Rolling Stones - The eternal heresy

"The world's greatest rock 'n' roll band". Perhaps, for once, the most overused (self-proclaimed) title is also the right one. The Rolling Stones aren't just a miracle of longevity: they are the quintessence of an entire genre - rock - which they helped forge and make immortal, going right back to its roots - tribal rhythms, blues, jazz - and coining a sound that proved powerful and decisive for generations to come. A complete symbiosis, not limited to the musical side alone. No one, in fact, has embodied the modus vivendi, the frenzy and the excesses of rock better than they have. A flame that keeps reigniting with every new tour, renewing a spell that too many mediocre records in recent years threatened to break.

Dirty, Ugly and Bad

The Rolling Stones made their debut in the rock arena at the height of the beat era, as the "dirty, ugly and bad" alternative to the Beatles. The most predictable of oppositions was born instantly: the polite, likeable subjects of Her Majesty versus the insolent hooligans of London's suburbs; the knighted champions of pop conformism versus rock's damned souls. A contrast as contrived (to the record labels' delight) as it was false, considering, for instance, that the Beatles were the true sons of the working class, while the Stones sprang from the artistic ambitions of restless offspring of the London bourgeoisie. Both bands, moreover, shared circles and musical tastes: it was Harrison who contacted Decca to set up the Stones' first audition, while the Beatles gave their future rivals their first single; both slid into excess and drugs, both chased the wellsprings of American music, psychedelia and the hippie utopia, protest and stardom. And yet the rivalry between the Liverpool quartet and the London quintet will forever remain the most famous dualism in the history of rock.

The Rolling Stones' music was rooted in the restless blues of Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley, and in a healthy dose of "rolling" in the style of Presley & Holly; but it was the way they approached this kind of musicality that first provoked the outrage of the respectable classes. Rock that was "of the street" through and through: in its melody, its look and its very lifestyle. A style embodied by the frontman himself, Mick Jagger, a brash and lascivious satyr, able to express all the neuroses and allure of the rocker, in an animalistic reimagining of the soul crooner figure.

Provocateurs by nature and for fun, the Rolling Stones pushed their basic spirit until it became a genuine cultural phenomenon, rebelling against the prevailing conventions, stiff with traditionalism and bigotry. They packed their lyrics with a depraved sense of youthful abandon, managing to sound utterly credible in those tales seething with excess, because often the main characters in those stories were themselves. Theirs was a direct language, without much stylistic ornament, but in those words every young person who felt imprisoned in the stifling society of the time could recognise themselves. Talking about sexual experiences bordering on (and beyond) pornography, urban hooliganism, the lucid and dramatic accounts of lives poisoned in squalid hospital rooms, or, more simply, recounting themselves purely for fun, with the unbridled hunger to do it now, right away, immediately - these were nothing but the cry of those who wanted to escape the greyness of everyday life.

Stoned music was never particularly elegant from a technical standpoint; it was a sonic construction built on endlessly repeated riffs: few chords and little attention to certain technical/instrumental showiness. Yet every instrument was its own little show: Watts' martial, lithe drumming, Richards' roaring, sinuous guitar, Jagger's lusciously black vocals, Wyman's cavernous bass; plus, in the early phase, the eclectic genius of Jones, capable of exploring the sounds of the organ, the dulcimer, the sitar and the recorder.

Would you let your daughter go out with one of the Stones?
(Andrew Loog Oldham)

Heart of Stones

The original nucleus of the band came together in London in the early 1960s, when singer Michael Phillip “Mick” Jagger (1943, Dartford, Great Britain) and guitarist Keith Richards (1943, Dartford, Great Britain) — schoolmates since primary school and already performing together under the pseudonym Nanker & Phelge — formed, together with Dick Taylor, Bob Beckwith and Allen Etherington, Little Boy Blue And The Blue Boys, one of the many groups inspired by Chicago blues. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones (Lewis Brian Hopkins-Jones, 1942, Cheltenham, Great Britain) joined the lineup soon after. Jagger and Richards then replaced the other three members with guitarist Geoff Bradford, pianist Ian Stewart, and drummers Tony Chapman and Mick Avory (the latter would go on to join the Kinks).

