Some of the wilder rumours surrounding him are debunked, such as the trip to a Swiss clinic to change all his blood, but he can’t resist buffing up the bad-boy image. Almost 50 years later, Richards still sees himself as the archetypal bluesman, romanticising life “on the road” as an existential state of being, a self-contained world which nothing can interrupt – not even the death of his two-month-old son Tara in 1976, when the guitarist decided to continue touring rather than return to his then partner Anita Pallenberg.

A shared love of the music drew him to fellow Dartford teen Jagger, and led to the formation of the Rolling Stones in 1962. “It still rankles, that humiliation.” The fallen choirboy heads over to the dark side. He excels as a choirboy, singing in front of the Queen at Westminster Abbey (“I’ve still never played a better gig prestige-wise”), but then his voice breaks and it’s back to school, where he’s sent down a year to catch up academically. When not in mythopoeic mode (Dartford as the Stones’ Mississippi Delta), Richards sharply evokes the greyness of 1950s life: sadistic gym teachers fresh out of the army, factory-like schooling. It has, he claims, an ancestral outlaw spirit: “Everyone from Dartford is a thief.” Born in 1943 in the midst of the Blitz, Richards remembers the suburb where he grew up as a Dickensian place of thick fogs and woods with army deserters camping rough.

It opens with an atmospheric account of his childhood in Dartford, on the border of London and Kent. But what about the real Keith? Well, he emerges too – but you have to dig a little deeper to find him. This is the “Keef” of Rolling Stones legend: rascally, dangerous, witty the ultimate rock 'n' roll survivor.

Life by Keith Richards