Free Moranthology by Caitlin Moran Page A

hash joint, and there’s bits of stalk and crap in there. It’s unacceptable to a smoker.”
    He takes one of his own out of his pocket, and lights it. The smell of the smoke mingles with his cologne.
    â€œWhat have you got on?” I inquire.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œ ’Ere,” he says, suddenly concerned, looking at the cigarette smoke. “I hope you’re not . . . allergic.”
    Apologizing 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 heyday—he once spent forty sleepless hours with the NME journalist Nick Kent “pinballing” around London in a Ferarri 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.
    â€œYeah—that was cocaine I had to give up for that,” he says, with an equinanimous 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.
    â€œI’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:
    â€œI’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 honor, hur hur.”
    But having spent from 1968 to 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, to the air-dried Inca mummies of Chachapoya.
    â€œWell, 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