect the deep freeze between them to continue. They will travel separately with their own entourages on tour and never visit each other’s dressing rooms.
They are reported to barely speak, and any association is for business only. Yet Marianne Faithfull once said: ‘Of all Mick’s relationships, the only one that really means anything to him is with Keith.’
So why does Richards keep aggravating Jagger — and will their toxic rivalry finally kill off The Rolling Stones?
CAMP VERSUS COOL
The relationship dates to April 1951, when seven-year-old Keith started at Wentworth County Primary in Dartford, Kent. Legend has it he found Jagger showing off his chemistry set to teachers and Richards thought him a ‘hopeless weed’.
They bumped into each other again as teenagers at Dartford station in 1960, and two years later The Rolling Stones were formed.
Initially, they were close in every sense. The band’s founder, the late Brian Jones, once came back to the cheap two-room digs where all three were staying and found Keith and Mick huddled in bed together for warmth.
When fame hit in 1964, conflict took root. Jagger, with his androgynous look, provocative pout and hip clothes, became an object of frenzied desire for teenage fans — and loved it.
It was all rather baffling to Richards, who had always exuded an effortless cool, was devoted to the blues and couldn’t abide teenyboppers.
From this point on, each thought he was the soul of the Stones; Jagger with his overtly sexual presence on stage, Richards with his drugs and rock ‘n’ roll wildness.
As Keith put it in a 2010 documentary: ‘Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow. Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around.
‘Mick’s rock, I’m roll.’
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, pictured performing as part of the Rolling Stones in concert at Ciudad Deportiva, Havana, Cuba in 2016
The Rolling Stones together in their hotel at 2 a.m. after a British concert, 19th May 1976. Charlie Watts, keyboard player Billy Preston, percussionist Ollie Brown with Marlon Richards (Keith’s six-year-old son), Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood
BELITTLING BRENDA
Ever since the Seventies, Richards has disparaged Jagger by referring to him as ‘Brenda’, ‘Her Royal Highness’ or ‘the Queen Mother’ — an expression of contempt for both his social-climbing and faintly effeminate manner.
He apparently dislikes Jagger’s onstage theatrics, too, once remarking: ‘If Her Royal Highness had her way, we’d be playing in f***ing panto.’
While he will, on occasion, concede that Jagger is the best frontman in rock history, he’s more likely to take a swipe at the well-preserved singer, who puts himself through a gruelling, daily fitness regime.
‘Excuse me while I laugh,’ Richards once said. ‘He’s a bit vain, let’s put it like that.’
He also has no time for what he sees as Jagger’s social pretensions: he likes to socialise with well-connected intellectuals such as playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, or the former BBC panjandrum Alan Yentob, and nurtures a taste for high culture, art and ballet.
Richards (right) apparently dislikes Jagger’s (left) onstage theatrics, too, once remarking: ‘If Her Royal Highness had her way, we’d be playing in f***ing panto’
GETTING CLEAN
At first, there was a shared taste for narcotics. The Stones’ American tour of 1972 was reputedly the most debauched of all — a marathon of sexual and narcotic indulgence.
According to Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone magazine, every kind of drug was available, including a 4ft long line of cocaine which was laid out on a mirror and consumed in a matter of minutes.
Then, in 1976, Jagger gave up drugs under the influence of then-girlfriend Jerry Hall, and from that point frowned upon Richards’s excesses. He nearly died after the Stones’ concert at Knebworth in 1976 — probably due to his habit of taking a small snort of heroin while driving, which caused him to drive his Bentley into the central reservation of the M1.
During later concert tours, Richards was reputed to smoke ‘dirty cigarettes’ laced with heroin on stage, with fellow guitarist Ronnie Wood. Richards got clean from heroin in 1981 but exasperated Jagger by being drunk on stage.
Their 1981 tour — hailed as the most profitable in rock history — saw Keith and Ronnie develop a ‘boozing bond’, which one night led them to rush on stage thinking they’d missed the start of the show, only to find the warm-up act.
Jagger deplored the lack of professionalism while Richards made it clear he found his one-time friend ‘boring.’
Mick Jagger with Jerry Hall at the christening of daughter Elizabeth at St. Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, June 24th 1984 (left). Keith Richards with Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon at Heathrow Airport (right)
MAKING MONEY
While Richards was spiralling into drug addiction, Jagger was taking action to make his — and the rest of the band’s — fortunes, intensifying the bad feeling between them.
