You'd be in some motel, and people would be shooting at each other, but unfortunately you'd be in the room in between. I used to keep my gun under my pillow [laughs], but then it becomes like your fetish, and you can't go to sleep unless it's there. Then you start wondering what you're worried about and if you'd actually use the gun anyway I got pretty good at light bulbs and chandeliers, though. "What I can tell you," he says, "is that when we were finishing the album in LA, Johnny came down to the studio to talk about the movie. He's always been a good, smooth acoustic player, but the electric seemed like an untamed beast for him until this year. When I heard him this time I thought, 'My God! The boy's finally got it.'" This is how Richards goes on: holding court, spinning anecdotes, and generally leaving no buckle unswashed.
No huge surprise, then, that he has reportedly been offered a part in Pirates of the Caribbean III (Pirates II is already in the can). While his pal Johnny Depp famously used Keith as a template when playing the roguish Jack Sparrow, Richards says he can neither "confirm nor deny" his own involvement in the trilogy. There was a pregnant pause, and we thought, 'Should we put things on hold?' But then it was, 'No, let's forge ahead - it will be a good incentive for Charlie. Actually, this is probably the closest Mick and I have worked together since Exile on Main Street. Both of us took on tasks that normally wouldn't have occurred to us, playing bass or whatever "Mick playing great guitar helped," Richards continues "I sleep downstairs and the studio is upstairs. One night I thought I was hearing this old Muddy Waters track I didn't know, but it turned out to be Mick working on a slide part for "Back of my Hand". "We were short staffed," he quips, enjoying a quotidian phrase and deliberately sounding like himself as caricatured by John Sessions on Stella Street.
"Mick and I got the news that Charlie was going in for treatment just as we started writing. While, for example, some sneaker companies maintain that their shoes have nothing to do with fashion but are manufactured solely for sporting endeavour, Nuovo, 44, makes no bones that his creations should be seen as trend-setting accessories. "Oh, absolutely!" he beams, sat in London's Design Museum, hours before he's due to deliver a talk on what the future holds, mobile-wise. "In the early days I would use 'fashion' and 'technology' in the same sentence and the engineers would say, 'What the hell are you talking about?' They'd turn pale." Today, there is nothing pale about Nokia's bank balance. With annual revenues over £18bn, the company is in rosy health.