Keith Richards: The True Superhero of Rock and Roll Excess

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Keith Richards has been a totemic figure from the very beginnings of rock music, both for his incredible musicianship ability and the enormous impact he has had on the world around him at the vanguard of a cultural revolution. If this wasn’t enough to secure True Superhero status his reputation for fast living has led to him being mythologised as an almost indestructible figure. Although Keith’s taste for hedonism has diminished in recent years he continues to rock, now pushing past his sixtieth year as a Rolling Stone while doing everything he can to bring positive change to the world around him. 

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Street fighting boy

Keith was born in 1943 in Dartford, a small satellite town of London on the south bank of the Thames, to the east of the capital. Dartford used to be an ambushing point for highwaymen looking to hijack cargo traveling from the port of Dover into London, and as Richards describes it in his autobiography, Life, “everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood”. During World War II the town had a bigger problem as it was surrounded by munitions factories and other vital infrastructure, and acquired the nickname “Bomb Alley” because of the frequent attacks from the Luftwaffe. Richards was born during an air-raid, and grew up on a street that had been largely destroyed by the bombing.

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