In this first phase of the band's history, the soul of the Stones is Brian Jones. Blessed with a prodigious musical talent (as a boy he could already play anything, from organ to saxophone, and nursed an unbridled passion for the jazz scores of Charlie Parker), Jones also held the curious distinction of fathering six children by six different girls within the span of a decade (the first when he was fifteen). An incurable provocateur and nonconformist, with long hair and an insolent gaze, he embodied in every respect the figure of the doomed rocker, raised "on the road".

The band made its debut on 12 July 1962 at one of the temples of rock: London's Marquee. Meanwhile, Bill Wyman (William Perks, 1936, London), former bassist of the Cliftons, and Charlie Watts (1941, Islington, Great Britain), drummer with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, joined the original nucleus. Renaming themselves The Rolling Stones (after a famous Muddy Waters song), they caught the attention of manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who secured them a contract with Decca and pushed Stewart out of the lineup; he would go on to become the band's road manager and an auxiliary member. It was Oldham himself who coined the famous slogan: "Would you let your daughter go out with one of the Stones?"

The Rolling Stones' music is as brash and untamed as their image, drawing on the blues wellsprings of rock'n'roll. Their first single, "Come On" (1963), is a cover of a Chuck Berry song; their second single is a gracious nod from "rivals" Lennon and McCartney ("I Wanna Be Your Man"), but it's "Not Fade Away" (written by Buddy Holly) that, in June 1964, brings their first solid sales success.
The five singles that follow (including "Little Red Rooster", "The Last Time" and "Get Off My Cloud") vie with the Beatles' hits for the top of the charts.

In the glittering Swingin' London of the 1960s, the Rolling Stones represent the city's dark, subterranean soul — the one that feeds on deafening revelry in underground clubs, the one that throbs with the rage of the slums, of the most violent and run-down neighborhoods. Their music, however, manages to win over a far wider audience, thanks to the extraordinary technical skill of an ensemble that doesn't rest solely on Jones's genius, but also on Keith Richards's wild guitar playing, while Jagger, with his devilish crooning, would establish himself as one of the greatest singers, frontmen and performers of all time.

It's only rock 'n' roll…

The band's raw debut album, Rolling Stones (1964), is essentially a reworking of several great rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll classics, including "I'm A King Bee" (Slim Harpo), "Carol" (Berry), "Route 66", "I Just Want To Make Love To You" (Dixon), but it also features the first track credited to Jagger & Richard: "Tell Me".

At this stage, however, the band expresses itself mainly through singles. Take "It's All Over Now", a version of a Bobby Womack song recorded in Chicago, but above all two Dixon covers, "Time Is On My Side" and "Little Red Rooster", plus two compelling original compositions: "Heart Of Stone" and "Good Times Bad Times". These and other tracks are collected on Rolling Stones n. 2 (released in the US as Now).

It is 1965, however, that marks the beginning of the Stones legend, thanks to a dazzling trio of singles: "The Last Time" (February), "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (May) and "Get Off Of My Cloud" (September), all driven by an infectious blues propelled by Richards's distorted riffs and Jagger's raucous vocals.
It is above all "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", a sensual anthem punctuated by a killer riff, that takes both sides of the Atlantic by storm, staying at the top of the Billboard chart for four weeks.

The public is also scandalized by their incendiary concerts (memorably one that ended in a brawl in Berlin in 1966, after Jagger staged a Nazi goose-step onstage), their constant provocations, their depraved lifestyle steeped in sex, violence, alcohol and drugs, and their scandalous flings (most notably, and unhappily, Jagger's affair with Marianne Faithfull, the first of many queens of the Stones age to be seduced and abandoned). A spectacle-driven approach that rock would never again shake off, and which, alas, from the second half of the Seventies onward, would end up swallowing the band's own musical creativity.

