Keith Richards, guitarist with the British musical group The Rolling Stones, on Wednesday backed away from a statement he made a day earlier claiming that he had snorted his father's ashes after mixing them with cocaine. According to a spokesman for the singer, the comment made during an interview with NME magazine was no more than an "April Fool's Joke" and that there was no underlying truth in the statement.
"It was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true," Bernard Doherty of LD Communications, public relations firm representing the artist, told the AP.