“Where’s my fucking breakfast?”: How did Keith Richards end up as a babysitter in Melbourne for a week?
Keith Richards has lived a thousand lives during his time here on Earth. Drug busts, house fires, onstage fights, and even snorting his own father’s ashes; The Rolling Stones guitarist represents the pinnacle of rock and roll depravity, having fostered an unparalleled reputation for wild antics over the decades. However, old Keef certainly has a sensitive side, too. In fact, for a few weeks during the early 1970s, the guitarist resigned himself to an honest life as a househusband in Melbourne.
It is difficult for any anecdote to be surprising when it comes to Keith Richards – the headline of this article could be “How did Keith Richards end up as an intergalactic bolshevik leading a revolution against Martian overlords?” and it wouldn’t be all that surprising. Nevertheless, the idea of the Rolling Stones’ anarchic axeman sitting at home with a child, cooking corned beef hash while waiting for his woman to return home is pretty bizarre. After all, Richards’ existence is hardly an advert for domesticity.
Ever since the early days of The Rolling Stones, as faithful blues devotees in London during the early 1960s, Richards has always stood out as the wildest, most unpredictable member of the group. This reputation only increased when the Stones found mainstream success in the UK and further afield, held up as poster boys for youthful rock rebellion. The late 1960s were storied by drug busts, chaotic trips abroad, and a not insignificant amount of infidelity. As the 1970s approached, this run of behaviour showed few signs of stopping.
That was until The Rolling Stones visited Australia in 1973. Following on from the riots and highly publicised chaos of the band’s 1972 tour of America, their visit to the Pacific was shrouded in uncertainty. The governments of both Japan and Australia initially said they would not grant Mick Jagger entry due to his drug convictions, but Australia eventually relented, allowing The Rolling Stones to perform nine shows across the country.
The tour included three shows in Melbourne, where the band set up camp for around a week. During that time, Richards managed to charm a local Aussie lady and ended up moving in with her for a few days. Perhaps this turn to domesticity came as a result of fatigue from all the chaos and rioting of the band’s previous tour? Well, not quite.
“She could get me pure cocaine, pharmaceutical,” he wrote in Life. “She kept coming to the hotel to deliver, so I went, ‘Hey, why don’t I just move in?”’
As it transpired, this cocaine dealer’s husband had left her alone with a young kid, and so Richards, while presumably wired on pharmacy-grade coke, became a sort of nanny for a week. “Living in the suburbs of Melbourne for a week with a mother and child was kind of weird,” the guitarist recalled. “Within four or five days, I was like a right Australian old man. Sheila, where’s my fucking breakfast? … It was like I’d been there forever. And it felt great.”
Inevitably, Richards had to give up this cocaine-fueled fatherhood when The Rolling Stones moved on to Adelaide, Perth, and then Sydney, but it seems as if he still remembers that week fondly. “I was a husband for a week. Changed the baby’s diapers,” he wrote, adding, “There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.”
So, if you were born around 1973 and lived with your mother in Melbourne, who knows? Your babysitter might well have been one of the most prominent rock and roll guitarists ever to grace the airwaves. Stranger things have certainly happened, at least in the extensive life of Keith Richards.