Their songs are crowded with vile, dissolute characters: psychopaths, drug-addled misfits, prostitutes, criminals. And yet the Rolling Stones legend isn't made of violence and depravity alone. Jagger and company, in fact, can also move listeners with a couple of poignant ballads like "Play With Fire" and "As Tears Go By". The crowning moment of a slow journey draws near — one that had seen them start out reinterpreting classics of African-American music (blues and the more recent r&b) and arrive at the maturity of a personal, remarkably expressive songwriting voice.

The band's past, and the early 1960s with its focus on the single, are now far behind them. A few months earlier, the Beatles had shown (on 3 December 1965, to be precise, with the release of "Rubber Soul") how attention could be focused on the album as a whole rather than on isolated (however numerous) chart hits, and from this point on, within just five years, rock — freed from every creative constraint — would undergo endless metamorphoses of unruly freedom, in which Jagger and his bandmates would actively take part.

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
(“Paint It Black”)

Heart of Darkness

Enter Aftermath (1966), the first Stones album to contain only songs written by the Jagger/Richards partnership. The arrangements also grow richer: alongside the guitar-bass-drums core, instruments like dulcimer, marimba, sitar, flute and every kind of keyboard make an appearance.
The filthiest, most fetid and misogynistic blues alternates with rural country shot through with folk tinges — Robert Johnson meets Hank Williams, so to speak, along with the well-established Dylanesque star, giving rise to one of the greatest examples of white blues in history.
"Paint It Black" (a 1966 single included on the American edition), with its blazing tribal pulse and Jones's magical sitar, is the Stones' manifesto: the heart of darkness is not merely a human condition to be passively accepted, but an active choice of will (of power?), a free stance taken against the respectable, bourgeois moralism of adults; the menacing words still echo: “I see a red door and I want it painted black/ No colors anymore I want them to turn black…”, leaving the impression of a lustful allegiance to the devil.
"Stupid Girl" portrays women as soulless icons obsessed with their own appearance, voicing an entirely male voyeuristic pleasure in the face of the feminine universe — sometimes in misogynistic terms, other times as romantic submission (the age-old dichotomy of woman as whore/woman as angel). The music echoes a fifties-flavored r&b, roughened by a funky bass-and-drums groove. "Lady Jane" is a sweet, medieval-tinged elegy that keeps the identity of its addressee deliberately ambiguous (woman, or marijuana?).
One of the album's high points is "Under My Thumb", built on a jazz-funk groove with added vibraphone (courtesy of Jones), sung with a rapt delivery worthy of the finest blues and soul crooning, with choppy yet composed guitar work and scornful lyrics still shot through with strong misogyny: a track steeped in the reckless innocence of the Sixties. "Doncha Bother Me", "Think" and "Flight 505" are three classics in how they revisit genre conventions: rural blues for the first, blues-rock for the second, smoky jazz filtered through a beat sensibility for the third. Flight 505 plunges into the sea, dragging its protagonist down with it, depicting the fears and failure of an entire generation.
"High And Dry" is a perfect transitional stomp, ferrying the album toward the soft acoustic psychedelia of "I Am Waiting". But it's the closing "I'm Going Home" that is the real highlight of side two, a track stretching past ten minutes that joins the Stones' blues roots with the incipient wave of psychedelia: the homecoming is drawn out through a long vocal jam that never quite arrives, recalling another of Jagger's kindred masters, Jim Morrison, of whom he can rightly be considered the English counterpart.

The first LP to top the charts doesn't break the streak of hit singles, though: the blasphemous, electrifying "Mother's Little Helper" and the sensual boogie of "Let's Spend The Night Together", buoyed by Ian Stewart's lovely piano riff (the track would be censored by the media, to the benefit of the B-side, the languid "Ruby Tuesday") keep the myth alive, while Jagger's onstage theatrics (the first live album, Got Live If You Want It!, is released only in the US market) and the sensational drug arrests of Jagger, Richards and Jones (in early 1967) fill the headlines.

