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Keith Not Burned by Smoking Ban
Claims of Keith Richards breaking the law have gone up in smoke.
Just a day after the Glasgow City Council announced plans to investigate allegations that the Rolling Stones guitarist violated the city's smoking ban by lighting up onstage, a spokesman said the aging rocker was in the clear.
While the Scottish city enacted legislation last spring prohibiting smoking in public spaces, Hampden Park, the stadium where the Stones held their gig on Friday, was apparently not covered in the ban due to a technicality.
Smoking is illegal only in public places that are more than 50 percent enclosed, a classification that includes spaces covered on three sides, including most--though not all--outdoor stages.
"The stage for the concert was not of the dimensions to be covered by the smoking ban legislation in Scotland," the spokesman for the city council said. "There are no plans to launch any investigation."
It's quite the change of tune.
Shortly after the Glasgow gig, which fell on the U.K. leg of the Stones' A Bigger Bang tour, the council threatened to fine both the accident-prone rocker and the concert venue.
"The law in Scotland says where you can and cannot smoke," Maureen Moore, a rep for Scotland's Action on Smoking and Health organization, told the BBC. "And if he has been breaking the law then he has to pay the penalty like anyone else."
Richards, 62, would have faced a nominal penalty of 50 pounds, or roughly $95, should he have been found guilty of firing up a cig--something he has been doing onstage for years--while the stadium, which introduced its own smoking ban in January, would have had to pony up 250 pounds, or $475.
Although city officials were quick to announce they were launching an investigation into the incident, not everyone was in agreement to move ahead with the penalty.
"This is yet another way in which the smoking ban makes Scotland look ridiculous," Neil Rafferty, a spokesman for the Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco, or Forest, told the BBC.
He may have been right.
According to the city council, the journalists who first reported that Richards was smoking onstage may not even have been present for the performance.
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