KEITH RICHARDS AND THE MAKING OF “Exile On Main St”

Interview by Pierre Perone

Thirty-eight years on from its original release, Exile On Main St is the stuff of rock’n’roll legend, many people’s favourite Stones album and the one Keith Richards is always happy to return to. So much so that the Glimmer Twins, who are notoriously loath to open up the vaults, have finally assembled a deluxe edition with 10 bonus tracks on top of the 18 first issued in 1972. I’ve followed the Stones since I was a kid. I covered their songs in a garage band and failed exams because I travelled to see them in Nice the night before. I’ve seen them live over a dozen times, in France, in London, in the US. Three years ago, I wrote the liner notes for the re-release of the Rolled Gold+ compilation. Over the years, I’ve interviewed Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood, but never Keith Richards.

I’d resigned myself to his glaring absence from my lengthy list of interviewees until the expanded, remastered Exile, an ideal opportunity for a kid who spent half of 1971 dreaming of running away from Marseilles to join the Stones at Nellcôte, in Villefranche-sur-Mer.

Richards is tickled when I tell him this. He’s at the Mercer Hotel, a luxury establishment in New York, the Big Apple’s equivalent of LA’s Chateau Marmont. …

by Pierre Perone
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