Life by Keith Richards

An interesting one this – on the surface of things, you’d think Keith Richards sitting down to write his memoirs would be the most titillating read on the shelf (and indeed, the publishers have been rubbing themselves in gold since its release) but there’s something a bit….well, slightly boring about the whole caper.

Firstly; how does a man who took more drugs than a war torn hospital remember enough to fill 500 pages? The answer I reckon, must have been to make some shit up along the way. There’s a lot of ‘here’s how I remember it’ – no doubt to negate any potential lawsuits – and there’s a lot of ‘I was a functioning addict’, tales where everyone around him goes down in a drug induced stupor, EXCEPT for him. Which is maybe how it actually happened, and I’m just such a lightweight that I don’t understand how someone can drink three bottles of bourbon, five tabs of acid and a tab of heroin and not sleep for five days and live to tell the tale.

So the excess is there, and people around him turning into monsters on drugs (his long-time missus Anita Pallenberg is depicted as an unreasonable, sex crazed violent psycho), characters dropping dead left right and centre, but there’s not a lot of true introspection. Even his philandering is wrapped up in this warm, fuzzy ‘there were women I cuddled along the way’ dialogue, when really he was cheating on his partner.

What IS fascinating is the rock and roll cultural history along the way, and how some honky English lads managed to take a blues R&B sound and scare the living beejusus out of a God fearin America. And the depiction of a music scene that truly was organic and for rabid music fans – people hunting down rare records, one ‘black’ station and hearing new music at underground parties – no internet, no publicists, no regurgitated hit makers and a population so surrounded by crap music that when something awesome and original comes along, you’ll just as likely hear it on Nova as you will on Triple J.

And if you want to examine a complex and deeply dysfunctional band relationship, look no further than the brotherly hate displayed by Richards and the Stones frontman, Mick Jagger. I think Keith spends a whole lot of this book trying to sound aloof and disconnected, when you get the feeling underneath he's just simmering at a life spent to the left of the man in the spotlight. Also, I can't finish this review without mentioning Richards' fierce mullet and unfortunate above the neck situation - really one of the most unattractive musicians going round.

If anything, it made me a little bit sad that our generation will never have a Beatles or a Rolling Stones to hold up as the marker of better days gone by. And on that old lady having a rant note….