Keith Richards

On December 18, 1943, at the height of the Second World War, while air raid sirens wailed and flak exploded over the streets nearby, Keith Richards was born a war baby in Livingstone Hospital, Dartford, Kent. At the age of thirty-three, his mother, Doris Dupree Richards, bore the only child of her marriage, which lasted twenty-seven years, for the express purpose of avoiding wartime work. As during most of Keith’s childhood, his father, Bert Richards, who was thirty-six when his son was born, was absent for the event, having been called up to serve as an electrician in the army. “I don’t remember World War Two at all,” Keith said on the subject of being born in a crossfire hurricane, “nothing except the sirens. I can hear them today in the old movies on TV and the hair on the back of my neck goes right up and I get goose bumps. It’s a reaction I picked up in the first eighteen months of my life.... I was born with those sirens.” He was also born to the sound of music. Doris would jump up and cut a few fast steps around the room whenever she heard a hot sound on the radio. She spent the majority of her pregnancy bopping to the popular violinist Stephane Grappelli and the big band sound of Billy Eckstine and the singer Ella Fitzgerald. Keith was in good musical company from the outset.

Dartford, a small industrial town just sixteen miles southeast of London, was on the German bombing corridor between the southeast coast and the capital, an area nicknamed “the Graveyard.” When Keith was six months old, in June 1944, the Germans unleashed their unmanned V-1 airplanes from bases in France. An eighteen-foot-long metal cylinder with two small wings packed with explosives, the V-1, or “Doodlebug,” could fly below the level detectable by radar and reach England in one hour. Once it had reached its destination, the Doodlebug would cut dead its motor, which sounded not unlike a washing machine, and drop out of the sky on its target. This was, in part, the brilliant invention of a man who would go on to become an architect of the U.S. space program and a major fan of the Rolling Stones, Wernher Von Braun. For eighty days it caused devastation to the British without cost to the Germans in bombers or pilots. Sixty thousand British civilians lost their lives as a result of German bombing raids during the Second World War. The inhabitants of London and “the Graveyard” (also known as “Doodlebug Alley”) were the hardest hit. “It was,” according to one of them, “as if we had a plague of giant hornets going over all the time. The noise was terrific. Shrapnel used to fall all around us like rain. Across the middle of Kent the noise of fighters, guns, and bombs was an almost continuous crazy chaos.”

Before the two and a half months of daily V-1 raids ended, Keith and Doris were evacuated to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, which was out of the direct line of fire, and also where Keith’s father, Bert, was recuperating in an orthopedic hospital. Bert had been out of England only once and that was, as Keith later put it, “to get his leg blown up in the Anglo-American tour of Normandy.” Shortly after their departure, Keith’s cot in the Richardses’ Dartford home at 33 Chastillian Road was destroyed by a Doodlebug.

“There was a great brick through the cot,” his mother recalled. “People were killed in the house next door and the one opposite.” Years later, Keith, who has a revisionist tendency to infuse his childhood years with the drama that characterized his adulthood, would tell a friend, “Hitler dumped one of his V-l’s on my bed! He was after my ass, you know that! I was out shopping with my ma ... and no house was left when we returned. The rocket went straight into my room!”

Conditions in postwar Britain were grim. “To look back at all was to look back in anger—and in grief,” wrote David Thomson in England in the 20th Century. “So men looked forward, damning the recent past perhaps too completely, and shunning so vehemently the errors of the past that they were apt to commit an entirely new set of errors of their own. Uppermost in their minds was the desire for fuller social justice, a lessening of class differences, and greater security and peace.” The Richards family hovered uncomfortably on the borderline between the lower and middle classes in a society in which class was perhaps the chief controlling factor. Food was allocated on a strict system of rationing that severely limited anything considered luxurious, such as candy, as well as such basic staples as milk, orange juice, eggs, and meat. “I was eleven before I could buy candy whenever I wanted,” Keith said of the rationing, which continued in Britain until 1954. By the time Keith was three or four years old, he was already inured to a household dominated by poverty. Bert Richards worked as a foreman in an electronics factory in Hammersmith, London. “He’d worked his way, been there ever since he was twenty-one or so,” Keith recalled. “Always been very straitlaced, never got drunk, very controlled, very hung up. We just about made the rent. My dad worked his butt off in order to keep the rent paid and food for the family. The luxuries were very few. There wasn’t a lot of chances for someone, the way I grew up.”

