Keith Richard’s sobriety greatly exaggerated

Keef being directed to the bar

You read it here first, and it was denied shortly thereafter. There is egg (from a whisky sour) on the Jet-Set Hobo’s face. Apparently, in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, Keith Richards addresses the scurrilous rumours and base libel (such as to be found on this column) which suggest that he had stopped drinking.

“Listen, the rumors of my sobriety are greatly exaggerated,” he is quoted as saying. “And we’ll leave it at that.”

So the Human Riff is still guzzling that sickly sweet rubbish Jack Daniels eh? Presumably washed down with coke, and I don’t mean cola. Well, apparently he can handle the stuff. In recent photos he’s looked the picture of health.

I suppose that means another lacklustre album which will sink like a stone, (accompanied by po-faced statements that this is their ‘best yet’) perhaps another walk-on part in a Disney franchise, another nostalgia-fest stadium tour… Oh, the dangerously subversive rock-n’roll lifestyle. The man your great-grandmother warned you about.

Now I don’t particularly mean to mock, as I’m a Stones man from way back. I saw them again in concert here in Budapest a few years ago, and I was struck by their ‘cinematic’ appeal. Which is to say, seen from the back of a stadium, they still look like the drainpipe trouser wearing stick figures who originally burst on the swinging London scene a few years before I was born. Probably why they were quietly relieved to get shot of Bill Wyman, with his codger belly and reading glasses. Not quite the image they wished to project.

The fact is, I’m just jealous. I’d love to drink hard liquor all the time, but I’d swell up like an Indian rubber ball, even if I did run around like a headless chicken under hot lights for hours on end.

Anyway, that’ll teach the hobo to get his news from low-rent ‘newspapers’ like trashy UK tabloid, The Sun. But speaking of drinking, isn’t it good to have St. Patrick’s out of the way for another year? It’s another date on the calendar – like New Year’s Eve – that only amateurs can truly love. As an Irish friend of mine put it, “You go and be as Irish as you like this evening, and leave the other 364 nights to me.”