Tripped-out hippies

By now prolific not only with 45s but also with albums, the Stones release in 1967 the double act of Between The Buttons–Their Satanic Majesties Request, two works that emerged in the wake of the psychedelic fever injected into Britain by Kinks and Pink Floyd and that exploded internationally with the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the Beatles.

Between The Buttons is still an uncertain step into new territory. It's no coincidence that, in the American edition, it boasts a pair of thoroughly old-style singles: the aforementioned "Let's Spend The Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday", at the expense of "Back Street Girl" and "Please Go Home", which instead appeared on the version released in England. A fortunate choice nonetheless, given that the album would reach number two on the American charts and go gold.
The tracklist alternates boogie episodes with jazzy digressions: "Something Happened To Me Yesterday", "Connection" and "Cool, Calm And Collected" (the latter enriched by a great vocal solo from Jagger) are symptomatic of this new direction, in which organ and piano seem to take over. And while "She Smiled Sweetly" follows the same blueprint as "Ruby Tuesday", lingering in hazy atmospheres, "Miss Amanda Jones" injects massive doses of rock adrenaline, while the psych-blues of "All Sold Out" explodes to the rhythm of trombone, pierced by guitar feedback and piano dissonance.
Three standout musicians contribute significantly to the album's sound: Ian Stewart (piano and organ), Nicky Hopkins (piano) and Jack Nitzsche (piano and harpsichord).

While guru-mania runs rampant and the trip to India becomes practically an obligatory pilgrimage, Jagger too declares himself — more or less credibly — a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, venting his mystical-satanic-orientalist streak on Their Satanic Majesties Request.
In this long-distance game of envy and nods to Mother India, the Rolling Stones appear somewhat ill at ease. Acid and hippie utopia simply don't suit their style. Their oddball psychedelia convinces neither fans nor critics (the British press bluntly dismisses it as "rubbish"), and perhaps not even the band themselves, if it's true that Jagger himself would later say of the record: "It's full of rubbish. We had too much time on our hands, too many drugs...". And yet, even in such a bizarre creation, there are gems to be found, like "She's A Rainbow", a luminous essay in psychedelic pop set ablaze by trumpets, strings and a music-box piano (courtesy of Hopkins), or "2000 Man", with its Donovan-like folk cadenced by crooked electronic beats, or "Sing This All Together (See What Happen)", with its lysergic, free-form derailments. There are also the folk-rock charms of "Dandelion" and the Kinks-style vaudeville of "Sing This All Together" to redeem some rather embarrassing missteps, from the rambling fairy tale of "Citadel" to the para-Floydian effects of "The Lantern".
An uneven and chaotic album, in short, that nonetheless hints at the now mature and brazen talent of an ensemble that no longer fears anything, not even the most reckless ventures.

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
(“Sympathy For The Devil”)

