Keith Richards admits he went "fucking berserk" when Mick Jagger accepted a knighthood on the eve of the singer's 60th birthday last year - an honour bestowed by "the same establishment that did their very best to throw us in jail and kill us". This month, on December 18, Richards, too, joins the over-60s club. Do we take it we shouldn't be looking for his name in the forthcoming New Year's honours list? He harumphs. "I don't want to step out on stage with the coronet on. And I told Mick, 'It's a fucking paltry honour, anyway. If you're into this shit, hang on for the peerage.'"
There's a certain ring to "Lord Richards of Redlands", the name of the house in Sussex that he still owns and was the scene of the bust that briefly sent him and Jagger to prison in 1967. But if Jagger these days is the well-connected socialite and acceptable face of the Rolling Stones, "Keef" is still the band's swashbuckling outlaw and unlikely to be visiting Buck House for his investiture any time soon. If there was a popular vote, however, to elect one "people's peer" to represent the rock world in the upper chamber, it would surely be Richards and not Jagger who would get to wear the ermine.
The singer Chrissie Hynde tells the story of bumping into Richards once at Heathrow. "We walked to the gate together and it was extraordinary the amount of people who passed him and said, 'Hey Keith, how're you doing, mate?' The only other rock star I've ever seen with that common touch was Joe Strummer. They certainly wouldn't have done it if it was Mick."
That Richards has reached 60 at all is a source of some amazement. For a long time in the 1970s when he was "a human chemical laboratory" - his own description - you couldn't have got decent odds on him making 40. He lived on a diet of heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD and heaven knows what else, washed down with industrial quantities of Jack Daniels. Many of his drug buddies, including Gram Parsons and John Belushi, failed to make it.
But Richards is famous for his ox-like constitution. Cold turkey is not so bad after you've done it "10 or 12 times", he once opined. So before meeting him in New York last month, I sought a medical opinion and asked Dr Hank Wangford, a singer as well as a GP, what was the secret of Richards' survival. "Keith has a genetic strength," he said. "But just as importantly, he has an appetite for life. He wants to be here."
When we meet, I put this to Richards, and it gains his approval. "People say I've got a manic lust for life. But I've got no idea about that, really. To me it's just the way I am. As far as I'm concerned, life is all you get and I'll make the best out of it. So yes, that's a great answer from the good doctor. That encapsulates it , I think. I want to be here. And I want to see where I'm going."
Yet it wasn't always so. He never actually wanted to die. But he was certainly careless about living and on several occasions almost joined the not-so-exclusive club of needlessly dead rock stars. "I've been stupid with it," he admits. "I've abused it. Almost like trying to commit suicide without any intention to do it - that stupid, stupid kind of suicide. But it just won't go away. So I decided to learn to live with myself."
At the end of the year-long Forty Licks tour, Richards looks surprisingly robust. The lines in his face that the camera seems to accentuate are far softer in the flesh, so they resemble creases rather than crevices. His voice is also surprisingly cultured, far more so in many ways than Jagger's flattened vowels. And he's infinitely sharper and more focused than his image often suggests.
I discovered at first-hand that his "What year is it, man?" persona is a bit of an act several years ago at the Q awards. We were seated on the same table and before the presentation he was perfectly sober and coherent. Yet when he was called on stage, an extraordinary transformation took place. He scratched his head, mumbled "Yeah, man" several times and got the name of the award wrong, thanking the organisers for conferring on him the non-existent title of man-of-the-century. Everybody clapped and winked approvingly. Good old Keef. It's only lunch-time and he's already out of it. Then he returned to the table, and was perfectly straight again.
Yet with his fish-hooks and amulets dangling bizarrely from his hair, he does look every inch the rock'n'roll buccaneer, and you can see exactly why Johnny Depp chose to model his character in Pirates of the Caribbean on the Stones' guitar-slinger. Richards enjoyed the portrayal and reveals that he recently had dinner with Depp. "He paid. Which only seemed right under the circumstances."
Something very interesting has happened to our perceptions of the Rolling Stones over the course of the last year or so. Five or 10 years ago, there appeared something obscene about these leering, middle-aged men strutting the stage and pretending they were still young bucks. Yet once Jagger turned 60, it was as if it suddenly became noble and heroic that they were still up there doing it. In short, the Stones have become a national treasure, rock'n'roll's answer to the late Queen Mum. Richards has noticed it, too.
