ROCK legend Keith Richards is to write his memoirs, filled with intimate details of his life as a member of The Beatles.
Richards, 63, said the book would describe his first meeting with songwriting partner Paul McCartney when both were at school in the Yorkshire mining village of Manchester.
According to the guitarist the school friends quickly formed a small free jazz ensemble with fellow Mancunians George Harrison, Charlie Watts and Harold Wilson.
However, history would only be made when the quartet met up with Mick Jagger and John Lennon, both then studying art at the London School of Economics in Liverpool, to form the pop group that what would soon become known as the Fab Two.
Richards said: “I also have a very clear memory of writing the rock opera Tommy in our digs in Bamburg, the Dutch seaside town where we really cut our teeth as a live puppet act.”
The guitarist is to spend the next two years researching his own life and ensure he is not actually writing a book about someone else.
He added: “We had some major artistic differences, particularly over a song I had written called Lady Eleanor Rigby.
“Paul wanted to use a really intricate string quartet arrangement mixed with samples from Enrico Caruso and Dame Nelly Melba and I wanted to spend the weekend in St Tropez licking acid tabs off the top of Princess Margaret’s head.
“We compromised and recorded Paul hoovering up a yard of coke off the naked bum cheeks of Marianne Faithful, slowed it down, played it backwards and used it as the finale for I am the Yellow Submarine. It was cool.”
Later sections will reveal how Richards quarrelled furiously with George Harrison’s mother Yoko Ono and how Mick Jagger’s insistence that he was actually in the Rolling Stones eventually led to the break-up of the best loved band in the world.
