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IT'S dusk on Keith Richards's verandah in the hills outside Ocho Rios, Jamaica. The grizzled face is half-hidden in the shadows. From inside the villa wafts the steady nyahbingi drumming of the Wingless Angels, five Rastafarians whose debut album has been produced by the off-duty Rolling Stone.
"To me there was such an incredible power of expression in the music," says Richards. "It hasn't been done for commercial enterprise; it's just what this lot of people do when they've finished whatever hustle they do to survive."
The collaboration recalls Brian Jones's jaunt to Morocco in the mid-Sixties when Richards's old sparring partner in the Stones recorded with the master musicians of Joujouka. There are similarities, Richards concedes, between the "two little hill villages, in Morocco and Jamaica, each with its own separate culture and drumming". That said, this is not simply a vanity project.
The multi-millionaire has owned property in Jamaica since the early Seventies, and he claims to feel at home among this group. Its line-up includes ska legend Justin Hines and a former Talking Heads and Bad Brains sideman, Black Skull, as well as Warren Williamson, Bongo Neville and fisherman Bongo Locksien. Richards jokingly refers to himself as "the albino in the band", but he's addressed by the five dreadlocked musicians as "Brother Keith".
"I have common roots with these melodies," he says. "They're old hymns and I was a choirboy." (He once even gigged at Westminster Abbey.)
Richards first met Skully and Hines after recording the Goat's Head Soup album with the Rolling Stones in Kingston in 1971. "We didn't know he was Keith Richards, such a great man," says Hines. "He was relaxed, just like a normal person."
In the mid-Seventies, when Richards couldn't be with his kids because of the Stones' endless touring, he entrusted them to the Rastas, who looked after them at home in the village of Steertown. "Safest place in the world for them," he says stoutly.
Richards came up with a name for the group. "Justin's voice - it sounds like angels singing. I said to him, 'You're angels, but you've got no wings.' Then, of course, that led to the jokes - like, the wings had got stuck in customs at Kingston."
Cups of tea flow steadily while the Angels philosophise and reminisce. No matter how secular their previous music might have been, they see a clear connection between Biblical cosmology and everyday life. As Hines observes of the song, Book of Life: "When you become a spiritual person within yourself, your name will be written there as one of the chosen ones.
"I'm looking for all the peoples in the world to have their names written down in the long book of life."
In its purest form, nyahbingi drumming is played at Rastafarian meetings and involves repetitive chanting and drumming. The touchstone recording of the genre remains the epic three-volume box set by the late Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari.
The collaboration between Richards and the Angels expands the genre. Radically breaking with Rasta machismo, the group features a female voice, that of the sensible Sister Maureen. The traditionally sparse sound is further embroidered by the delicate filigree of Richards's guitar, and the fiddle and squeezebox of Irishman Frankie Gavin.
"I wanted to put stuff in without getting in the way," says Richards. "It came slowly. As usual, the more space you leave, the better. Silence is your canvas, then you start to tickle it and play with it. That's how you get depth and space and dynamics, and that's what these guys are past masters at."
It took the best part of three decades to get round to making a proper album. "Like fine wine, the music has matured," Richard claims. Now, the Stones demand his attention for the Bridges to Babylon world tour. But Hines, for the Angels' part, isn't fazed: "He still moves humbly today; I and I have sincere love for this brother."
"Knowing people for a quarter of a century is a long, deep thing," Richards observes. "Nothing was ever planned on this; it's just what we love to do. As soon as I come to Jamaica, when the sun goes down, the drums come out."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4711241/A-Stone-goes-back-to-his-choirboy-roots.html
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