The guitarist Keith Richards always wanted to be: “The epitome of a hero”

There is little in the world of rock music that hasn’t been besmirched by the greasy fingerprint of Keith Richards. One of the most influential musicians of his generation, behind the perceived simplicity of his riffs was the vital composition of every good thing about The Rolling Stones, and there were a lot of good things.

Despite what you may have read, The Rolling Stones weren’t built on the foundation of sex and drugs but rather pure rock ‘n’ roll; everything else was secondary. The triumvirate just formed that way by virtue of inevitability. As a band, they were hell-bent on liberation, smashing the stilted shackles of conservatism that they had grown up with, none more so than the highest man on the high seas, Captain Richards.

The guitarist is now simply synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll. Like the ground beneath our feet, it feels difficult to remember a time when the band’s battle-hardened guitarist wasn’t a part of the fabric of existence in one form or another, either roaring through the radio, tearing up some column inches, or comically chastising Elton John. Though he might profess to prefer “the roll” to the former, the musician has become a uniquely positioned pillar among music’s architecture, and pillars rarely move with ease.

However, if you are to squint with a little more focus, you can notice that Richards has often moved genres occasionally. A noted lover of reggae and a sincere blues enthusiast, he may make rock and roll, but Keith Richards is a lover of music at large, even dabbling in a little stylistic saunter with his solo projects. It makes sense, then, that perhaps his ultimate hero was not a rocker like Scotty Moore, whom Richards undoubtedly adored, nor Chuck Berry with whom Richards endured a few verbal fisticuffs, but Roy Rogers.

“I was a Roy Rogers freak,” Richards told the Poughkeepsie Journal in 2014 of the famous singing cowboy. The actor, singer and marksman was a huge star for Richards and a generation of children in Britain. He typified what it meant to be a man for the young guitarist.

He continued: “There was a man who could ride a horse, shoot straight, and play a guitar. To me, that was the epitome of a hero. Nothing to shoot? Just get the guitar out.”

It wasn’t just that he was an impressive shot, but he inspired Richards on guitar, too. The young boy from Dartford had been an avid learner of the instrument since he was five, and Rogers helped to cement that ambition. When he first met his songwriting partner, Mick Jagger, he shared his love of the man: “I asked Keith what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be like Roy Rogers and play guitar. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Roy Rogers bit,” Jagger admitted. “But the part about guitar did interest me.”

It’s difficult to see Keith Richards singing the kind of near-yodelling country tunes that Rogers delivered, but the inspiration was clearly there. He not only picked up and held onto the guitar for as long as possible, but one can easily picture him in a cowboy hat, on a horse, and shooting wildly.