Mick Jagger And Keith Richards on stage at Wembley in June 1982
As Richards explained: ‘I started going my way, which was the downhill road to dopesville, and Mick ascended to jet-land. I was living in a different world from him. His jet-setting got up my nose.’
Jagger hired financial expert Prince Rupert von Loewenstein, to establish the Stones as a money-making machine. There were sponsorship deals, tours and record sales — and four Dutch companies to receive the cash.
The Voodoo Lounge tour in 1994-95 grossed £247 million, the greatest in history at that point. The Bigger Bang tour, which started in 2005 and finished in 2007, took £430 million, more than a million dollars per day. ‘It’s not that Keith doesn’t like the money, but it isn’t what drives him, and he thinks it’s all that matters to Mick,’ says a source close to the band.
FURY AT SOLO SINGER
Hostility between the pair erupted in 1985 when Jagger made a solo album, She’s The Boss.
Richards was furious, describing what followed as World War III and said he came close to hitting his former best mate — ‘but there’s no joy in punching a wimp’. He even tried to get Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, to replace Jagger but failed.
The recording of the next Stones album, Dirty Work, was fraught. Studio time was organised so Mick and Keith did not have to be in the same room at the same time.
It was Ronnie Wood who negotiated a truce in 1987. ‘As Keith and I were talking on the phone the other line rang — it was Mick in New York, saying Keith wouldn’t take his calls,’ Wood said. ‘After our conversation had finished, I told Keith: “Mick really wants to talk to you. He’s going to ring you right now.” Half an hour later Mick was on the line again and [told me]: “We’re talking again”.’
Feelings continued to run high over solo efforts. Jagger’s 2001 album Goddess In The Doorway was micheviously rechristened Dog**** In The Doorway by Keith.
LAYING INTO RIVAL
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards perform during a concert a Rolling Stones in concert at U-Arena, Paris, France, 20 Oct 2017
As Jagger’s marriage to Jerry Hall ended — after he impregnated Brazilian swimwear model Luciana Morad — Richards took the chance to stick the knife in.
‘I’ve never started a relationship just for the purpose of wham-bam-thankyou-ma’am,’ he said. ‘Chicks are too precious for that.’ He added: ‘No one ever divorced me. It boils down to the fact I’ve never just been interested in a lay.’
KNIGHT TO FORGET
Richards went bananas when Jagger accepted a knighthood in 2003, threatening to pull out of a Stones’ mega-tour in protest.
He said: ‘I don’t want to step out on stage with someone wearing a coronet and the old ermine. I told Mick it’s a paltry honour . . . it’s not what the Stones is about, is it?
‘They didn’t offer it to me because they knew I’d turn it down. It’s b******s. You have to kneel and I’m not going to kneel for anyone.’ He went on: ‘Mick came to me and said: “Tony Blair insists I accept this.” I said: “Well, you can always turn it down.” You know, Mick wanted one, so he got one.
‘He is a power freak and there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t want to do anything about it. Let him b****r about. It doesn’t make any difference to what we do.’
TODGER TROUBLE
In his 2010 autobiography Life, Richards said Jagger had a ‘tiny todger’ and went on to claim he had enjoyed an affair with Mick’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in the Sixties. Richards added: ‘I know he’s got an enormous pair of ***** but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.’
Another Arctic freeze descended between them. A year later, Keith apologised. ‘As far as the book goes, it was my story and it was very raw. But I know some parts of it, and some of the publicity, really offended Mick and I regret that.’
Jagger responded — grandly — by releasing a statement. ‘In the Eighties, Keith and I were not communicating very well. I got very involved with the business side of the Stones, mainly because I felt no one else was interested.
‘But it’s plain now from the book that Keith felt excluded, which is a pity. Time, I reckon, to move on.’
Relations were so difficult that they only managed to release a compilation of hits to mark their 50th anniversary in 2012.
DON’T TOUCH MY PIE
Richards continues to be irritated by the fact that, on tour, it is Jagger who bounces on stage last. Even now he is sensitive to the idea that Mick is the bigger star.
In May 2010, he pulled out of an appearance in Cannes to promote Stones documentary Shine A Light because he felt that the movie was more about Jagger than him.
But more trivial matters can trigger rows, too. In Toronto in 1989, the Steel Wheels tour was delayed by a row over shepherd’s pie.
Richards threw a tantrum when he found someone had sampled his pie — and refused to go on stage until another one was produced. Jagger was furious.
Afterwards, Richards remarked: ‘It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie till I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby.’