Gordon in the morning: White list

Rather an odd non-story about the Rolling Stones from Gordon this morning:

Rolling Stones open to Jack White collaboration

KEITH Richards wants Jack White to work his production magic for The Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary.

What's this based on? Apparently Keith saying

He said: “The door is wide open for Jack.”

This is Keith Richards. Are we sure he isn't just refusing to rule out drug use?

What is the point of this story? It's not announcing that White is going to produce or work with the Stones; despite Gordon's gloss there's not even much in that quote to suggest that Richards "wants" White to work with them. Just that it's possible.

But the real point of the story?

Er... to run a large picture of Georgia Jagger modelling one of the badly-designed Madonna/Lourdes outfits.

Gordon in the morning: More on Mick's manhood

So it turns out that we're still talking about the size of Mick Jagger's cock. Last year, you'll have shut out of your mind, Keith Richards claimed that it was so miniscule, it was no tool at all.

Today, though, Pete Townshend has decided to defend the honorable member:

He said: "I think it's sad that we will only remember Keith's book because of what he said about the size of Mick's genitals. Which, by the way, to use an apt term, is b*******.

"I've seen them and they are not small. And it is not just the balls that are big."

Pete doesn't appear to consider that, perhaps, he happened to see Mick fully deployed while Keith couldn't stir Mick to such heights.

Gordon describes Pete's testimony as "first hand experience". If Mick was that huge, surely he'd have needed a second hand?

Keith Richards tries to make things better

Keith Richards gives Mick Jagger a bit of a going-over in his new autobiography, but he wants to make it clear that he's not at war with Mick or nuffink:

"You don't expect relationships to remain in the same groove all the time," he remarked.

You'll recall that the highlight of the book is Keith saying that Mick has got a small cock. Which means he perhaps should have chosen his words more carefully when explaining things:

"It goes up and it goes down and we always end on middle ground and find our spot together."

And while we're talking of Music Of Black Origin...

The other day, behind The Times' paywall, there was more attention given than strictly necessary to Keith Richard's memoirs, including a chance for other stars to say how great Keith is as a musician. (Why this was felt strictly required for a book that is mainly about how tiny Mick Jagger's penis is isn't clear.)

Amongst those lining up with opinions was Serge out of Kasabian:

"You play in open G tuning and it's instant Keith. and then of course you can't play it. For someone to own that sound is The holy Land as far as being a guitarist is concerned. And he always knows where to put the riff, where to put the note. He plays like a black man, with a machine gun rhythm, but he's white so it sounds different"

Black people play the guitar differently from white people, and even if white people do play in the same way as black people, they can't because of their skin pigmentation.

At best, Serge has created a modern version of "did you ever notice black people drive their cars like this... and white people drive like this" routines; at worst, it's right up there with "black people have natural rhythm" as lazy, quasi-racist gibberish.

As Michael M, who pointed me in the direction of Pizzorno's pensées says:

These is no essential difference to the musical abilities of white or black musicians, it's all cultural. Given that for the last 4 or 5 decades black and white musical culture has become increasingly merged his statement is at best an outdated nonsense.

Although, really, the idea of someone from Kasabian producing "outdated nonsense" shouldn't really be that surprising.

Keef grief

It appears that Keith Richards used to hate being called Keith Richards, as it didn't live up to his expectations:

"It made me sick – my name's Keith Richards," he said. "It hardly makes it against Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, does it?

Presumably Keith knows that Mr. Wolf and Mr. Waters weren't actually known by those names to their mums, right? Surely Keith didn't sit about cursing his luck that he was born to the Richards family rather than the Fox clan?

It seems, yes, as he did try to rebrand himself:

On my first guitar I had Boy Blue written – just pathetic. But that was as good as I got at the time.

Ah yes. Looking to channel the great Mississippi bluesmen, Keith Richards tried to get himself passed off as a gay jazz mag.

