The cocaine duel that derailed Keith Richards’ attempt to produce The Only Ones
Name a drug, and Keith Richards has probably got a story about having tried it. You might not be able to rely on all of the details being accurate, given the constantly altered state his mind has been in throughout large portions of his career, but you can bet he’ll give it a go.
Of course, we tend to look at The Rolling Stones guitarist’s tales of drug use as being somewhat amusing, with Keef’s cheeky demeanour often being a reason to chuckle along as he regales his fans with stories of extreme inebriation. Richards is evidently blessed with some sort of raconteurial ability when it comes to making drug abuse sound somewhat exciting, but the manner in which he often tells these stories avoids touching upon the more troubling aspects of the situations.
If you scratch beneath the surface, these stories are frequently quite harrowing, and you do also feel sorry for Richards and his battles with crippling addiction, slowly eating away at him while he pretends that all is well. It’s frankly a miracle that he’s alive today and able to tell these tales, no matter how incoherent or incomplete in detail they are.
Richards wasn’t necessarily solely to blame for his descent into a drug-addled nightmare, and in many cases, it was down to the company he kept. One particular serial enabler was Peter Perrett, the frontman of London power pop outfit The Only Ones, who he formed a strong bond with during the 1970s, but who was also responsible for broadening the range of substances that were entering his system.
Shortly after The Only Ones formed in 1976, Richards was coaxed into trying to produce a record for the nascent group, but this led him down a dark path that derailed the creative partnership the minute it began. His friendship with Perrett opened him up to a world of being able to get his hands on cocaine and heroin, largely thanks to his new friend introducing him to a group of Italian importers who he claimed to have ended up shifting supplies for on the side.
However, it was upon his arrival at the band’s first studio session that he was made to realise that not only had he met his match when it came to substance abuse, but that he wasn’t ever going to be able to make a record with the band if this was how things were going to commence. With Richards rocking up to the studio with his eight-year-old son, Marlon, in tow, guitarist John Perry claims that an entire bag was emptied onto the floor and subsequently polished off, although that pales in comparison to their following encounter.
“There was lots of coke being chopped out, and Peter was in competitive mode,” Perry recalled. “Every line that Keith put out, Peter would say, ‘Zena [Perrett’s wife], put some more out!’ It was like a poker game where Peter was going to match whatever Keith was doing, and raise him.”
Suffice to say, very little got done when Richards and Perrett were in the studio together, and while they were clearly excellent partners for some activities, they simply couldn’t function as a creative pair, with The Only Ones eventually settling on recruiting Steve Lillywhite to produce their debut album. Besides, Richards would be arrested on trafficking charges while in Toronto in 1977, making it virtually impossible for him to have carried on working anyway.
