He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard

Anthony Kiedis’ girlfriend Eileen Kelly has written about the benefits of their age-gap relationship, calling him “one lucky bastard”.

Kelly is a columnist for Vogue magazine, and began dating the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman earlier this year. She is 30 years old, while Kiedis is 63.

In a new article, she has espoused what she believes to be the virtues of their age gap, without identifying Kiedis by name. “It’s my first time dating someone significantly older, and sometimes I joke with friends that I’ve been missing out my whole life,” she wrote.

“There is something to be said for a man who’s simply had more time to get his shit together, and my much older boyfriend seems genuinely excited to be with me — not like he’s biding his time before he can swipe for someone better,” she continued. “He is fully aware that he’s one lucky bastard.”

She said they met at a birthday party and began striking a connection after finding out they had a mutual connection to Hawaii. She went on to say she has lost a friend over the relationship and has been mistaken for Kiedis’ daughter on multiple occasions.

“If I were 18, or even 21, the scales would be weighted far differently,” she went on to explain. “We’re mostly just two people doing the ongoing, unremarkable work of moving through life together.”

Kiedis was in a relationship with actress Ione Skye in the late ‘80s and was rumoured to have a brief relationship with Sinead O’Connor in 1990 and Mel C later that decade. He also wrote in his autobiography Scar Tissue that he had sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl when he was 23.

In other news, the Netflix documentary The Rise Of The Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, which focused on the early history of the band and in particular the first guitarist Hillel Slovak, premiered last month.

While the band were interviewed for the film, they went out of their way to distance themselves from the project. Despite that, Flea spoke positively about the film, describing it as “a beautifully made film” that “filled my heart right to the top, not without a good dose of lifelong melancholy”.

Upon its release, the documentary made headlines for the its use of Slovak’s own voice, as regenerated by AI, to bring to life the guitarist’s journals. The film makes clear early on that it has used the technology for these segments.

The band spoke about their former member’s legacy in a cover interview with NME. “The energy of Hillel Slovak has never truly faded,” frontman Anthony Kiedis explained, before reflecting on his loss.

“I wish Hillel hadn’t missed out on that first recording [self-titled debut ‘The Red Hot Chili Peppers’] in the first year,” he said. “We did some TV shows in 1984 and I look at them now and think: ‘Damn, I wish Hillel would have been there for that. He was a creator of the band. That was his baby.’ Anyway, it was meant to be the way it was meant to be and it all fleshed out the way life goes… But Hillel’s still there in our hearts, whether it’s 30, 40, 50, 60 or even 100.”