The real problem of the Richards family was not, however, poverty so much as the differences between Keith’s parents. Doris and Bert Richards were joined in a temperamental misalliance that by the time of Keith’s appearance on the scene was based more on a tongue-biting tolerance and the pursuit of separate interests than on the mutual bonds of family life.

Richards: “My great-grandfather’s family on my father’s side came up to London from Wales in the nineteenth century. My grandfather, my father’s father, Ernest Richards, was a Londoner. He was the mayor of Walthamstow, a working-class borough in East London. They liked him so much they made my grandmother [Elizabeth] mayor after he died. They were solid socialists, helped organize the Labour party in England. The Red Banner and all that. It wasn’t cool to be a socialist back then. The Tories used to hire thugs to beat and assassinate people. It was the height of fame for the family. They were very puritan, very straight people. Both dead now. But then you come to Gus: my mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree. He was a complete freak. He used to have a dance band in the thirties, played sax, fiddle, and guitar. The funkiest old coot you could ever meet. My mother’s family was very artistic, all musicians and actresses. My grandparents [Gus and his wife, Emily] had seven daughters and the house was filled with music and skits all the time. My grandfather was a saxophone player before he took up guitar. He got gassed in World War One and couldn’t blow anymore. My grandmother used to play piano with my grandfather until one day I think she caught him playin’ around with some other chick, and she never forgave him, and she refused ever to touch the piano again. I think she’s even refused to fuck him since then. Very strange. That side of the family came to England from the Channel Islands. They were Huguenots, French Protestants who were driven out of France in the seventeenth century. So I come from a weird mixture. Very stern on one side, and very frivolous, gay, artistic on the other.”

Bert was close to Keith during his early years, taking him to play football on nearby Dartford Heath, imbuing the son with admiration for his “athletic” father. But throughout the majority of his son’s childhood, Bert Richards was the prototypically absent father. A small, shy man, he arose regularly at 5:00 A.M. to attend to his low-paying job as a foreman in an electrical plant in Hammersmith, London. From there he returned to his bomb-damaged house at 6:00 P.M., where he collapsed into an armchair in the lounge and remained there wrapped in an unapproachable silence until he retired to bed. Bert was not an unaffectionate man, but Keith saw that “it wasn’t possible to be that close to him because he didn’t know how to open himself up.”

The dominant parent in Keith’s formative years was undoubtedly his mother. Both Keith and Doris have described their relationship as close. Though 33 Chastillian Road lacked a telephone and a refrigerator, the Richards family possessed a radio, and the lively Doris sang along and danced to the popular American artists. According to his mother, Keith sang with her to the radio and from the age of two had perfect pitch. Soon he was correcting her if she wandered sharp or flat. Coddled within the largely female world of the Duprees, Keith preferred to stay in and spend his time drawing and reading rather than playing football or fighting. English and history were his favorite subjects. In these pursuits he was encouraged by a small public library, only three blocks from his house.

“With six aunts, he was a bit spoiled, and he really was a sweetlooking kid,” Mrs. Richards said. “Chubby and sturdy—and always with a red nose and a stark white face. But Keith was a bit of a mother’s boy, really. He was such a crybaby. When he first went to school [at the age of five] I went to meet the teacher. She said he had been in a terrible state all day. I had to carry him home. He was frightened that maybe I wasn’t coming to get him. Once I got him home he had a high temperature. When he started school he used to get panic-stricken if I wasn’t there waiting for him when they all came out.”

At the age of five, Keith also began to attend the Saturday matinee movies regularly, although usually alone. This first glimpse of a world beyond the confines of his family and the aftermath of the war offered a series of startling vistas to the sheltered boy. British culture in the postwar years was straddled by two giant influences: On the one hand there was the strangely glamorous horror of the Nazis, with their mad, evil faces and flash uniforms. On the other was the more tangible presence of America, represented by the 110 American army bases throughout Britain.

Although he would retain a lifelong fascination with the Nazis, in an attempt to dream up his own paradise he plunged into a love affair with the United States. Soon Keith had read every book on America he could put his hands on in the local library and it was said among his relatives that he knew more about his adopted country than his native one. When one of his aunts moved to California and sent him a map of the state, it became his most treasured possession.

