By Peter J. Smith
LONDON, April 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards gained newfound infamy and media attention by admitting in a recent interview that his strangest drug experience was snorting up the remains of his own father with cocaine. Richards’ repulsive statements took handlers by surprise who hurried to dismiss it as an “April Fool’s joke.”
Popular music magazine NME published its interview with Richards, 63, on its website Tuesday where among other tawdry things, the rocker admitted he ground up his own father’s cremated remains with cocaine in a drug binge.
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow,” Richards said in the interview, which NME posted Tuesday on its website.
“My dad wouldn’t have cared,” Richards said of his father who died in 2002 aged 84.
“It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
The worldwide media attention has apparently taken Richards’ manager and spokesman by surprise, who scrambled to dismiss Richards’ gruesome admission as an April Fool’s joke.
Manager Jane Rose told MTV.com the comment was “said in jest”, while UK spokesman Bernard Doherty of LD Communications, issued a statement on behalf of Richards saying the comment was “an off-the-cuff remark…file under April Fool’s joke.”
However according to NME, interviewer Mark Beaumont explained that Richards’ comment was no joke, but came about after the Rolling Stones’ guitarist considered the question for a while.
“He didn’t offer the information, I had to ask him a couple of questions to get the information out of him,” said Beaumont. “He didn’t come straight out with that.”
NME has stuck by the story, which appears in this week’s printed edition Wednesday. The story gained worldwide media attention after its online publication on Tuesday.
Neither Doherty nor Richards have commented why Richards would even make such a grotesque joke in the first place so offensive to life and the dignity of his dead father.