Still, it would have all made for a wonderful Aviva advert - a shot of Keith being cheered back when he had internal organs, with modern Keith digitally inserted: "Would any of this happened if I'd been called Keith Richards... oh, actually, it did, didn't it? Bugger."

"Turn left at Sympathy For The Devil Close and take the shortcut through State Of Shock Drive..."

Dartford - boyhood home of Jagger and Richards - is proud of its famous sons. It gives them something to talk about other than the tunnel. So, how better to celebrate a new housing estate than to give the streets names related to Rolling Stones songs?

Yes, there's even a Ruby Tuesday Drive, which if isn't already the name for a sex act presumably will be by sunset tonight.

What this really tells us is not how proud Dartford are of the Stones, but what the vintage of the council who approved the idea is:

Leader of the council, Jeremy Kite, said he thought Ruby Tuesday Drive sounded a "fantastic" place to live.

Passing Americans will assume it's named after an unpleasant chain restaurant, and expect to see an intersection with Red Lobster Avenue, but let's give Kite his moment:

"It is a very groovy development - a very modern, creative community and I think people will enjoy the street names," he said.

Yes, he did just call it a "groovy" development. He really, really did. In 2008. Dartford Council have told the Ordnance Survey to not feature the new housing estate on its maps, as the only directions you need are that, man, it's just out there.

Kite doesn't explain why a modern community would be the best place to slap down some names of songs that are the best part of half a century old - he was presumably on his way to open the Ivor Gurney Youth Centre.

... and, presumably, a card at Christmas

The Rolling Stones aren't exactly bosom pals, says Keith Richards:

"If we aren't working then we probably only talk around once a year. A few faxes, drawings and notes here and there. If you are stuck on the road for two and a half years together, you've said just about everything you've got to say to one another."

"Pass the Rizlas... have you got the accountant's number?... Can you change a fifty?" Yes, there's probably little more left to be said after a couple of weeks, we'd guess.

Keith Richards: Autobio... what was I doing again?

Keith Richards is having a problem writing his life story. He does so much dope these days, he's having trouble doing that thing, the thing where your brain does that bit and thinks about, you know, what stuff you did back when it wasn't now:

"I can't even remember yesterday. I'm trying to put together an autobiography and it's coming along.

"You have to drag things out of your memory. Some of it you don't even want to remember and others you've totally forgotten, so you end up trying to put your life together again.

"And since I didn't keep a diary, it's a bit difficult."

He probably did keep a diary. Hundreds of them, probably; mostly with just one entry on before they got lost.

Richards has been lecturing younger musicians about drucks a lot recently. He's not actually taking his own advice, though:

"I smoke my head off. I smoke weed all the damn time.

"But that's my benign weed. That's all I take, that's all I do. But I do smoke, and I've got some really good hash."

Ah. Keith's drugs are only benign. But how does he know that Amy Winehouse wasn't doing positive crack?

Keith Richards turns to the good book

Heartwarming news as the world prepares for Holy Week: Keith Richards is working his way through The Bible:

“I read it sometimes, but it bores me to death.

“I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.

“Why are they all hung up about all that ‘In the beginning’ stuff? Ah, well. At least it is stable.

“It has said the same damn thing since I was a kid.”

Really, Keith? Surely large chunks of the Bible hadn't actually happened yet when you were a kid.

We love that he's trying to understand religion by close study of the Bible and yet there's still the lingering suspicion that he hasn't got past the first three words of the first chapter yet.

Keith Richards hawks stuff

When not telling kids to not take drugs and slagging off any band that's come along since 1973, Keith Richards spends his time avoiding tax and falling out of trees.

Oh, and now: also appearing in adverts for Louis Vuitton luggage. It's impossible to imagine why Richards has been approached to push leather-faced, rugged old cases.

Richards is going to give some - some - of his fee to Al Gore's environmental charity, which means he's only mostly a money-grubbing corporate shill. He does retain a small portion of his dignity.