Street fighting band

Spring 1968. The squares of Europe's great capitals are swarming with angry students, Paris has its barricades, and from Berlin echoes the slogan "We want everything and we want it now". The days of peace and universal love give way to the days of rage. The Rolling Stones, with their usual cunning, throw themselves body and soul into the heated climate, to the point that Mick Jagger will even take part in some anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
It's the right moment for an album like Beggars Banquet. From its outrageous cover art alone — censored in the United States, where the album will be released with a virginal white sleeve — the Stones show they want to reclaim their image as "ugly, dirty and bad", since playing tripped-out hippies hadn't brought them much luck. Everything returns to being pure blues pulp. A sound that's often acoustic, propped up by a sturdy rhythm section, Nicky Hopkins's immense piano work and Richards's cutting guitar. The lyrics, beyond the usual references to sex and drugs, give voice to youthful discontent and brim with empathy for the working class. Never again will the Rolling Stones be so revolutionary and dangerous.
The album's masterpiece is the opener, "Sympathy For The Devil": a demonic sabbath set to a samba rhythm, a percussive obsession driven by Hopkins's piano phrasing (perhaps the greatest session man in rock history) and the stiletto stabs of Keith Richards's Telecaster, taut as never before; Mick Jagger slips perfectly into the role of Lucifer, and like a true messiah of hell, rewrites the history of humanity. On the acoustic, elegant "No Expectations", Brian Jones re-emerges for a moment from the abyss of drugs and existential spleen into which he has fallen, just long enough to gift the track a magical pedal steel part. The country of "Dear Doctor" lays out ideas that will later be developed on the following album, Let It Bleed. Wyman's plastic bass, the ever-present Hopkins's piano figures and Richards's slide guitar achieve perfect cohesion on the hallucinated visions of "Jigsaw Puzzle", the album's other masterpiece.
Side two opens with the rock-solid battle hymn "Street Fighting Man", powered by a riff carved in granite and Watts's "military" drumming; the lyrics represent the strongest political anathema ever written by the Jagger/Richards partnership (the track contains Brian Jones's last contribution to the Rolling Stones' story — his is the sitar part). The gutter, perverted blues of "Stray Cat Blues" crowns Jagger & co. as public enemy number one. The bucolic elegy of "Factory Girl" and the choral gospel of "Salt Of The Earth" fittingly close out an unrepeatable work, one that still today puts to shame all the self-proclaimed "rebels" of modern rock.

Meanwhile, the Stones drop Oldham and put their trust in Allen Klein, recording a TV special (with Who, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull) that remains unreleased until 1996 ("The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus").

The annus horribilis

But the story of England's most outrageous band soon turns to tragedy.
Brian Jones, by now abandoned to his self-destructive fate and replaced by Mick Taylor, is found dead in his swimming pool on the night of July 3, 1969. The coroner rules death by drowning and finds huge quantities of alcohol and drugs in Jones's body. But over the years, suspicions of suicide or even murder will persist — suspicions that will even implicate the Stones' own entourage.
Nico, with whom Jones had a fling, would write the poem "Janitor of Lunacy" for him, Jim Morrison "Ode to L.A. while thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased" and Pete Townshend "A Normal Day For Brian, a Man Who Died Every Day". But neither Keith Richards nor Mick Jagger would attend his funeral.
Jones's tragedy kicks off a grim season of losses in rock: within a year, three more first-rate stars would die — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. The hippie utopia, the epic of freedom and love, is on its way out, symbolized by the impossible escape of the film "Easy Rider" (1969). Woodstock is the last illusion. But also in '69, the deranged sect of the guru (and failed singer-songwriter) Charles Manson stains Bel Air with blood, slaughtering seven people, including actress Sharon Tate (Roman Polanski's wife), casting an accursed shadow over the Californian hippie universe.

And an aura of death hangs over the Stones too. In December of that same year, during the performance of "Sympathy For The Devil" at the Altamont Festival (which also featured Grateful Dead, Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), the violent security detail of Hell's Angels, hired by the Stones themselves, sparks chaos that culminates in the killing of a young spectator, Meredith Hunter.
Finally, Jagger leaves Marianne Faithfull, devastated by drugs and repeatedly on the verge of suicide, and marries Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias, a young Nicaraguan aristocrat.

