Keith Richards told Mick Jagger he was ‘getting off lightly’ in tell-all autobiography

The autobiography of legendary guitarist Keith Richards caused a stir with The Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger. While the two have worked together for decades, it sounds as though Richards’ writing infuriated the Start Me Up singer. The veteran rockers came to blows over the book, Life, which released in 2010. Reviews at the time hailed Richards for his honest and open portrayal of life in the band.

But this is where Jagger took issue with Richards’ writing as he claimed the book had been far too open for what it was. Richards would later reveal he and Jagger had a frank chat about the details in the book and that the frontman had actually come out of the tell-all better than he would have had the whole truth been published.

Richards told MOJO Magazine: “Oh yeah! He called me – (unhappy Jagger voice) ‘I have to talk to you…’ Of course, a few things rankled with him but I then produced the pages I had blue-pencilled out. ‘Look – you’re getting off lightly, pal!'” Richards would delve no further than this but the pair’s fractured relationship is public knowledge.

While Richards and Jagger remain close friends and still work with one another often, their relationship took a knock in the 1980s. The pair would rally through all the same, with Jagger once likening their relationship to that of brothers.

He said at the time: “If you work with someone that long, it makes a lot of bonds, a lot of memories, and things you relate to from your past. You have reference points that you can evoke. You have relationships with everyone in the band and with people in the periphery, so it’s a large group. But it isn’t a family”.

In the same interview, Richards added: “Everybody’s still here, which is obviously an important ingredient. With any band that has been around, even for a few years, not everybody always likes everybody. But maybe you need that conversation to continue, and music is the one way you can do that. It’s stronger than the other things that get in the way”.

Professional problems between Richards and Jagger remain, with the guitarist saying there are setlist troubles almost every show. Jagger’s literal read of his songs has been ridiculed by guitarists Richards and Ronnie Wood.

Wood said: “On the Forty Licks tour, we changed the set list every night, throwing in songs and often going back to the drawing board; Keith would say, ‘Oh shit, get my five-string in here, we’re going to revise this one.’ We all got off on the challenge of a new surprise every day.

“The variety and the choice of the songs helped contribute to keeping the liveliness of the band alight, plus the fact that we were still doing a soundcheck before every new show. Wherever we are in the world, Chuck Leavell is able to look at his notes and tell us which songs we played in that city the previous time and the times before that.”

Richards added: “In general I let Mick decide the set lists because he’s the one who has to sing the songs, and his decision depends on how he feels on any particular day, but sometimes if I thought he was flaking me, I would push him. I’d have to make a decision between Mick’s natural conservatism and the fact that the band would get bored if there wasn’t enough variety.

“The band would always play the setlist as well as they could, but we didn’t rehearse 145 songs in Toronto in order to play only thirty of them on the road. It was a matter of working out how to break Mick out of his shell.

“For instance, Mick would want to open the shows with Start Me Up because he’d say it was totally obvious, and I would say, ‘Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with it, it is totally obvious!’ that is the difference between our brains. That’s Mick and me.”