(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sat 6 September 2025 17:00, UK
There has never really been a point in the entirety of The Rolling Stones’ members’ careers where they stopped. Since their formation in 1962, it’s been all go since then and even in periods of turmoil for the group, when their activity might have dipped, their solo careers filled the void.
They say that talent is a muscle like any other. Especially when it comes to playing an instrument, there can be no talent without skill, and skill takes practice. So, when considering the greatness of Keith Richards’ playing, his years upon years upon years of touring have to be taken into account.
Since his teens, Richards has been practising day in and day out in front of huge audiences or in the best recording studios around. There has been little to no rest for the wicked, as even when he and Jagger famously fell out in the 1980s, he had plenty of solo stuff to keep him busy and would pop up playing for plenty of other people, ensuring his hand was always in the game.
He’s great because he’s kept at it. Richards has never fallen off because there has never been any significant off-period to allow it. But in 1967, he felt it slipping. Things got dark for the band then. 1966 had been a hectic year of touring, but after the release of Between The Buttons in January 1967, they embarked on a 27-date race around Europe, and that was it.
That was it because chaos upon chaos kept coming their way. The press began hounding the band about their drug use, and suddenly, the Stones were at the centre of a war against drugs targeted right at rockstars. They were subject to undercover sting operations, constant press exposés, and then, eventually, the raid on Richards’ Redlands estate in February. Three of the band members were hit with drug charges.
To add on top of that, it was around this time that Richards realised that Jones was abusing his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg. By the end of a group holiday to Morocco, Richards had stolen her away, adding to tensions in the band.
And so, by the time they came to make Their Satanic Majesties Request in December, the band had essentially had a break – not because they wanted one, or had planned one, but because there was too much else happening to deal with making music.
It tainted the album too, as during the recording sessions, all of the members were being pulled away to different trials or court dates, were fighting too much to be in the same room, or were caught up elsewhere, meaning that there was little to no collaborative time for them all working together. The result for Richards? Complete and utter boredom. The album flopped, and he felt less inspired than ever.
“During that long recording lay-off after Between the Buttons, I got rather bored with what I was playing on guitar—maybe because we weren’t working, and it was part of that frustration of stopping after all those years, and suddenly having nothing to do. So my playing sort of stopped, along with me,” Richards recalled of the period.
But then he picked up his instrument again and tried something else. Typically, a traditional player who doesn’t like to mess around with anything too technical or fancy, he said, “I started to use open tunings on Beggars Banquet,” as the band’s 1968 album saw his excitement come flooding back with a new trick to play with.
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