Keith Richards‘ daughter Alexandra Richards didn’t realize how famous her Rolling Stones dad was until she was in high school. The 31-year-old DJ and model is the youngest daughter of Richards and his second child with his wife of nearly 35 years, model Patti Hansen.
Alexandra spoke to Hello! Fashion Monthly, and explained how she finally came to understand how important and far-reaching her dad’s influence was, recalling, “I grew up in a very public school (Western High School in Greenwich, Connecticut), and there was a lot of teasing going on. Kids would play dad’s music in the playground. That’s when I really got it that dad was on the radio. The kids would be like, ‘My parents listened to your dad last night when they were cooking in the kitchen.'”
Alexandra, along with older sister Theodora, often traveled the world with their parents during the Stones’ mammoth globe trotting tours, and ended up skipping third and seventh grade due to the band’s road work. She said that it was Ron Wood‘s daughter Leah, who shepherded the Richards sisters while on tour: “She was the one I always looked up to. . . because she was a little bit older than us.”
Still, Alexandra admitted that it was tough to re-acclimate to a normal teen existence after being on tour with the Stones: “For me it was a lot of growing and when I went back to Western Connecticut and I told all my friends where I’d been — it was just so different from what they were experiencing at that age. After that I was commuting from Connecticut to New York, modeling while trying to finish school and get my grades up.”
Although the Rolling Stones are often portrayed as a roving band of pirates, Keith Richards explained that the band has always relied heavily on their families both on and off the road: “I mean, this is a very rootless life, if you’re on your own. Y’know, the only thing sometimes, you’ve got to hang on to is family. Ask anybody in this band, they’ve got very strong family ties.”
The Rolling Stones will next perform on May 17th in Dublin, Ireland.
