dumb britain

"I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around my brain. I've got pictures of it, mate. They cut my head, brain, skull open, went in and pulled out the crap, and put some of it back again".

Lots of rubbish in the papers today, I note, about how Keith Richards supposedly snorted his dad's ashes with a line of coke. Drawn from his comment in a typically funny NME interview, it's made the cover of the Mirror and various other rags - it makes you wonder how the English dare criticise other European nations for 'lacking a sense of humour'. The comments are so self-evidently jokes and that fact has either been missed or glossed over in the search for a good headline. Given that Keith's old joke about having his entire blood system transfused in the 1970s still occasionally does the rounds, I suppose we can at least credit the man with being a master when it comes to managing and massaging his image; it's long been commented that away from the press, where Richards is reliably louche, spaced out and rather camp, he's far more articulate and straight-forward. Anyway, joke or no, I enjoyed the rest of his quotes, above and below, which I suspect are similarly mischievous.

"My advice is that [Pete Doherty] should shut the fuck up and leave her. Kate wants to play with bad boys, and she's done one, and then another one, and then another one. Badabing, badabang, badaboom. She'll live, the boys will die."