Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is Keith Richards. If one single living person could be said to

person to personify rock and roll, then it is surely him, cool, rebellious, enduring, and in an apparently perpetual

state of having a good time. He's been making music and causing various degrees of havoc

for over half a century and counting. His songwriting, singing

and guitar playing have helped to make the Rolling Stones a stratospherically successful group,

and his early and single-minded dedication to the triumvirate

pursuits of sex and drugs and rock and roll made him a counterculture icon.

No surprise then that as a boy he would go to sleep at night with his arm around his first guitar.

Slightly more startling are the facts that he used to be the patrol leader in the seventh

Dartford scouts and a choir boy.

So where did it all go right?

Well, he says,

I thought rock and roll was an unassailable outlet

for some pure and natural expression of rebellion.

It used to be the one channel you could take without ever

having to kiss ass. So we welcome you to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much.

I didn't I expressed it so well. Very articulate there.

Rebellion of course is a natural part of being young,

but at 71, almost 72 does the rebellion come quite so naturally now?

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