![\"Keith](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Keith-Richards-1967-Musician-The-Rolling-Stones-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n
Mon 30 June 2025 18:00, UK <\/p>\n
There is little in the world of rock music that hasn\u2019t been besmirched by the greasy fingerprint of Keith Richards<\/a>. One of the most influential musicians of his generation, behind the perceived simplicity of his riffs was the vital composition of every good thing about The Rolling Stones, and there were a lot of good things.<\/p>\n Despite what you may have read, The Rolling Stones weren\u2019t built on the foundation of sex and drugs but rather pure rock \u2018n\u2019 roll; everything else was secondary. The triumvirate just formed that way by virtue of inevitability. As a band, they were hell-bent on liberation, smashing the stilted shackles of conservatism that they had grown up with, none more so than the highest man on the high seas, Captain Richards.<\/p>\n The guitarist is now simply synonymous with rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. Like the ground beneath our feet, it feels difficult to remember a time when the band\u2019s battle-hardened guitarist wasn\u2019t a part of the fabric of existence in one form or another, either roaring through the radio, tearing up some column inches, or comically chastising Elton John<\/a>. Though he might profess to prefer \u201cthe roll\u201d to the former, the musician has become a uniquely positioned pillar among music\u2019s architecture, and pillars rarely move with ease.<\/p>\n However, if you are to squint with a little more focus, you can notice that Richards has often moved genres occasionally. A noted lover of reggae and a sincere blues enthusiast, he may make rock and roll, but Keith Richards is a lover of music at large, even dabbling in a little stylistic saunter with his solo projects. It makes sense, then, that perhaps his ultimate hero was not a rocker like Scotty Moore, whom Richards undoubtedly adored, nor Chuck Berry with whom Richards endured a few verbal fisticuffs<\/a>, but Roy Rogers.<\/p>\n