WATCH – Rolling Stoned –
Oct. 12, 2020 – Mick Jagger, speaking with Rolling Stone, put the band’s prior creative lull in the ’70s down to one thing, “Everyone was using drugs, Keith [Richards] particularly,” said the frontman in 1995. “So I think it suffered a bit from all that. General malaise. I think we got a bit carried away with our own popularity and so on. It was a bit of a holiday period. I mean, we cared, but we didn’t care as much as we had. Not really concentrating on the creative process.”
Richards has racked up five drug charges since the start of his career which never deterred him to take the path to sobriety like so many of his contemporaries who swap the substances for smoothies. Instead, his reason for packing in the habit was boredom. Speaking to the Telegraph in 2018, Richards was asked about his well-known hedonistic tendencies, “Drugs are not interesting these days,” he said. “They are very institutionalised and bland. And, anyway, I’ve done ’em all,” he boasted.
“I’m not saying I’m definitely off all of this stuff,” he also admits. “In six months’ time, I might be on it again. But at the moment, for a couple of months, I haven’t touched it,” before going on to say he finds sobriety “novel”.
