1999: Keith Richards
From the GQ archive: The greatest rock'n'roller alive, Satan's little brother, the Human Riff.... Forty years of drink, drugs and debauchery haven't seen GQ Special Award winner Keith Richards off to the big stadium gig in the sky. Yet.
Keith Richards looks like something out of a gothic horror movie, a man - if that is indeed what he is - who lives according to his own particular timetable within his own parameters. Forty years of fame have allowed him to indulge himself to the extent that he operates on Keith time and on Keith time only, GMT being strictly for squares, you understand.
His simian good looks and delicate little body should have been diminished by his habits, but they've actually been enhanced - even if he does have the nonchalance of the dead. He famously had a decade-long heroin odyssey during the Seventies and, although he has admitted to having had "a little taste" of it on the Rolling Stones' recent tour, currently seems remarkably compos mentis. He drinks vodka and fizzy orange all day and still smokes dope occasionally (when we met in Spain at the end of the tour this summer, he was carrying some extra-large Rizlas "more in expectation than anything"), yet he is sprightly on his feet.
And he looks great in a Versace coat.
The lolloping libertine has been the most elegantly wasted man in rock for over a quarter of a century. If Mick Jagger still seems like an over-wound toy, Richards is the quintessential urban cowboy, his gait that of a bow-legged junkie looking for his horse (or his guitar). He is 55 yet his skin is clear and the lines he carries on his face are, in his own, rather elasticised words, "built from laughter." He talks a little like the Paul Whitehouse creation Rolly Birkin QC, though if Keith were to complete a story with the words "... but I must say I was very, very drunk," then you know he would have been. Very.
"I've been an amateur chemist, a 'drugologist,'" he says, of his 35-year relationship with drugs. "I always went by this old 1903 medical dictionary, which was produced before such drugs were considered bad for you. If you were constipated you were told to go to the chemists and get a little tincture of cocaine. If you had diarrhoea then is was a grain of heroin. I've abused drugs, but I didn't go into them without boning up on them first."
The Dartford-born axeman has outlived three generations of rock'n'roll bad boys, intent, it seems, on emulating the wizened old bluesmen who inspired him. The Human Riff is a werewolf in black leather, scuffed bovver boots and skull rings, his fingers resembling nothing more than overcooked Lincolnshire sausages: "I play the guitar, what can I tell you." At the moment he is also sporting some slightly odd dreadlocks, which his assistant plaited during the recent tour. "It's something of a fetish," he says.
He is intrigued by his own image, happy in the knowledge that no one else can look quite like he can. When he was young, he wanted to look like Elvis and Little Richard, then Buddy Holly, and then finally, forever, himself. "I don't really study my legacy, it's got to the point where it's like a shadow that you drag around behind you. Now and again I just pull the Keith Richards look and scare the living daylights out of somebody just because they're in my way. It's just a little something you have in your locker. It's a look and a quick move. I don't have a fixed image of myself. You know, 'cos every time I see myself it's in a slightly different shade. Each tour produces its own outfit. At the moment I'm wearing this jacket that was bestowed upon me by some biker friends in Germany. Fighting colours they are. Heavy dudes.
"My lifestyle and the way I look evolved out of being on the road, my semi-nomadic life. I carry my own home furnishings with me, a few rugs, a few rags, things that can be packed up. If you're going to be in hotels for two years on the trot, I've got to transform a room immediately. I even do it at home, but then in the last 20 years I've never lived anywhere for longer than three months."
When he's on tour - something the Rolling Stones have been for the last 24 months, playing over 130 concerts in 100 cities to six million insatiable customers and earning more than £200m - Keith is constitutionally incapable of anything resembling normal behaviour, while his world is almost hermetic in its isolation from the one outside. The vampire will party 'til dawn, then sleep 'til the middle of the afternoon (often curling-up with one of his beloved guitars or an unread history book), eventually stirring and "swimming through the fog" for that night's show, working his way through his scrambled eggs and vodka breakfast. After a gig Keith will hang out in a specially-designed after-hours area which he shares with fellow Stone Ronnie Wood and which looks exactly the same at every venue in every city in every country. This is Keith's very own Voodoo Lounge (or, perhaps more accurately, Vampire Lounge).
