“Dirty rat scum”: the two songs Keith Richards wrote as brutal barbs for Mick Jagger
While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may be the only two continuously present members of The Rolling Stones since their inception in the early 1960s, it’s a well-known fact that not every part of their journey as a group was smooth sailing. On the face of things, to be able to work alongside someone for the majority of your life suggests a tight-knit bond between two or more people, but in actuality, there were more than just a few periods where Mick and Keith actively hated each other’s guts.
Working together in such close capacity for several decades is sure to test your patience, and it is remarkable that The Stones continue to operate as a group today despite their many grievances with one another. The mutual amicability between Jagger and Richards was tested at times, and there were even times when the entire fabric of the band seemed destined to be torn apart by these two warring factions.
Jagger almost certainly took a few public jabs at the band’s ever-present guitarist, but Richards’ outspoken nature meant that he was even more prone to taking swipes at the frontman. From insulting remarks that were published in his memoirs to not-so-subtle lyrics that he wrote, there have been plenty of occasions where Richards has made his true feelings towards Jagger evidently clear, and they’ve never made for comfortable reading.
During the 1980s, their relationship was at its most fraught, and towards the end of the decade, Richards chose to focus on writing his own solo material while The Rolling Stones took a short hiatus from recording together. On his debut solo record, Talk Is Cheap, there were many moments where Richards’ frustrations with his former colleague became hugely apparent, not least on ‘You Don’t Move Me’.
On the track, Richards pokes fun at Jagger for having ruined all of his friendships, singing, “You drove them all around the bend,” and rhymes the words “greedy” and “seedy” in his attempts to undermine any preconceptions that they may have still been close companions at the time. It’s a brutal character assassination, but it’s far from the most derogatory set of lyrics that Richards ever wrote about his fluctuating friend.
A prior example of this vitriolic hatred came on The Rolling Stones’ 1986 track, ‘Had It With You’, although curiously, Richards isn’t even the person singing all of the insults on the track. Having written the words himself, it is, in fact, Jagger who delivers them, essentially being duped into singing a barrage of horrific put-downs that were intended to be levelled at him.
From “you’re a mean mistreater / you’re a dirty dirty rat scum,” to “you always seem to haunt me / always try to haunt me / serving out injunctions / shouting out instructions / but I had it, I had it, I had it with you,” the words that Richards tricked Jagger into singing pull absolutely no punches, and would no doubt have severed their relationship even further the minute it became obvious that they were directed at him.
It’s no wonder that Dirty Work was the album that caused Richards to go on his own for an album, and why it was such a failure compared to the rest of their discography.
