Crock rocker nearly snapped

Rolling Stone Keith Richards had "a close call for early retirement" during a trip with his family to an exclusive game lodge near the Kruger Park shortly after the band's two Johannesburg concerts in January 1995.

Writing in his new autobiography, Life, the 67-year-old guitarist reveals that he almost had his hand bitten off by a crocodile during a game drive - an experience he felt he could have passed up on, particularly as he was suffering from a hangover and a lack of sleep.

"One morning, we'd been up all night and I'd been asleep about an hour and I really wasn't ready for it, but they scooped me up and put me on the back of this open safari truck," Richards writes.

"I wasn't in the best of moods to start with, jolting around in the back ."

The first animal he saw was a warthog - "the ugliest creature I'd ever seen . wonderful to watch, but not when you've slept for an hour and have a terrible hangover".

An encounter with a very well-endowed bull elephant was next. He writes that it was "tearing down two trees" about 10m tall.

"Then one of my daughters said, 'Oh, Daddy, he's got five legs,' and I said, 'Six including the trunk.' His c*** was on the ground, 11 feet long. Humbled, I was humbled. I mean, this gun was loaded."

His advice for spotting big cats?

"How do we know they're around? Because there's an antelope in the goddam tree, dangling. A cheetah has dragged it and stashed it there." (Perhaps he had confused it with a leopard.)

The incident with the crocodile came when his driver stopped near a water hole, got a stick and "pokes this puddle".

"And I'm just sort of hanging around the back, I've got my hand dangling over the edge, and I feel this hot breath, and I hear this snap, the jaws of this croc must have missed me by an inch. I almost killed the guy. Crocodile breath. You don't want to feel it."

Behaviour of staff at the lodge, particularly towards black members of his entourage, was just as unwelcome.

"We were there only two or three days, in the middle of the Voodoo Lounge tour, and we took along Bernard Fowler and Lisa Fischer [both backing singers]."

The lodge's employees, Richards says, were white "former prison guards. And obviously most of the prisoners were black. You could see it on the barman's face when Bernard or Lisa ordered a double shot of Glenfiddich. It was hardly welcoming. Mandela had been released five years earlier. Lisa and Bernard went out to seek this moment and do their roots thing, and they came back really p***** off.

"All they got was blacks not welcome. Nothing seemed to have changed from the old apartheid attitudes."

Richards did not name the lodge.

"I can't really say it was fabulous. It's a retrospective pleasure. What riled me up was the way the whites were treating Bernard and Lisa. It just soured me for the whole visit."