It’s difficult for rock stars to shock in the 21st century, but in 2007 Keith Richards managed it by telling NME’s Mark Beaumont that five years previously, after the death of his father Bert, he had mixed the ashes of Richards Sr with cocaine and snorted them.
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father,” said Richards. “I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.
“My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
After the story went round the world, Richards claimed that he had been joking, and was merely trying to illustrate how close he and his father had been. He later said that he had scattered most of Bert’s remains around a tree.
However, paternal bonds clearly run deep in the Richards family, as the Rolling Stones guitarist has now given his daughters permission to snort his ashes after his death. “I’ll give them a straw,” the 71-year-old is quoted as saying in the Mirror.
Richards has four daughters and a son. Famous for his substance abuse over the years, the guitarist finally kicked drugs in 2006 after falling out of a palm tree in Fiji. He had to be airlifted to hospital in order to operate on a blood clot on his brain.
He is promoting his solo album, Crosseyed Heart, and a Netflix documentary, Under the Influence. Both are released on 18 September.