Keith Richards: music stopped in 1973

He's off again, like Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses. Keith Richards doesn't like any music since, ooh, roughly the time The Stones started going bad:

"I don't like CDs, quite honestly. They sound tinny to me."

The possibility that, just maybe, the problem might be with his ears rather than the CDs doesn't seem to have occurred to Keith. Not that it matters; he wouldn't buy any bloody records anyway:

"I've not even heard the Arctic Monkeys. I know of them but I don't know anything they've done. I didn't like Oasis, I didn't like the Sex Pistols, I don't like any of those English rock n' roll bands. They're all crap."

... says the godfather of English rock and roll bands. Still, its nice that he's actually bothered to listen to Oasis before dismissing them.

Keith Richards: Two hours on stage and still has to do a sex

Keith Richards seems to be feeling his age:

For me, doing a Rolling Stones show for two hours a night, that’s enough fuckin’ exercise, you know? Then I’ve got to go to bed with the old lady, bonka bonka. You know?”

No wonder the old boy tries to hide up trees. But "bonka, bonka"? With "the old lady"? What a silver tongued smoothie.

Richards, Jagger tut at Amy Winehouse

You'd imagine if anyone had sympathy for Amy Winehouse, it'd be the Rolling Stones.

Not so:

"She should get her act together," the former junkie said during a round-table interview at the Berlin International Film Festival on Friday to promote Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light."

The often-addled rocker paused, then added: "Apart from that, I have got nothing to say to the bitch."

'Pull yourself together'. That's a constructive approach, Keith. Mind you, what would you expect from someone who calls a woman a "bitch" for no reason.

Jagger, meanwhile, tried to make it seem like they were a little less hypocritical by suggesting that back in their day, drugs were new and unknown:

"When we were experimenting with drugs, little was known about the effects," Jagger said.

Cocaine was banned in the United States in 1914. Heroin addiction was being studied seriously in New York in the 1950s and the problem was well known enough in the UK in the 1960s for a survey of addicts receiving treatment to be the subject of what would become a thirty-year study. For a time in the 1950s, it seemed that all movies included some sort of reference to pot, potheads, and the risks. Reefer Madness came out in 1935. And Jagger is trying to say that nobody knew anything about the effects of drugs in the mid 1960s?

"In our time there were no rehab centers like today. Anyway, I did not know about them."

So, the information was there, but you chose to ignore it. Isn't that exactly the same recklessness you're accusing Winehouse of?

"Keep Richards" says Keef Richards

At his time of life - and with his history - it's no wonder Keith Richards is worried about his local hospital closing down.

Keef is going to join a march protesting at cost-cutting plans to reorganise Sussex hospitals, which would see St Richards possibly having its acute services cutback. As a West Wittering homeowner, this worries Keith.

Of course, Keith might have more effectively ensured the NHS provide wide ranges of services at local level by making sure he and his chums didn't organise their tax lives to minimise the level they contributed to the nation.

Not that I could care, your paper's full of shit...

Good bloody lord. Keith Richards is getting so needful, he's taken to writing to Swedish newspapers to moan about bad reviews.

Not that he's worried about himself, of course. Oh, no, Richards is worried that if the fans who enjoyed the concert read the review, it'll break their little hearts:

"Never before have I risen to the bait of a bad review.

"But this time ... I have to stand up ... for our fans all over Sweden ... to say that you owe them, and us, an apology.

"There were 56,000 people in Ullevi stadium who bought a ticket to our concert — and experienced a completely different show than the one you 'reviewed,'" the letter said.

"How dare you cheapen the experience for them — and for the hundreds of thousands of other people across Sweden who weren't at Ullevi and have only your 'review' to go on.

"Write the truth. It was a good show."

Quite why Richards feels that the experience of not-being-at-a-gig could be cheapened by reading that the gig you weren't at wasn't worth being at in the first place is as bemusing as this suggestion that readers of the Expressen and Aftonbladet will suddenly feel that the evening they thought they enjoyed wasn't enjoyable at all, rather than thinking "I disagree with what I, as an adult, understand is merely the subjective judgement of one person."

