(Credits: Far Out / Marcel Antonisse / Anefo)
Fri 16 January 2026 16:00, UK
The art of rock and roll nastiness was practically written by people like Keith Richards.
He may have been one of the greatest songwriters of all time when working with Mick Jagger, but whereas The Beatles set the world on fire, The Stones were the ones that sent everyone running scared when listening to their music. Those riffs sounded dangerous whenever Keef played them, but underneath that sinister figure was a musician who could always appreciate a song regardless of genre.
Because when looking at The Stones’ discography, you can never say that they didn’t switch things up every now and again. There are more than a few times where their experiments may have been a terrible mistake, but when they strayed away from the blues on a handful of their records, they still managed to get a few hits when working on everything from baroque pop to psychedelic rock to even disco when Jagger decided to write ‘Miss You’. Richards was down for anything, but there was a sweet spot for him.
After all, he was rooted in rock and roll and blues from the minute that he met up with Jagger again as teenagers. They had already known each other, but after finding out that he loved artists like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, they were practically inseparable. Most rock and roll tandems would kill for that kind of musical telepathy, but whereas Jagger wanted to follow the trends in every other decade, Richards did start to move outside the box once he met Gram Parsons.
The country music boom may have been starting around the time the Stones made their blues odysseys like Beggars Banquet, but Parsons was Richards’s musical translator half the time. He was the one who knew all of those deep cuts from the days of Porter Wagoner and Hank Williams, so whenever they had some downtime, Richards could normally be found strumming away and talking about how a woman broke his heart.
He even managed to get a few decent country tunes out of the deal, but no matter how good ‘Dead Flowers’ or ‘Far Away Eyes’ or even ‘Sweet Virginia’ was, Richards was stepping into another league when he got the call to work with George Jones. This was the living legend that saw all of the minutiae of the record industry, and when standing at the country singer’s side, Richards couldn’t have asked for anything more.
It was one thing to be on the stage next to an idol like Chuck Berry, but Richards felt like he had left his body when hearing Jones sing, saying, “That was like [I’d] died for a day and gone to heaven. George was a fantastic fella, and he loved that we were doing one of his old songs, ‘Burn the Playhouse Down’, which is a great evil song. Great fun. I worked with George a couple of times but a great honour for me, and I always know that my old friend Gram Parsons is eating his heart out.”
And when looking at Richards’s track record, a song like ‘Burn Your Playhouse Down’ fits a lot better than any mournful ballad. He’s had his fair share of brokenhearted songs like ‘You Got the Silver’, but the idea of him breaking out the Telecaster and playing a revenge-style song is so quintessentially Stones that it’s a shame that he hadn’t thought of it as a song The Stones could have worked up.
But even if Jagger had given the best performance of his career singing this song, his understanding of country was a lot different than how Richards viewed it. He was the one willing to go back and study those old tunes, and he wouldn’t rest until he had the kind of take that the country gods would have approved of.
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