Could Keith's memoirs destroy the Stones: Jagger and Richards have been feuding for 59 years... and it's coming out into the open

By Alison Boshoff for the Daily Mail
Updated: 21:12 EDT, 5 July 2010

Theirs is not quite a rocky marriage, nor a case of sibling rivalry - although Mick once said that they were like brothers who had been born by chance to different parents.

No, the partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is all these things and yet far more - a complicated and 'completely dysfunctional' relationship; a 59-year association which can lay claim to being the greatest partnership in rock.

'With those two,' says a friend of the band, 'it's all about the niggle - there's always a niggle between them. They are like a couple of soap-opera queens.'

Now, Keith has completed his autobiography, entitled Life, which will be published in October by Little, Brown.

'It's all about the niggle': Call it creative tension or a downright feud, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have been at each other for decades

It contains a full account of his views on Mick Jagger, including hundreds of critical words devoted to Mick's womanising and drug taking.

Keith's opinion, I'm told, is that Mick 'has never been able to handle chicks', and he expounds this theory at some length throughout the book, criticising his old friend for destroying his marriage to Jerry Hall and for his cruelty to Marianne Faithfull.

There are also passages about Mick's use of cocaine and marijuana in the Seventies, which are said to be making the publisher's lawyers turn several different shades of green.

It sounds like rather more than a 'niggle', then - indeed, the question is, will it be enough to cause a permanent rift between them? Might this book finally split the Rolling Stones?

Back in the day: Look at the picture above this one and then back again. They have been fighting for that long

Only a month ago, all seemed well when the pair were together in New York, laughing as they finalised publicity for their Exile On Main street album re-release.

But people who know the band say their bickering is virtually a way of life. Keith didn't go to Cannes last month to promote a film about Exile On Main street because they were having one of their periodic 'moments'.

There are times when they are not even on speaking terms - Keith recently mischeviously suggested to reporters that Mick had a small manhood, which led to 'arctic' relations between them.

Keith, naturally, thought it was all a huge joke. Even now, they have separate managers and will travel to gigs separately. This has been the case, quietly, for decades. Neither, sources indicate, do they socialise at all outside of rehearsals and performances.

But Stones sources all agree that their yin and yang relationship is the very engine which drives the band.

'The bottom line is they take great pleasure in winding each other up,' says one who knows them well.

'Keith, in particular, can never resist a chance to have a pop at Mick - and, of course, it makes Mick completely bloody furious. When Keith does an interview, Mick is always asking: "What has he said about me?" '

The tension was there from the moment their friendship started in April 1951, when seven-year-old Keith joined Wentworth County Primary school, in Dartford, south London.

Legend has it that he glimpsed Mick showing off his chemistry kit to teachers and saying: 'When I grow up, I'm going to build an atom bomb.'

Keith remarked that he thought his fellow pupil was 'a weed'. It's an opinion he seems to hold to this day.

Ever since the seventies, Keith has also been in the habit of referring to Mick as the Queen Mother - an expression of contempt for Mick's social-climbing and faintly effeminate manner.

He also says he dislikes Jagger's onstage theatrics, once remarking: 'If her royal highness had her way, we'd be playing in f***ing Panto.'

'Excuse me while I laugh,' he once said. 'He's a bit vain, let's put it like that. We want a vain bloke up there, don't we? Meanwhile, the band can go to work.'

The issue of women was another area where their paths diverged. Keith is a one-woman man - in the sense that he sticks with whichever woman he is with at any given time.

In the late sixties, he fell in love with model Linda Keith, and then, after a drugged-out period with Anita Pallenberg, he fell for and married model Patti Hansen.

They have just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.

Girl trouble: Keith with Anita Pallenberg. Mick also had a fling with Anita, and Keith's attitude to Mick's relationships with women plays a big part in his book

The contrast with Mick's love life does not need to be laboured. Mick had a fling with Anita Pallenberg while Keith was dating her. Keith was said to have suspected that Mick had made his girlfriend pregnant.

Was this betrayal ever forgiven? Keith is proud not to be a lothario like his Stones partner, which makes one suspect not.

'I've never started a relationship just for the purpose of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. Chicks are too precious for that,' Keith once said in an interview.

It was one of his deliberately tactless interventions, made at the time when Jagger's marriage to Jerry Hall foundered. 'No one ever divorced me,' he declared, pointedly. 'It boils down to the fact I've never just been interested in a lay.'