Perhaps if you've spent the evening having sex, the discovery that somebody else in the room has given the experience a negative review might lead you to think back and find the flaws in performance, casting a gllomy new prospect on your recollection of events - but, Keith, it's not the same with gigs.

We knew there'd be trouble if he ever started to remember them.

Victoria goes to see the Stones

Besides giggling about Keef and Ronnie smoking onstage - in defiance of the smoking b... sorry, it's so boring I can't be arsed to finished the words - Victoria Newton's 'review' of The Stones at the Millennium Dome reads more like someone who, at best, filed before she set off:

The band arrived at the riverside venue in true James Bond style — on a speedboat. They went on to deliver a medley of hits, and inevitably Keef got to sing a couple (time to go to the bar).

Ah, yes. "A medley of hits". That's, um, quite a setlist.

But once again they proved they’re still a class act and worth the extortionate ticket prices.

Sorry... how can anything be "worth" an "extortionate" price? Victoria, you've just said 'they proved the unfair price was fair'. But perhaps we should let it go as, clearly, you must have been writing this piece so close to midnight, musn't you?

The last thing you'll ever hear

There are worse things to have around you as you die (or almost die) than an ITV camera crew. We feel sorry, for example, for Doris Richards, who got Keith at the end of her death bed playing his bloody guitar:

"I sat on the end of her bed two days before she kicked the bucket. I brought round a guitar and sat there and played to her. She's gasping by now, she's out of there, y'know. 'Bye bye mum, see you tomorrow.' "

Still, Doris got the last word in:

"Next morning, she wakes up and tells my secretary, who goes round to see her every day: 'Did you hear Keith play? He was a bit out of tune.' To the end, man. Acid."

We're also touched by Keith's devotion. Not every man would send his secretary round to see his dying mother every day, you know.

Always Wanted More: Ron Wood was down on his luck

Despite having made more cash than a private equity boss, Ronnie Wood nearly found himself in the poor house after making a terrible investment in the South Kensington Harrington Club. Indeed, only a quarter of a million quid loan from the rest of the Stones in 2004 kept him afloat long enough to start making cash back from the continuing touring and his art.

No, we don't know what rate of interest Keith Richards insists on, nor if Mick used to turn up on a weekly basis for his repayment, threatening to take the TV if Wood didn't cough up.

Old men fighting

According to this morning's Bizarre, there was an elderly bust-up on the Isle Of Wight last weekend when Ronnie Wood took exception to being called boring by Keith Richards. Keith, claims Victoria, is getting annoyed that nobody in the band wants to go drinking with him anymore and it seems was trying to goad Wood into going down the pub with him.

But it seems all is sweetness and light now:

Last night Ronnie’s son Jamie, who also manages his dad, said: “Dad is dad and Keef’s Keef. They are always falling out with each other. They are like a pair of teenagers sometimes.

“They went for dinner the other night and everything is fine. There were no fisticuffs — Keef is just mad.”

We're sure that Jamie Wood actually said "Keef", too, and that's not his quote being embellished in any way at all.

How odd must it be for your son to be managing you, and giving statements to the press about "you know what these teenagers are like"? If Ron and Jamie have fallings-out, does Ron have to threaten "I'll have you cut yourself out of my will, young man"?

Nothing is wasted

In this ecologically aware age, we suppose someone finding a use for discarded, broken guitar strings is to be applauded. Even if the big idea is to turn them into bracelets, and the "authenticity seal" probably consumes more resources than did the guitar string originally. And 'bracelet made from guitar string' sounds right up there with 'piano wire necklace' in terms of 'terrible accident waiting to happen, with lots and lots of blood'.

Still, the Relix Band (yes, we're afraid that's what they're called) do give their profits to charity, and you can choose from a range of artists including Keith Richards, Jon Bon Jovi, and Death Cab For Cutie.

Coming tomorrow: Pencils made from broken drumsticks.