Twenty five years of being a Rolling Stone has left Keith Richards looking more battered than a vintage Telecaster. But many a good riff is played on an old guitar...

If, like Dorian Gray, Cliff Richard kept a portrait in his attic that bore the marks of his degeneration whilst he retained the looks of an Adonis the painting would bear more than a passing resemblance to Keith Richards.

There isn't much compensation for having given Rock'n'Roll the best years of your life. In fact, very often all Rock'n'Roll will do by way of a return favour is leave you looking not unlike a guitar playing prune. Elegantly wasted is one of the kinder descriptions but the fact remains that at 43, Richards is no oil painting. Indeed his deathly demeanour has given the English language the expression, "You look like Keith Richards warmed up." But despite appearances he is nonetheless a living legend.

A conversation with Keith Richards is a daunting prospect for two reasons. One is that he's so bloody famous it makes you nervous. The other is that he is Rock'n'Roll history made flesh. He was there when they invented the thing. Hence he knows a bit about it and has one of the most valid opinions on Rock'n'Roll in the world as we know it. Contrary to popular opinion, Richards isn't a surly, snapping prima donna.

Sitting on a porch on the Carribean island of Antigua, Richards is genial, chatty and very cheerful. It is gratifying to learn that his happiness and verbosity are not attributable to anything naughty.

He's clean as a whistle and having a natter about the things he loves: the Rolling Stones, Rock'n'Roll, guitars and life. He talks about Mick Jagger too, although you get the impression that he's not altogether head over heels about his fellow Glimmer Twin at the moment, referring to him as "Brenda", "a pain in the neck" and implying more than once that Jerry Hall wears the proverbial trousers in her relationship with Jagger. Apart from conjuring up visions of eight foot of Texan leg in skintight baseball pants, these comments make you wonder how and why the Stones keep going. Of course, Keith's answered this one before.

"Quite simply it's the fact that we all really enjoy playing together," he says in his surprisingly refined English accent softened by a hint of mid-Atlantic.

"We've all been through so many changes. My relationship with Mick changes all the time. That's the reason we're still around — there's enough elastic in the arrangement. The Stones aren't the beginning and end of life for me but just like a million other people I'm very glad that they're around. Also, I'm very selfish and I really do like to play with the Stones."

Dirty Work, the Rolling Stones' most recent LP, is their 47th if you count all the compilations and live albums. In the past 25 years the band have been through everything from sexual revolution to technological revolution.

Change has always been an essential feature of the Stones and whether it is personnel or SSL they consider the alternatives and adapt as they see necessary.

"Technology is racing way in front of making music," opines Keith. "You can just sit and make music any time. Two thousand years ago, right now I could sit down with an instrument and make music. But making records is a different ball game. Making records is a race with technology. There are now a ludicrous number of toys available in the studio to a musician. And you play with them and discard them when a better one comes along just as a kid does with a toy.

"The thing that strikes me as being very strange is that as more and more possibilities present themselves the more records sound alike, and I think that's wrong. But music is in a period where there is so much technology — and everyone is playing with it trying to find out what is really useful and what is just a toy — records, whether they were made this year or last year, have basically been made on the same six or seven pieces of equipment.

"Technology is supposed to be a tool that widens the spectrum to make more possibilities available, but at the moment it is working negatively. I think people are getting frightened by the number of possibilities and are sticking with formulae they know to be safe."

With that thought in mind how do the Stones approach work on a new album?

"We never go into the studio with a really set idea of how an album is going to be," he says. "Circumstances dictate and chance always plays a big part. I think all you have to do is put the Rolling Stones in a studio and they will come out with something interesting. That's often a better way to work as opposed to having something planned.

"It never takes long once we get in the studio," he continues, "all we really have to do is get in there and sort out who's doing what and how we are going to play individually and together and we take it from there. We don't need all the toys to do that. That's what the Rolling Stones are really good at... just playing together in the studio and recording.

"Here I want to say that I'm not knocking anyone who wants to go into a studio and use every bit of technology available. We use quite a bit, obviously, but we like to think that we are using it 'responsibly' and 'intelligently'. It's very easy right now for the technology or gadgetry to overcome a record. We like to use it but use it sparingly because once the machine has become the record you've missed the whole point.

"I remember when we started we used to record on two track. The first album was all done on two track. Their idea of soundproofing the studio was to stick thousands of egg cartons on the walls and to make it look professional they used to hang the two track on the wall instead of just leaving it on the table. That was supposedly hi-tech!"

Richards shares a penchant for mono with Phil Spector. He maintains that if a record was made to be listened to in mono then that's exactly what you should do with it.

