Yesterday Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones caused something of a sensation by claiming in an interview that he mixed his  dead father's ashes with cocaine and snorted them all up – after all, everyone knows that you're supposed to inject ashes.

But it appears that Keith Richards, the cheeky young scamp, was telling a bit of a porky. Instead of commemorating his father Bert's death by blasting his remains into his sinuses through a rolled-up tenner, in actual fact Keith Richards just planted a tree on top of the scattered ashes. Which doesn't sound that rock and roll, admittedly, until you discover that the tree exclusively grows dirty syringes and prostitutes. Or acorns – we're always getting those two mixed up, which might explain why our garden is such a bleeding deathtrap.

The thing about Keith Richards is that he's lived a life of such insane excess that it's hard to tell if he's joking. If your average man on the street told you that he'd snorted his dead father's ashes with a load of cocaine, you'd instantly suspect that he was lying – but Keith Richards?

Keith Richards is the man who spent a great deal of last year getting his head drilled open to stop him dying of a drunken accident and starring in a cartoon about a single mother and smoking a cigarette on a stage in Scotland once – and the man who reportedly once had all his dirty blood removed and cleaned up in a European clinic – so when Keith Richards told the NME this:

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow… . It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

The natural thing was to believe him. In retrospect we probably shouldn't have, because it turns out that all the Dad-snorting was just an example of Keith Richards' wit. And just to clear things up, Keith Richards left the following message on the Rolling Stones website yesterday:

"The truth of the matter is that I planted a sturdy English Oak. I took the lid off the box of ashes, and he is now growing oak trees and would love me for it!!! I was trying to say how tight Bert and I were. That tight!!! I wouldn't take cocaine at this point in my life unless I wished to commit suicide."

As you can clearly see, Keith Richards wouldn't dare snort his dead father because he's replaced his love of drugs with a more unsettling addiction – an addiction to over-exuberant punctuation.

But don't be upset just because Keith Richards didn't snort the remains of his dead father – planting a tree on top of his ashes is more rock and roll in the long-term, because by doing that Keith Richards has ensured that future generations of the Richards family will now always have something to fall out of and nearly die.

Read more:

Richards Says Father Comment A Joke - Reuters