Keith Richards: Smoking in New Cross

Goldsmiths' lecturer and activist John Hutnyk seems to have an uncanny knack for sniffing out New Cross drug stories in celebrity biographies. It was he who first drew my attention to Russell Brand's early chemical experiments in SE14.

Now at his Trinketization site he has uncovered this gem from Keith Richards, from his new autobiography Life, about an early tobacco experience with his grandad Gus:

'Gus never bored me. On New Cross station late at night in deep fog, Gus gave me my first dog end to smoke. “No one will see.” A familiar Gusism was to greet a friend with “hello, don’t be a cunt all your life.” The delivery so beautifully flat, so utterly familiar. I loved the man. A cuff round the head. “You never heard that.” “What, Gus?”