Dick Taylor (second from right) will finally make it to Australia with his legendary compatriots.


The Pretty Things played with fire.

KEITH Richards never did change his blood to clean up his heroin habit. It was just a bad-boy myth; the kind that rock stars find easier to accept than deny as time conflates rumour and history.

His old mate Dick Taylor feels the same way about the airborne pyro outlaws story of 1965 that led to the Pretty Things being banned for life from Australia and New Zealand.

''I plead amnesia,'' says the guy who left Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, his London art college band with Richards and Mick Jagger, just before they became the Rolling Stones.

''Obviously, the New Zealand thing happened. Questions were asked in Parliament and all that. But I haven't officially received a piece of paper saying, 'You can't come back.' I'm sure we can walk in there with heads held high - and we shall.''

It will be without Viv Prince, the drummer reputed to have blazed a trail of lunatic showmanship for the Who's Keith Moon, also allegedly responsible for cremating a crayfish on board that NZ flight an aeon ago.

''We just thought he was being Viv,'' Taylor says.

Singer Phil May, Taylor and fellow veteran Frank Holland lead the band that will land in Australia for the first time. Behind them are twentysomethings George Perez and Jack Greenwood - an indication of the esteem the Pretty Things command in younger generations.

''We seem to have a really good following [of] younger people. There's an interest in all that; kind of another mod revival,'' Taylor laughs. ''You look out at the audience sometimes and it looks like it's 1965. It's brilliant.''

Before you ask, he has no regrets about parting with Jagger and Richards 50 years ago. He recalls being perfectly happy ''lurking around swinging London'' in the slightly-less-famous blues-rock coterie of the Animals and the Yardbirds.

He fondly recalls his time at Abbey Road Studios circa '68, where the Pretty Things recorded the (alleged) first-ever rock opera, S.F. Sorrow, while the Beatles were laying down their self-titled ''white album''. ''John [Lennon] would put his head around the door and say, 'How you getting on, lads?' with his thumbs up. I'd go to the tearoom automat thing and you might well bump into one of the Beatles, but it all seemed rather like a normal day's work,'' he says.

''On one occasion we decided we needed a bigger drum sound and we happened to have the keys to the cupboard in studio one with Ringo's kit in it, so we purloined it.''

That memory comes with a rattling cackle. He's also quietly chuffed by decades of high praise from rock legends as diverse as Van Morrison, Joey Ramone and David Bowie, who covered two classic Pretty Things singles - Rosalyn and Don't Bring Me Down - at the height of Ziggy-mania.

And yes, he wearily affirms he and May were so pig-headed about their blues-rock aspirations in their youth that they refused to record a trippy folk tune titled Mr Tambourine Man. (The Byrds weren't so proud, nor quite so poor, thereafter). The rest of the myth, though, is just that.

''We go on stage and we play good music,'' Taylor says. ''The bad behaviour thing is a diversion. It gets me so pissed off, I feel like throwing a TV out the window.''

The Pretty Things play the Corner Hotel on Tuesday and the Caravan Club December 13 and 14.