Hollywood film stars, especially Roy Rogers and Errol Flynn, were much more vibrant than their English counterparts, such as John Mills and Richard Attenborough. Keith played World War II games in the machine-gun bunkers across from the marshes along the river Thames, and in comparison to these desolate slabs of concrete beneath England’s slate-gray skies, he found the panoramas of sun-blasted badlands in American westerns exhilarating. Keith became, as he later told friends, “an incredible dreamer.” He saw himself riding through the badlands of South Dakota wearing a white Stetson, strumming a guitar. But with his physical world in near ruins and his emotional world in a figurative cold war, Keith was growing up a fearful, timid child whose sensibilities, gone underground for self-protection, were being compressed into a dense internal core that would serve as a source of both protection and hostility all his life.

In September 1951, Keith left infants’ school and began to attend Wentworth Primary: “They had just finished building a few new schools by the time we’d finished the first one so we went to a new one nearer to where we lived. That’s where I met Mick, ’cause that’s where he went too, Wentworth Primary School. He also lived around the corner from me, so we’d see each other on our tricycles and hang around here or there.” Doris remembered meeting Mick at school, but noted that Keith never invited him home, something he rarely did with any playmate. “We weren’t great friends, but we knew each other,” recalled neighbor and fellow revisionist Michael Jagger, who was the same age and lived only two blocks away from Keith on Denver Road. “He used to dress in a cowboy outfit, with holsters and a hat, and he had these big ears that stuck out. I distinctly remember this conversation I had with Keith. I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be like Roy Rogers and play guitar.”

One teacher at Wentworth Primary found Keith “a straightforward type of person. He laughs when he is happy, cries when he is sad. There is no problem in trying to find out what is going on inside his mind. He’s open, frank.” “He was a bright, attentive boy,” recalled another, “especially responsive to words and language, who had a mischievous wit that made even the teachers laugh.” He liked tennis and cricket. According to the writer Edward Luce, when Keith was seven he was given a saxophone “which (for a short time) he took everywhere with him. As the instrument was almost as big as he was, people felt sorry for him when he struggled along the street with it.” But despite these occasional flashes of charm, Keith remained essentially a solitary, stay-at-home child. Small for his age and socially timorous, he tended to avoid peer interaction and to prefer the safe company of his aunts and mother. From the age of eight to thirteen, Keith accompanied his father every summer weekend to their tennis club, where he would watch him play and fill in as ball boy. Doris thought he was lonely. While living on Chastillian Road, he spent a lot of time alone in a tent he erected in the back garden, reading, drawing, and painting, which, as he saw it, became “my whole life.” The family’s annual summer holidays, two weeks camping on the Isle of Wight or at a holiday camp in Devon where he reluctantly donned costumes for the fancy dress balls, did little to broaden his social or cultural horizons.

Keith was, however, the beneficiary of a wider cultural heritage through the tastes and influence of his maternal grandfather, Gus Dupree. Where Bert Richards was the archetypal British stoic, lowermiddle-class subdivision, Gus Dupree was that other much-loved stereotype, the working-class British eccentric. Gus and his family of seven daughters lived in London, and Keith and Doris would visit regularly for a few days at a time. Keith’s first memory of London was “huge areas of rubble and grass growing.”

Gus introduced Keith to the British music hall humor of such popular stars of the day as Max Miller, Arthur English, and [Keith’s favorite] Jimmy James, who epitomized the top-hatted, alcoholic, stage-door Johnny. Gus also took him to the films and Victoria Palace shows of the Crazy Gang, who would come to have a lasting influence on British humor, culminating in Monty Python, and, surprisingly, on Keith’s vision of the longevity of the Rolling Stones. According to theater historian Stephen Dixon, “The Crazy Gang consisted of three very different and highly skilled double acts who got together every so often from the early thirties onwards but also continued to function successfully away from the gang.... The style of comedy for which [the Crazy Gang] is best remembered [was] outrageous audience involvement in which indignity after indignity was heaped upon the paying customers.”

In 1954 the Richards family, due a new house since the V-1 smashed Keith’s crib in 1944, left 33 Chastillian Road for number 6 Spielman Road on the brand new Temple Hill Estate. England’s struggle to rebuild its shattered cities resulted in a series of aesthetically and organically disastrous housing estates, offices, and schools. Poorly built, with few amenities for their inhabitants, these were distinctly repetitive, boxlike structures, more like cells than forms following function. Keith was whisked away from a world that, if drab, had at least become safe through habit, and was set adrift on a landscape that looked to him as alien as the moon.