"I dont want to listen to a 1952 Muddy Waters record in stereo," he reasons. "It's not what was intended when the record was made. Just because it now has stereo stamped on it, it doesn't make it alright. I mean I remember with the Stones when this new big deal called stereo came along half way through the 60s and all we did was put mono out both speakers! There was no way you could make stereo out of our records!

"But we haven't changed a great deal in the way we actually make records. We're probably making them the same way but for different reasons.

"I think because music is in such a state of flux at the moment with everybody trying to find the limits to which they can take things we deliberately went into the studio and made an album that was extremely straightforward."

Much to Richards' chagrin, Mick Jagger spent most of the time booked for the Stones to record Dirty Work working on his solo album She's The Boss. Richards voiced his annoyance and the disagreement over priorities soon escalated into a full scale public feud. Just as with Let It Bleed (which suffered exactly the same problem when Jagger concentrated his efforts on making Performance) Dirty Work has come to be called another of Keith's albums. Richards obviously doesn't disapprove of the term.

"Well I was very into it," he smiles, "and it's nice to make a good album. After you've spent a year and a half in the studio it's nice to still feel good about the songs. I mean we were completely sick of most of our best records by the time we'd finished recording them."

The album unusually features a greater writing contribution from Ronnie Wood, with four songs attributed to Jagger/Richards/Wood.

"Normally when it comes to making a Stones album Mick and I get together and sort the songs out but this time Mick just wasn't around and as Ronnie lives pretty close to me he was coming over and we were jamming on guitars as usual and a few songs started to come out.

"Eventually I said to him, 'Hey, you've helped me write three or four songs here,' and I really wanted him to get recognition for them because he doesn't always get the credit he deserves. I mean the band still consider him to be the new guy and he's been with us 10 years! I think after 10 years, you're definitely in the band.

"Ronnie and I play together really well. When Mick Taylor left in 1975 we auditioned lots and lots of different guitarists. We'd have someone different coming down every week. And all of them were extremely good guitarists — virtuosos. But, the Stones aren't about virtuosos. Look at Charlie Watts — he'd run a mile from a drum solo or even doing something flash. The word 'virtuoso' just isn't in his book. But, he's the only drummer I know that can really... take off! I rely on Charlie, he holds it together. With the Stones it's more about fitting in well with the rest of the guys and that's exactly what Ron did. It's a chemical thing."

Since joining, Wood has been the perfect foil for Richards' ramshackle playing technique but amazingly there is still no rigid format for who takes what part.

"It's just something we do," says Keith. "We don't need to discuss it. If I hear Ron beginning to take a solo then I'll lie back and let him do it. Sometimes it happens that neither of us take the solo and one of us has to take control."

Wembley 1982 saw Richards take control rather forcefully. When Wood headed off to another planet on stage during the intro to She's So Cold Richards, who was left somewhat in the lurch, took matters beyond the musical, stalked across the vast stage and piled a fist square into Wood's face. What price the perfect guitar playing partnership? It certainly isn't all trading licks and lending each other top E strings.

Sometimes, when the telepathy breaks down there is no alternative but to crack your partner in the mouth. It's basic philosophy. At least it's basic philosophy when you're a member of the most famous gang in the cosmos. Apart from being able to take a punch like Frank Bruno, Ronnie Wood also harbours a few other extra curricular talents.

"Ronnie's a multi-instrumentalist," grins Keith. "You see there's room for that in the Stones. We haven't got that sort of 'do you mind if I touch your instrument' attitude. Consequently we swap about all the time — Ronnie played the drums on Sleep Tonight.

We were all pretty surprised because myself and Ron had sorted the arrangement and everything out and Ron was showing Charlie the sort of thing he wanted on the drums and Charlie just stood up and said 'You've got it, you do the part.' Ronnie also played bass on Too Rude and Back to Zero. I enjoy playing bass, too. It's kind of a hobby with me. But we're a band full of bass players! There's Bill, Ron who played bass for years and myself. I haven't played bass since Pretty Beat Up, which was on Undercover, but I really get into it when I do."

It must have been difficult working out the bass part on Had It With You from Exile On Main Street.

"That's because there isn't a bass part on it," he laughs. "We tried the song with the whole band — guitars, bass, piano and everything and it all sounded a bit stiff because there were half bars and quarter bars to sort of make it swing in a Bluesy way. So, the band said, 'you, Mick and Charlie run through it out there and we'll follow it.' So we ran through it twice and everyone said, 'That's it, you've got it — you don't need us on it.' We put on a tiny bit of bass — a few bars in the fade out, and Ronnie overdubbed a bit of sax that was kept very low but kind of gave it a bottom end. But as far as I was concerned the guitar and drums gave the song enough bass anyway."

Sessions for Dirty Work weren't quite as harmonious but in their own way they were just as inspired.

