| August 15th, 2005 10:15 PM |
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| Marianne |
An interesting article I found on a Johnny Depp site and thought you guys would find interesting.
Richards and Depp are pirate pals
ALLAN HALL
KEITH RICHARDS
JOHNNY Depp may have lampooned Rolling Stone Keith Richards' drug-addled manner when he played Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, but the two celebrities are now "good buddies".
Richards, 61, who is to take the part of Sparrow's father in a sequel to the film, said they had teamed up in pirate costumes to amuse his grandchildren.
In an interview, the former heroin addict also explained the origins of the urban myth that he regularly has all his blood removed and replaced with a fresh supply at a clinic in Switzerland and spoke of the effect the 9/11 terrorist attacks had had on his family.
Depp previously revealed that he had copied Richards' body language for his role in Pirates of the Caribbean.
But Richards appears to have enjoyed the joke and said Depp was now a firm friend. "Johnny is a good buddy," he said.
"Recently, he visited me with a set of Disney pirate costumes and we disguised ourselves one afternoon and had a hell of a fun time. One of my grandkids thinks I am full-time pirate."
Richards, who once drank two bottles of whisky a day, said he was amused by the tale of his full-body blood transfusions and explained he appeared to have inadvertently started it.
"It is a super legend - and just as long-lived as I am. But it is rubbish," he said.
"Once, I was at Heathrow Airport on my way to Switzerland for treatment for heroin addiction. I met some youngsters who asked me where I was going. I said to Switzerland to exchange my blood. They didn't understand me, obviously."
Richards lives in Connecticut and was in New York at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Centre. "On 11 September, I was literally around the corner," he said. "My grandchildren go to school past the World Trade Centre. Fortunately, they are genuine Richards, which means they were reliably, totally late.
"They still were on the street when the first airplane came, and watched how it smashed into the tower.
"In the weeks afterwards, my house became a kind of five-star rock 'n' roll refugee camp. Some of Mick's children came, also because some of their things were all burned. It was a bad time. All this has left a noticeable impression in the American psyche. But life must go on ... you can't simply give up."
Richards said he was keen to avoid involvement in politics and distanced himself from the new Rolling Stones song Sweet Neo Con - short for neo-conservative - whose lyrics were Mick Jagger's idea.
The record is making waves in the US, with one verse referring to Mr Bush thus: "You call yourself a Christian/I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot/Well, I think you are full of s***/How come you're so wrong/My sweet neo-con."
Richards told the German news magazine Der Spiegel: "The song grew out of Mick's head. There have been political songs of the Stones in the past - take Street Fighting Man or Sweet Black Angel. Mick was keen to write Sweet Neo Con, me less so. I repeat what I said to Mick: politics are exciting, but in rock 'n' roll songs, it's my opinion that it counts for nothing - it does not fit.
"I do not want to play to party programmes on my guitar. That is tedious. But it is also no taboo, and for Mick it was important; I went through with it because we are a team."
Richards said there was none of the earlier animosity between him and Jagger.
"Perhaps it's because we're getting milder in old age and, I don't like to say it, have grown up.
"Last year, Charlie Watts had treatment for cancer and it wasn't clear how it would turn out. One day I said to Mick, 'Maybe we are the last two originals of this band'. One became very thoughtful. But fortunately the thing with Charlie went very well and everything is running as it should."
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| August 15th, 2005 10:43 PM |
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| exile |
one story
http://edition.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/showbiz/2005/08/11/haffenreffer.rolling.stones.neocon.affl&wm=native_mac
the other story
http://extratv.warnerbros.com/v2/news/0805/10/1/video.html
[Edited by exile] |
| August 16th, 2005 02:16 AM |
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| CraigP |
"The former heroin addict..." |
| August 16th, 2005 04:31 AM |
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| Monkey Woman |
Keith and Johnny Depp have been good buddies for some time, haven't they? Keith does a cameo in POTC special edition DVD, joking that now he knew why Johnny bought him dinner so often, he was studying him! 
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