Keith Richards takes back those nasty things he said about Mick Jagger, sort of

As part of the celebrations for the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary this year, the lads recently announced that they’ve hired director Brett Morgen to assemble “a groundbreaking and eye-opening documentary, featuring remarkable revelations from the world's most legendary band.” One of the first revelations has to do with Keith Richards’ 2010 memoir Life, in which he wrote that, although he is still Mick Jagger's “mate," Jagger “makes it very difficult to be his friend,” and that at some point in the 1980s, their partnership “started to become unbearable.” (He also announced to the world that the size of Jumpin' Jack Flash's penis is nothing to write home about.)

Now Rolling Stone is reporting that, in the course of interviews being done for the documentary, Richards says that the book “was my story and it was very raw, as I meant it to be, but I know that some parts of it and some of the publicity really offended Mick and I regret that.” For his part, Jagger concedes that his relationship with Richards may have become strained in the ’80s because “I got very involved with the business side of the Stones, mainly because I felt no one else was interested, but it's plain now from the book that Keith felt excluded, which is a pity.” Whatever was Richards’ intent, the book may have helped break the ice between them, as Richards says that he and Jagger “have had conversations over the last year of a kind we have not had for an extremely long time and that has been incredibly important to me.” For some ideas about what Jagger might have had to bring to those conversations, it might be worth re-visiting this fantasy missive from the critic, music journalist, and Community loyalist known to Stones obsessives as the other Bill Wyman.