"I wrote Fight when Mick walked out off a session and I got mad, "he says laughing at the memory," so I guess something good came out of it. But as the Stones' begin to work on more and more solo stuff it becomes increasingly difficult to even get the band to meet in the same country let alone the same recording studio."

The responsibility for producing the Stones latest meister werk fell on the young shoulders of Steve Lillywhite.

"It was sort of an accident the way we came to work together," says Keith. "Mick and I had been saying since Some Girls that we should find another producer because we hadn't really had any sort of producer since Jimmy Miller on Goat's Head Soup in the early 70s. We never intended to produce that many Stones albums between us. It's just too difficult a job to be the writer, the arranger and musician and then go into the studio and spend your time dashing between control room and studio putting on your producer's hat and then your musician's hat. It's just too many bases to cover.

"But I firmly believe that producers are like gurus — you don't find them, they find you. It was silly in the 60s when all those hippies were running across India looking for gurus. You don't look for a guru, a guru looks for you. Due to timing and various other problems it can be difficult trying to work with the producers you want to work with. But it's great when you find someone who can tell this band what to do, I can tell you.

"I'd very much like to work with Steve, again. My only reservation is that other producers we've used have just ended up a complete wreck and I don't want to do that to Steve. But, I'd certainly like to do another album with him — if he wants to!"

Considering Richards' long-standing affair with heroin (which finished as long ago as 1977) he was odds-on favourite to be the first dead Stone. Hence, the band and their public alike were shocked by the untimely death of 'sixth Stone', keyboard player Ian Stewart who had been with the band since the very start.

"Stew was in the band and he wasn't in the band," says Richards, obviously upset, "so you could always ask him to arbitrate over an argument within the group or you could always go to him with a problem. I don't know who I'm going to go to now. I sorted out a piece that Stew did in Paris recently. You see when we are in the studio I leave the tape running all the time. It's a lot of tape but it's worth it even when there's no-one in the room. But when we'd all gone out for a pee or a drink during the Paris sessions for the most recent album Stew played this lovely tune on the piano and I found it when I was looking for an exemplary piece of his playing. It's called Key To The Highway — it's kind of appropriate."

Richards, who it could be said invented the riff, is still in love with playing the guitar whether he's picking out an old Elmore James tune at his home in Jamaica, cranking out the intro to Brown Sugar in that famous G modal tuning or strumming the wrong chords to Blowin In The Wind infront of 12 billion people at Live Aid. His favourite guitar is his 1956 Fender Telecaster.

"It used to be white but all the paint has come off. It's sort of blond wood now with patches of white. I had new pickups put on it but it still feels like a real old comfortable guitar.

"I always take a guitar with me. For two or three days I might not touch it but then I might get an idea for a song and not put it down for two days. Writing songs is like hunting sometimes — you see a little movement and you chase after it and start following it. In actual fact I think songs write themselves, all you are is the medium — you just happen to be around and the song comes through you. I could never get really (affects Donald Sinden voice) 'I've created this song!' I have never been able to get into any sort of routine for writing songs either. I aways find I have to get up in the middle of the night or jump up from the dinner table and race to the tape machine."

He views the idea of a solo album with great caution. Again he uses the word 'timing' and explains himself thus:

"I probably have enough material already recorded for a solo album but whether or not I'll release it this year depends on what the Stones are doing. At the moment it doesn't look like we'll be touring but if I were to release a solo album it would immediately be construed as my reply to She's The Boss. I don't want to start fighting him through records too! I don't want an extension of this public row we're having on vinyl. I can take care of him myself."

Whether it's Richards' world-wisdom or his extensive knowledge of Blues music (his immediate plans include producing and writing the soundtrack for a film about the life of Blues guitarist Robert Johnson) he seems to be the right man to ask about Rock'n'Roll's successful longevity.

"I think it's because it was suppressed for so long. It's not a new music after all. It's been people's music from way back. The early stages of the record industry suppressed it so much it just burst out at the seams. Given its birth I don't see any possibility for its death. There's a million turns it might take as it spreads out but it's still in its infancy. I remember when we started people were saying, 'give it three years and it will be gone. 'Well I'm still waiting! I find that the Stones are in a fascinating position now. They're finding out how you can grow with the music and how the music can grow with you. We've grown up together.

"Playing together is what the Stones do best and what I love to do. You can't be intimidated by being 40-odd and you can't let what's going on around you affect you and reduce yourself to the level of adolescent competition. It's all a matter of who has the Peter Pan complex.

"It's a difficult thing to explain. I can play and have played with the top musicians in the world and I have had a good time playing with them and learn a lot. But for sheer enjoyment and for something you can't measure with little flashing lights and little meters there's something... special about working with those guys. It's a pleasure."

Keith Richards, it's been a pleasure.