The move to Spielman Road, where Keith would spend the balance of his childhood and teen years, was threatening and disorienting. Although he had acquired some of the habits of a loner, he missed the boys he had played with on Chastillian Road. “In 1954 my family moved to this fucking soul-destroying council estate at completely the other end of town,” Keith explained. The Temple Hill Estate looked like “a disgusting concrete jungle of horrible new streets full of rows of semidetached houses.” The fact that few people had moved in yet and most of the buildings were empty only made it more alien. “Everyone looked displaced,” Keith thought. “Everybody was wondering what the fuck was going on.” Keith blamed his father for the move. “My dad really had no sense of taking a gamble on anything. And because he wouldn’t take a chance on anything, he wouldn’t try to get us out of there, which is what eventually did my mother in as far as he was concerned.”

In 1955, only one year after the shock of the move, Keith confronted the eleven plus examination. This comprehensive exam, a scholastic manifestation of England’s tendency to preserve rigid class distinctions until 1971, attempted to direct the eleven-year-old child toward his or her ultimate professional destiny, based on a score that admitted the student, in descending order of scholastic achievement, to either grammar school, technical college, or secondary modern school. The test only drove Keith further into himself. He had begun to resent school as much as he resented his new home. As he saw it, the eleven plus was “a big trauma, because this virtually dictates the rest of your life as far as the system goes.” While Keith, who was neither an academic achiever nor a dunce, was sent to Dartford Technical College, his more privileged and driven schoolmate Mick Jagger, whom he would not see for six years, was sent to grammar school.

Dartford Tech, on the other side of town from the Temple Hill Estate, required a long bus ride back and forth, and even at age eleven Keith was still nervous about going on his own. If he missed the bus he panicked because there wasn’t another one, and he would often stop to visit Doris, now the manager of a local bakery, on his way to school. After a while he switched from taking the bus to riding his bike to school, but that too had its problems. Jagger recalled seeing Richards riding by on occasion, although Keith never stopped to acknowledge his old friend. He was usually pedaling as fast as he possibly could in an attempt to elude the gang of boys who had taken to chasing him home every day.

Perhaps because of the them-against-us attitude engendered by the war, English schoolboys judged each other largely on how well they fought and which gang they joined. This was made poignantly clear in the testimony of one boy in a BBC interview who explained: “I would rather get hurt and be put in the hospital than refuse to fight, whether the geezer is ten times bigger than me, because if I lose face in front of me mates, well, that is it, I mean, I have got no right to say anything.” Keith Richards was born a Sagittarius. According to his chart, he could not “abide any form of restraint,” was “highly strung,” and was in “danger of nervous breakdowns if under any prolonged strain.” Considering that he would eventually base his adult existence on belonging to a gang, it is curious that Keith “didn’t want to know” about the idea. His mother thought it was just a combination of Richards shyness and Dupree arrogance. Regardless, gangs were the predominant mode of organization among English boys in the forties and fifties and Keith’s attitude soon caused him a lot of aggravation.

The world of the English schoolboy was sexually charged, violent, and cruel. In the 1950s English teenagers were segregated by sex at school and took much longer to get acquainted sexually than their American counterparts. English boys went through their most sexually potent years reacting to each other rather than to the opposite sex. Consequently, any boy with the slightest hint of androgyny became the target for the pent-up sexual energy of his peers. Such was Keith’s fate at Dartford Tech. “I got my ass kicked all over the place,” he remembered. “I learned how to ride a punch.”

Soon he was feigning illness and taking every opportunity to cut school in order to avoid fighting. He did, however, obey the schoolboy code of silence, and never said anything—that would have been a sign of softness Keith could not allow himself. Doris noticed him coming home with cuts and bruises on his knees and face, but was not sure whether Keith had cut himself in carpentry class or had been beaten up by one of the class bullies. Evidently willing to let him handle matters himself, she did not inquire.

During his second year at Dartford Tech the bicycle route to and from school took him through a desolate, gang-ridden area of town. The daily gauntlet became a nightmare of immense proportions that preyed on his mind day and night. It was at this dark moment of his childhood that a brilliant explosion occurred which turned his life, as Keith recalled it, “zoom! From black and white to glorious Technicolor.”