My date with Keef, Part 1.
My date with Keef, Part 1.
a.k.a. the best day's work I ever got paid for.
“Jane, darling, come here if you would. Jane, I asked for a drink. This is not a drink, Jane, this is a puddle. Now be a good girl, and fix me an actual drink…. Do you guys want one as well?”
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith is a reader-supported publication with a free Midweek Update full of recommendations and news, and a long-form article for the weekend, ideally read on a laptop rather than a phone. Many weekend articles, including this one, are for paid subscribers only. Monthly subscriptions are just $5 a month - or $50 for a full year - and give you unfettered access to all the archives, as well as the Crossed Channels podcast that launches December 2023.
The date was March 30, 1989. The location was Keith Richard’s triplex, above Tower Records on the corner of 4th and Broadway in Manhattan. The occasion was the guitarist’s final promotional interview for his solo record Talk Is Cheap before flying out to Montserrat the following morning to start recording the Rolling Stones album that would become Steel Wheels. The woman he was directing his drinks order towards was his personal manager, Jane Rose. And the “guys” Keith Richards was inviting to join him in a Jack-and-coke that late morning were myself and my two-man film crew for the TV show Rapido.
I should not have been there, sat directly opposite Keith. This was not meant to be my interview. I had only moved to New York City the previous summer, after a peripatetic period of back-and-forth between the UK and various points in the American north-east, and I was living and working out of a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment above a locksmiths on the very corner of East Broadway and Canal Street, where Little Italy met Chinatown met an old-time Jewish/Hebrew neighborhood frequented by families during the day and rocked by gunfire at night. My rent was $500 a month and I couldn’t afford it; I’d shown up in the City pretty much broke and was hustling constantly for freelance work.
Fortunately, I was getting it. My English accent and bona fides (including the recently published Echo & The Bunnymen biography) had secured me work for Spin, Details and the New York Press. Plus, I had left London with assurances from my various UK freelance outlets that they’d use me in New York as much as possible, and they were generally true to their word.
The one exception was the outlet that paid best and which I enjoyed the most: my production/journalism/directing/off-camera interviewing work for a TV show that, back when a call came out of the blue a couple of years earlier, from a Gilles Verlant in Paris who thought I’d be the right person for it, was called Rock Reports. It was co-hosted by a fast-mouthed Frenchman called Antoine de Caunes, along with Gilles and at least one female – all of whom I met for a fun Friday night post-shoot dinner in Paris after I realized the work they were asking of me was considerable enough (and well remunerated enough) that I should get to know everyone in person and made my own way over there.
About a year into our working relationship, Rock Reports changed its name to Rapido, stripped out the live studio format, dropped the other co-hosts, and built itself around de Caunes’ almost comically stereotypical French personality. Rock Reports had already been a hit, licensed across continental Europe, but when the BBC caught wind of this upgrade to Rapido and commissioned a UK-language version (de Caunes could speak English perfectly, albeit with a perfect French accent), the show’s reputation soared. Overnight, we got access to names previously denied. Names like Keith Richards.
I, however was not getting them. Rapido had its own man in New York. His name was Laurent, he was a senior French music journalist who also wrote for the leading French music magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, and he had first dibs on all assignments. Gilles green-lit some ideas of my own, and it was obvious he wanted to give me what work he could, but the major artists all had Laurent’s name on them.
This made the phone call Gilles had put in about 48 hours earlier all the more surprising.
“Tony. How would you like to interview Keith Richards? In two days from now? Are you available?”
You don’t look at your diary when asked this question. You just say “yes” and figure that anything else you might have to cancel was obviously worth cancelling. I did, however, ask why Laurent wasn’t doing the interview instead.
“We sent Laurent to Jamaica to interview Rita Marley,” Gilles told me in his own inimitable fast-talking French language-inflected style that I am failing to do justice to here. “He’s furious at missing out on Keith, he’s mad about it. He’s telling me he wishes we sent you to Jamaica instead. But we’ve been after Keith for months and this is the last opportunity. Laurent will have to miss out. The interview is yours, my friend.1