What made Keith Richards say Mick Jagger had “blown his credibility”?

It’s fairly common knowledge these days that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards aren’t really friends per se, and haven’t been for years. If anything, that’s because their bond is bigger and stronger than a word as slight as “friend”. They’re not even really brothers at this point, either. It’s telling that when The Rolling Stones broke into the mainstream, the phrase used to describe Mick ‘n’ Keef wasn’t friends, bandmates, or even brothers. They were twins.

Which is a hell of a statement, when you think about it. Two people who, in the most literal sense of the phrase, came into this world together. They grew up together and, as twins often do, know each other better than anyone else on the planet. In fact, as anyone who’d dealt with them previously will know, there’s often a co-dependency issue there as well. They want to function as separate entities, and also fundamentally can’t. Anyone who’s seen Mick and Keith’s solo projects may want to come to their own conclusions there.

However, as Keith Richards found out later in life, the people you know best are often the ones who surprise you the most. Not always for good reasons either. While the 1980s were famously the decade in which the relationship between Mick and Keith was at its most fractious (hence the trainwreck solo albums), there was also the feeling that their behaviour wasn’t exactly surprising to each other. Mick was being a control freak capitalist with an eye on the bottom line, and Keith was being a free spirit rock ‘n’ roller with addiction issues. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.

These were personal issues that they’d spend decades nursing. Whether it was sniping in the press or punch-ups in the studio, it was nothing new. No, it wouldn’t be until two decades later that something Mick Jagger did outright surprised Keith Richards. In a way, it’s a miracle the band continued after it because, as Richards wrote in his autobiography Life, it didn’t just make him angry with his singer. That was par for the course; he knew how to handle that. Something much worse and much more corrosive happened. It made him doubt Jagger for the first time in decades.

Why did Keith Richards say this about Mick Jagger?

It all came from an event in 2002 that a lot of ink has already been spilt about. The moment that Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones frontman and rock superstar, became Sir Michael Phillip Jagger, knight of the realm. Honestly, it had been coming. Five years earlier, Paul McCartney had his prefix added. Elton’s came a year after that. It wasn’t out of the question for a literal Rolling Stone to bend the knee for the royal family, but it was still a surreal sight.

No one felt this more than Keith Richards, who wrote about the experience in his autobiography Life with typical candour. At first, he talks about the phone call he had with Jagger, saying, “he called me today, I’ve got to tell you this now: Tony Blair is insisting that I accept a Knighthood. You can turn down anything you like, pal, was my reply. I left it at that. It was incomprehensible for Mick to do it; he’d blown his credibility.”

Next thing Richards knew, his Glimmer Twin was now a sir. While rolling his eyes at anything Mick did was pretty much second nature to Ol’ Keef, this cut a lot deeper. He talks about a follow-up call with Charlie Watts, where the drummer said, “You know he’s always wanted one. I said, No, I didn’t know. It never occurred to me. Had I misread my friend? The Mick that I grew up with, here’s a guy who’d say shove all your little honours up your arse. Thank you very much, but no thanks.”

Yet, there he was, accepting an honour from, as Keith put it, “a system that tried to put you in jail for nothing.” It reads like a point of no return for Richards, and when you think about it, he has a point. Imagine your best friend since childhood becomes the person you build a career around, and together, you become two of the most famous people in the world. How would you feel if, after forty years of knowing that person, you suddenly realised you might now have known them as well as you thought?