Keith Richards on drugs, guns, music and Live8

The grim reaper is at home watching TV when the doorbell rings. He opens up and Keith Richards is standing there in hooded black sackcloth, a sharp-looking scythe at his side.

"Sorry," says the Rolling Stones' seemingly indestructible guitarist. "Your number's up."

Presented with the above vignette, Richards gets the joke. "Yeah, I'd like to see the Reaper off," he says with a gruff laugh, "but people shouldn't try and do what I've done with my body, because not everybody can."

As though to underline that truth, he swigs at a large vodka and orange-based concoction called a Nuclear Fall-Out. Would I like to try one? No, I'll stick with beer, thanks.

Sixty-two in December, Richards is enjoying his tipple while chain-smoking full-strength Marlboros.

Though it's only 5.30pm, his skulls-and-guitars-appointed dressing room is candle-lit and heavy with incense. A small coffin-shaped box on the table lies open revealing Richards' rolling papers.

He's wearing lime-green work boots and a black tracksuit top with the word "Jamaica" emblazoned in yellow on the back.

You take in his gnarly knuckled fingers, his swarthy, heavily latticed face. On his right hand is the familiar silver skull ring that he has long worn as a memento mori.

Richards' eyes are so brown they're almost black. Juju trinkets dangle from his gloriously unkempt hair.

An amiable rogue who has been described as "a grinning baboon" and "the human riff", the guitarist is surprisingly well spoken. As the vodka kicks in he starts to slur a little.

Richards' dressing room is in a school in a quiet suburb of Toronto, Canada, where the Rolling Stones are rehearsing for their upcoming tour of the United States.

By Richards' account, rehearsals are going well. Is thinking of the 43-date tour like contemplating Everest?

"No, it's like downhill skiing! Nobody is dragging their ass to come on this one." Even Charlie Watts, traditionally the most touring-reticent Stone, can't wait to get going - despite the drummer's recent battle with throat cancer.

Later, when I sit in on the Stones' rehearsal session, it's clear that Richards' claims about the camp's high morale are valid.

It's fascinating to watch: Richards perusing the set-list through dainty pince-nez while he and 58-year-old Ronnie Wood's gritty guitars spar to glorious effect.

Mick Jagger - 62, black baseball boots sans laces, 28-inch waist still intact - looks almost boyish.

If the Stones' appetite for their upcoming jaunt is tangible, Richards was less enamoured with the notion of Live8, and vetoed the idea of the Stones playing the event.

"I didn't understand why everybody who was trying to coax me in happened to be knighted," he says.

"I got hit on by Sir Bob and Sir Mick, but I said to Mick, 'We ain't doing it, pal. You can do it, but I ain't.'

"Decreasing debts?" the guitarist goes on. "It all seemed a bit nebulous to me. Plus I couldn't believe the amount of pressure, even from 10 Downing Street.

"I heartily applaud what they were trying to do, except that it was tied in with Government policy and I always try and separate politics and music. I mean, Bob's a nice bloke and all that, but ultimately he's the one who comes off best, isn't he?"

The new album, A Bigger Bang, is their first studio outing since 1997's Bridges to Babylon, and as its title suggests, it sees the world's greatest extant rock band shirking complacency and roaring loud.

Not every track is a classic but Laugh, I Nearly Died is as agreeably raunchy as anything on Sticky Fingers, while Rain Fall Down is the band's funkiest moment since 1983's Undercover of the Night.

Elsewhere, on the flagship single Streets of Love, an uncharacteristically lovelorn Jagger delivers one of the most compelling performances of his career, his diction masterful and his ad-libs on the fade-out unmistakably heartfelt.

Lyrically, it's one of several songs on the new record that have led some to posit that the work is partly Jagger's love-letter to his estranged wife, Jerry Hall.

With Watts recuperating and Wood facing equally testing times (the guitarist was devastated when his first wife, Krissy, took her own life earlier this year), Richards says he and Jagger were forced to pull their fingers out on A Bigger Bang.

"Mick and I got the news that Charlie was going in for treatment just as we started writing. We thought, 'Should we put things on hold?' But then it was, 'No, let's forge ahead - it will be a good incentive for Charlie.'

