On Radio 2 there was no love lost between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger ? or brothers Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks
Start the Week (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Jagger's Jukebox (Radio 2) | iPlayer
Keith Richards at Home (Radio 2) | iPlayer
Johnnie Walker with the Kinks (Radio 2) | iPlayer
Harmony and discord are never far apart, and you didn't need to hear Idi Amin playing the accordion (on Andrew Marr's 40th anniversary excavation of the Start the Week archives) to understand that. In what he called "world war III" over the ownership of Rolling Stones mythology, Keith Richards seems to have made a significant advance in recent months with the publication of his bestselling memoir, which not only revealed the extent of his animus towards his songwriting partner, but was notably scornful of Jagger's manhood. Mick ? "tiny todger" or not ? is never to be underestimated in these ongoing attritional matters, however. Jagger's Jukebox sounded a lot like a first shot across the bows of his guitarist, which may yet culminate in a volume or two of autobiography of his own. In the show, Jagger chose to concentrate on the making of the Stones album Exile on Main Street, though tellingly he dwelt not on the industrial quantities of heroin that Richards had shipped into his French Riviera villa, but more on the eclectic range of musical influence that shaped his own songwriting intelligence. It is odd to think of Jagger taking the moral high ground, but there was at least a suspicion of it.
Richards, interviewed at his Connecticut home (Keith Richards at Home), where he keeps his "two or three thousand guitars", was in more expansive mood. A child of the 50s, he recalled how his determination to make music had come from hearing his parents talking about the golden times "before the war" and always "wondering where this wonderful place was". The version of those good times that the Stones subsequently created for themselves quickly became, he suggested, a cross between The Goon Show and a Hieronymous Bosch painting: nightly mayhem involving audiences of teenage girls "perspiring heavily and with their dresses up". It all began to go wrong, in his eyes, in about 1980, when Mick's great betrayal of the band began. "I don't think Mick realised how deep a cut that was up until now," Richards said. "But I thought if we can get over this then we are a real band. And this stuff happened 30 years ago."
Some cuts take longer to heal. Mick and Keith sounded decidedly fraternal alongside those two other legendary internecine squabblers, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Thirty years was nothing to them. Johnnie Walker With the Kinks traced their rivalry back to the moment, aged three, that Ray was first presented with his younger sibling. He had up to that point been the only son among six older, doting sisters. Still, despite feeling that Dave might already be "stealing his thunder", Ray resolved to at least try to get along with his kid brother.
Sixty-three years on, that is about where they remain. You had the sense that both were trying to be conciliatory in their separate interviews with Walker, but old habits died hard. Dave recalled how his older brother seemed always trying to put him off his key guitar solos: "I think he panics a lot. The last thing you want is some idiot standing in front of you panicking."
Ray, meanwhile, remembered how, having married at 19, he would be at home writing songs and looking after his child, while Dave "went raving" and waited for the new Kinks material to magically appear.
Would they get back together, Walker wondered eventually. "My brother is reluctant for reasons only known to himself," Ray suggested. After two hours, you had the strong feeling those reasons might be quite involved. If they could ever get beyond "the vanity of it and the ego of it", Dave suggested darkly, and resolve "things of a business nature", then it was theoretically possible. Both were agreed on one thing only: they couldn't have come so far without brotherly love.
Sarah Shahi Anna Paquin Diane Kruger Magdalena Wróbel Connie Nielsen
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