An outbreak of genuine hostility came in the Eighties, when Jagger made a solo album. Keith was furious and described what followed as World War III. He even tried to get The Who's Roger Daltrey to replace Mick in the band's line-up.

He was so furious that he came close to hitting his one-time best friend. 'But there's no joy in punching a wimp,' he said acidly.

Keith arrived for the recording sessions of the next Stones album, Dirty Work, with 27 songs, which went under titles such as Fight, Had It With You and Knock Your Teeth Out.

Hostile on mainstreet: Sources say that it is the bickering between the Rolling Stones' two main pillars that has kept the band going all this time

The recording of the album in Paris in 1985 was fraught: studio time was organised so that Mick and Keith wouldn't have to be in the same room at the same time.

To this day, Keith is irked when Jagger does solo work. Indeed, Mick's 2001 solo album Goddess In The Doorway was rechristened Dogs*** In The Doorway by Keith.

A truce was called only in 1987. Bandmate Ronnie Wood said in his autobiography: 'Eventually I got my chance to make things right. As Keith and I were talking on the phone one afternoon-the other line rang - it was Mick in New York, saying Keith wouldn't take his calls. After our conversation had finished, I told Keith: "Mick really wants to talk to you. He's going to ring you right now."

'Half an hour later Mick was on the line again and [told me] "We're talking again".'

That truce has held ever since, although Keith went 'berserk and bananas' when Mick accepted a knighthood in 2003, and threatened to pull out of a planned tour in protest. Even after he had been talked round, he was still fuming.

He told a magazine: 'I don't want to step out on stage with someone wearing a coronet and sporting the old ermine. I told Mick it's a paltry honour . . . it's not what the Stones is about, is it?

'They didn't offer it to me because they knew I'd turn it down. It's b******s. You have to kneel and I'm not going to kneel for anyone.

'Mick came to me and said: "Tony Blair insists I accept this." And I said: "Well, you can always turn it down." You know, Mick wanted one, so he got one.'

Onstage harmony: No matter how acrimonious their relationship is off-stage, Mick and Keith have always been professionals in front of an audience

Still rockin': Keith is amused by Mick's taste for theatrics on stage, but admits that you need a flambouyant frontman

He added: 'He is a power freak and there's nothing we can do about it. I don't want to do anything about it. Let him b****r about. It doesn't make any difference to what we do.'

So has the anger always been a one-way street? A Stones source says that Mick has, at times, been as furious as Keith.

'There was a nuclear explosion when Keith shot a Louis Vuitton ad campaign in 2008 without telling anyone else in the band. The etiquette is that you let people know - and anyway, no one could believe that Keith of all people, who's always banging on about Mick selling out, had done this.'

The source added: 'The relationship is of two lifelong friends who enjoy being best of enemies. An underlying issue is that Keith is always jealous about Mick getting most of the attention and the money.'

Mick may earn lots of money - but, as he sees it, without him the Stones would not have lasted so long. And it is true that his canny business sense and professionalism have guided them over the decades.

Indeed, Mick has long disapproved of his bandmates' liking for a rock'n'roll lifestyle - most recently shown when Ronnie Wood descended into alcoholism again.

This has also caused tensions over the years with Keith, who had an almost insanely destructive taste for drugs. In 1975, he fell over on stage in the middle of a song, and was so wasted on heroin and alcohol that he could not get up again.

But there is a genuine fondness and affection between the two. Their fellow Stone Brian Jones once came back to the two-room dive where all three were staying and found Keith and Mick huddled in bed together for warmth. Quite genuinely, they are best friends.

There is also a mutual appreciation that their rucks make for publicity - and the Stones have always had a great eye for a headline.

When all's said and done, they are friends. When Keith needed brain surgery after falling out of a coconut tree four years ago, Mick was in constant contact. Keith sends Mick jokey faxes and drawings when they're apart.

Keith, who is planning to make a further Rolling Stones studio album with Jagger, possibly this year, said: 'If we hated each other, we wouldn't be doing this, would we? Of course, we've had fights. That's what happens in a family. But we've got through it.'

Marianne Faithfull went one better when asked to sum up their bond. 'Of all of Mick's relationships,' she mused, 'the only one that really means anything to him is with Keith.'

Will that still be the case when Sir Mick has read his school friend's book? We'll find out soon enough.