"Mick playing great guitar helped," Richards continues. "I sleep downstairs and the studio is upstairs. One night I thought I was hearing this old Muddy Waters track I didn't know, but it turned out to be Mick working on a slide part for Back of my Hand.

"He's always been a good, smooth acoustic player, but the electric seemed like an untamed beast for him until this year."

This is how Richards goes on: holding court, spinning anecdotes, and leaving no buckle unswashed.

No surprise, then, that he has reportedly been offered a part in Pirates of the Caribbean III.

While his pal Johnny Depp famously used Richards as a template when playing the roguish Jack Sparrow, the guitarist says he can neither "confirm nor deny" his own involvement in the trilogy.

"What I can tell you," he says, "is Johnny came down to the studio to talk about the movie. Behind him was, like, the Disney wardrobe department or something, and we spent the rest of the afternoon hilariously dressing up in pirate clothes. I'm up for doing the film and so is Johnny, so hopefully we can schedule something in ... I'd obviously bring my own cutlass, ha ha!"

Joking aside, this last is not a fact that anyone who knows Richards would doubt. Ask director Julien Temple. Before he worked on the 1983 video for Undercover of the Night, Richards reportedly flicked open a switchblade, held it to Temple's throat and said, "You better not [expletive] up."

His liking for firearms has been well documented too, but he says that these days he leaves his handgun in the drawer at home. Asked what the biggest misconception about him is, Richards is stumped for a few moments. The public face of Keith Richards, he says, is a caricature with a large element of truth in it.

"I've been cast in the role of the rascal and I accept the role gracefully," he laughs, "but everybody changes.

"The problem is that, when you've been famous for this long you drag all the key events and rumours of your life around with you like Jacob Marley's chain."

These would include the night he wrote the riffs for Satisfaction and Brown Sugar, the bloodbath that was the Rolling Stones at Altamont in 1969, the mysterious death of Brian Jones earlier that year, and the persistent myth that a Swiss blood transfusion process akin to premature embalming was what enabled Richards to temporarily kick heroin prior to an important 1973 tour of Europe.

The biggest myth about him, he now posits, is probably that he was constantly endangering himself with drugs.

"Actually, I would take drugs quite responsibly," he says. "A nice fix at breakfast, one for elevenses, and another one at teatime - it was like breaks at the cricket, or something.

Richards' main home is still in Weston, Connecticut, with Patti Hansen, the Staten Island-born model he married in 1983.

It was at home on the couch that Richards penned This Place is Empty (without you), a fine country-style ballad partly written for Hansen from the new album, that he croons raggedly a la Tom Waits. The lyrics may also take in empty nest syndrome.

"Our daughters, Theodora and Alexandria, have grown up and got their own apartment in the city," he says.

There are also grandchildren to enjoy, fathered by Richards' son, Marlon, who with Angela, his other child by Anita Pallenberg, is now well into his 30s.

What, though, of absent friends and family? Richards has lost Brian Jones, and his own father, Bert. He has lost musical soulmates such as country star Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones' unofficial extra member and keyboard player, Ian Stewart.

"These people resonate; you never forget them. I miss all those cats."

And Brian? Is it all just too long ago now?

"Brian could be the most frustratingly obnoxious, nasty person. Which he never was until the minute we had a hit record. It was a fame thing, maybe; something seemed to snap in him."

At that, our time is up. One last question, though: does he have any kind of fitness regime prior to going on the road? "Yeah," he deadpans, "It's called rehearsals."

"Mick's your guy for a fitness regime and a schedule," he adds, "but then he has to cover a lot more stage than me.

"When I wake up in the morning I just say, 'Ahh! Jah wonderful! Let's see what the day brings.' I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be anywhere."

WHO: Keith Richards, guitarist for The Rolling Stones. Mr Indestructible.

BORN: December 18, 1943, Dartford, Kent.

GREATEST RIFFS: Satisfaction, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Start Me Up, Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women.

LATEST: new Rolling Stones album A Bigger Bang is released on September 3.

- Independent