"It would have been easy for me to give up and say I can't be bothered to be sniped at any more about wrinkly rockers and all of that," he says. "But what do the critics know? They've never sailed this sea before because nor have we. We're just floating out there and seeing where it can go."
Perhaps it's the talk of Johnny Depp and pirates. But Richards is clearly much taken with this nautical metaphor and the idea of the Stones as salty old sea dogs. "One expects some storms and some choppy waters. But it's like we've now gone over the Equator," he enthuses. "We're Magellan. Or Sir Frankie Drake. I was hoping for that, and miraculously we've got there through some rough old seas."
Inevitably, talk turns to his relationship with Jagger, which has endured its ups and downs over the years. It is now more than half a century since they first met at primary school in Dartford and, disagreements over the knighthood apart, a benign tolerance seems to characterise relations between them these days. Even when Richards alters the title of Jagger's last and spectacularly unsuccessful solo album to Dogshit in the Doorway, the insult is amusing rather than provocative. How much has Jagger changed over the years? "Well, his underpants, three times," he says. "I can't say really because my perspective has changed, too. We kind of orbit around each other until we end up colliding."
Later, I get to ask Jagger about Richards. A trawl through the press cuttings suggests that his public utterances about Richards have been surprisingly rare. At one point in the 80s when they were not getting on at all, he told an American reporter, "I try to lay off saying what I think because it's potentially damaging." Pressed again a few years later, he conceded, "It's a very English relationship, where not a lot is said."
Yet asked for a 60th birthday tribute, he jokes about "lovely, cuddly Keith" and speaks with considerable warmth. "We've been friends for a very long time and we're also partners as well as working together on a creative level. So because it's on all of those levels, it makes for a very complex and complicated relationship. I still don't really pretend to understand it. He's incredibly loyal. That's endearing. He's loyal to a fault."
Later still, I get to ask Charlie Watts how the relationship looks from behind his drum kit. "You could say Keith brings emotion and Mick brings direction," he says. "I think Mick on his own would have lost his way years ago if he hadn't had Keith to bounce off. And vice versa. Because without Mick pushing I don't think there's any way we would have been able to do it for this long. It's a combination of Keith's spirit and Mick's drive. They're like brothers. Always arguing but always getting on."
The Forty Licks tour may have been a triumph over the last 14 months - 115 concerts across five continents, seen by two-and-a-half million fans and gross takings in excess of £200m. Yet, noticeably, it was not supported by a new studio album and it is now six years since Bridges to Babylon, the longest gap ever between Stones' records in their 40-year career. There were four new songs on the Forty Licks compilation album released to coincide with the tour. Yet alongside the classics, they were exposed as pale imitations of former glories. Are the Stones now principally a touring act rather than a studio band?
"One could look at it like that," Richards says candidly. "I think from the Stones point of view, it's obvious we've got this body of work and so there's no pressure on us to come up with new stuff. We carry around a lot of damn good baggage. But if we've got something new that's really good, we've got the opportunity to throw it in. But at the moment, I'm not sure how we're going to handle this, quite honestly."
Although it has always been Jagger who has been the trend-spotter, adding disco beats in the 80s and bringing in hip young producers such as the Dust Brothers in the 90s, Richards insists he does listen to new bands. Not that there are many who have impressed him, and he questions their motivation. "They need to ask what they're doing it for. Do they want hit records? Or do they want to make good records and hope they're a hit? There are a lot of people out there who just think fame is it. Well it's handy, I can tell you." He laughs raucously. "But you've got to have something more than that."
Every Stones tour of the last decade has been touted as the last time. But at 60, Richards doesn't sound remotely like someone who has played his last lick. "Somewhere inside of us we feel we've got a mission to perform," he says. "We don't know who has told us to do it. But we feel we've been given this task and we're stubborn enough not to want to be the first ones to get off the bus."
So does he intend to keep on until he drops? "Well, look at Duke Ellington. Or Louis Armstrong. Nobody argued about them going on and on. I guess it's just because rock'n'roll is supposed to be something you do when you're 20 or 25, like a tennis player. But 20-year-old chicks are still throwing their panties at me. That's ludicrous, really. But I've got to see how far the ball will roll. And what would the world be without the Rolling Stones?"
· Nigel Williamson is contributing editor of Uncut magazine.