Mr Rattle and Roll

The only sensible time in a phone interview to ask the Difficult Question is at the end. If the subject hangs up at least you've already got something. So, as the clock ticks towards the 25-minute mark in an interview scheduled for 15 minutes with a garrulous and good-natured Keith Richards in his hotel room in Tokyo, it is time to toss in the Difficult Question.

On the very day of this interview Oasis' mouthy Noel Gallagher had this to say about the Rolling Stones: "They can't understand why people don't take the new records as seriously as the old ones. Well, you're old age pensioners. By all means make records and go on tour, because if people want to see you, fine. But don't expect to be taken seriously. Your best work is behind you."

So Keith, in the manner of an exam question: Discuss.

Richards' throat rattles with laughter like marbles in the bottom of a muddy barrel, as it has done regularly throughout the conversation, but then there is a pause and a tension that wasn't there previously.

"Well, what would he know? Every time I hear from the man he's a pain in the arse," he says dragging out his American pronunciation of the word for full derisory effect. "He keeps looking for a fight, and I will let him have it one day and he won't expect it."

Then his cheery mood returns.

"But anyway, bless 'is 'eart. He's only got one way to go."

And the marbles rattle again.

The joke is that any observer could well make the same comment about Oasis' career, and that the Rolling Stones' new album A Bigger Bang recorded in France and the West Indies - although in need of editing - finds them reconnecting with the ragged r'n'b spirit which has been the mark of their best work.

"A lot of it's the fact we didn't cut it in the studio," says Richards. "There's always the feeling with the Stones - most of us having been expelled at some time or other - that when you go into a recording studio you feel like you are going to school.

"The Stones are much better recorded in the way we did it this time which was just in the house where nobody really thinks about being recorded. I find it much easier to get a good track out of them when they are just sitting around on a couch and they sort of don't know it's happening. Maybe the secret is that the only good Stones records are those where people are spying on them and they don't know it."

Richards - 62, father of five, and married to Patti Hansen these past 22 years - says the band doesn't analyse itself but the consensus is that they have hit another level playing live.

He pays tribute to Charlie Watts - "the most amazing drummer in the world; I'd play for nothing to just play with him" - and says every tour has its own flavour.

"This current tour particularly is a quantum leap, really. There are so many things to put together - the lights, the sound, the stage, all kinds of things. The planets this time seem to be in the right alignment. I've got the best soundman I've ever had in my life, I believe. I'm actually going to buy him," he says, rattling the marbles again.

"When you play to 40,000 or 50,000 people you have to figure out how to reach out. I still think we are getting there. I don't think we're there yet, although I don't know where the there is. Wherever the there is, we're getting there."

The mysterious "there" has a path to it paved with gold, however. Last year's leg of their A Bigger Bang tour grossed a record-breaking $US162 million ($266 million) in the four months after it opened, which doubtless makes playing a free gig like the one in Rio in February a little less painful. The audience on Copacabana Beach was somewhere around 1.2 million.

"The length of a football stadium is about as far as you can see, anyway. But also you can't really think about it otherwise you'd be boggled. You play to the front row and hope that it bounces down to the back."

He likens a band to an engine and the audience, the fuel.

"You exchange each other's energy. There are two shows going on; one is us and the other is what we see in the audience."

As you read this the Stones will be playing to 8500 in Shanghai, China - and that will be another and very different audience again.

"It's great. They are going to choose the set list," he laughs of the Chinese authorities' need to approve all songs first. "But would they recognise it if we played a song they didn't want to hear?

"But you know what they're like. They are very argy-bargy, but very nice when you get there. I won't actually believe it until I get there. Actually I won't believe it until I get to Sydney and I've got out of there. Sometimes it's easy getting in and rough getting out."

Richards' conversation moves across subjects like the recent Rarities album which came out through Starbucks ("another experiment in how to market the stuff, and also to put out stuff that would have been left behind in the rush to make an album"), includes some jibes at the music business not knowing what to do in the age of the internet, a comment about playing Dunedin in the mid 60s - "like Aberdeen on a Sunday" - and when life goes back to some kind of normal after a tour: "It's the family and the dog and you put the cat out."

But usually there is a stream of musicians dropping round to his home in Connecticut.

"I feel a bit like a magnet because if anybody is around they gravitate towards me. I have a little - well, it's not a studio, it's actually a bar downstairs. But we've put up a few microphones. I get lots of ideas down there, but it's very casual. As you can imagine," he rattles.

Right now, however, home is a long way off. The tour rolls on - "I just stay on the road and family comes in and out and I go, 'See ya' or 'Welcome' - and night after night the Stones play to a different crowd in a different country.

"But in a sense people are the same the world over. One of the things I've loved about always doing this - apart from one or two nasty incidents which we all know about - is that millions and millions of people have had a good time and for a couple of hours we can forget everything except us all being there. It's a very warm feeling I get from audiences everywhere.

"That's what I work for, and if that's the result then I've done my gig."