But the former shady characters of London's suburbs can still draw blood. Proof of this comes with the double act of "Honky Tonk Women"-"You Can't Always Get What You Want", a rich taster for the album Let It Bleed, which gloriously closes out the Rolling Stones' annus horribilis.
The opening is pure dynamite: "Gimme Shelter", pure guitar-driven rock'n'roll, with Jagger backed in counterpoint by Merry Clayton's female voice in a contrast that perfectly captures that perverse male-female union that has always existed in the Stones' sound (it would even be covered in a goth key by the Sisters of Mercy). On the following "Love In Vain", a Johnson cover, the band's blues soul resurfaces, wrestling with slide guitar and mandolins (with Ry Cooder on top form) in a climate of sultry melancholy. Country makes its appearance on "Honky Tonk", an alternate version of "Honky Tonk Women", and does so through village-fair fiddles and a very rustic ensemble sound, with Mick Taylor on slide.
Wyman's powerful bass introduces us to "Live With Me", one of the Stones' famously sultry moods, driven by incisive drumming and cutting rhythm guitar. The title track is another gem: a honky-tonk piano (Stewart) steers the melody toward country-blues latitudes. Unease takes over on "Midnight Rambler", with its dark atmospheres, repetitive harmonic sounds and sinister, psychedelic tolling: a hallucinated urban sketch, in which Jagger unleashes Mephistophelean, guttural vocalizations. It's Richards instead who delves into the most rustic sounds of "You Got The Silver", with a gripping performance, before taking on a supporting role, backing up the ape-man Jagger on the anti-establishment invective of "Monkey Man".
The Stones' symphonic ambitions reach one of their peaks on the 7'28" of "You Can't Always Get What You Want": an emphatic gospel choir welcomes us in, well-placed splashes of organ alternate with guitar flourishes, and a chorus of music and voices keeps building, until it reaches almost mystical proportions. It's the superlative conclusion to another crucial album in the Rolling Stones' career.

I have my freedom but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken tears must be cried
Let’s do some living after we’ll die
Wild horses couldn’t drag me away
Wild, wild horses we’ll ride them some day
(“Wild Horses”)

Rock's most famous jeans

This state of grace is confirmed two years later by Sticky Fingers (1971), which will also become their most critically celebrated work, earning a permanent spot on nearly every list of the century's 100 best albums. Yes indeed, it's the album with the worn-out (and evidently well-stocked) jeans on the cover, complete with a real, working zipper (at least on the early vinyl editions), the whole thing signed by Andy Warhol. The first outrageous phase, the rawest and most ferocious one, has however already given way to a clear sonic design, perhaps less rich and visionary (you can't improvise or replace a Brian Jones overnight), but no less refined for it, as guaranteed by the production of the now-trusted Jimmy Miller (who, in the same period, was also the mastermind behind Traffic's musical kaleidoscope).
The opener is "Brown Sugar", a devastating chart-crushing weapon featuring Richards's inimitable riff, Jagger's animalistic vocals, Watts's dry beat, Taylor's sly guitar, a relentless profusion of piano (Stewart) and sax (Bobby Keys), and finally the unerring precision of Wyman's bass. Unmatched skill in expressing both the harshest convulsions and the most languid sweetness, as shown by the stratospheric "Sway", a ballad poised between white heat and melancholy, with palpable tension amid searing guitars, good old Nicky Hopkins's bittersweet piano, the discreet theory of strings (Paul Buckmaster) and drumming straight out of a visceral academy.
With "Wild Horses" the air grows thinner, the landscape that of some foggy countryside afternoon in the land of Albion, the perfect backdrop for the extraordinary acoustic-folk foundation of this melodic epic, languidly sung by Jagger ("Wild horses couldn't drag me away/ Wild, wild horses we'll ride them some day").
Less famous, but staggering, is the following "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", a rhythm'n'blues track with sultry funk-soul veins (bass and drums right in the thick of it, treacherous guitars and a voice chasing scorching breaking points), topped off by the vertical acidity of the organ (Billy Preston), the horizontal pulse of the congas (Rocky Dzidzournu) and a splendid sax performance from Keys. We catch our breath with an essential, roots-style cover of "You Gotta Move", in which the tipsy voices of Jagger and Richards act as a comic counterpart to a monumental Taylor on slide. But there's little time to relax, because "Bitch" is right around the corner, rock possessed by unstoppable imps, like the soul pouring from Keys's and Jim Price's horns, like the blues that scrapes off Taylor's guitar, like the crackling funk of the rhythm section, a runaway train on indestructible tracks. Tracks that carry us through the sour sadness of soul on "I Got The Blues".
The pen of muse-and-lover Marianne Faithfull is behind the lyrics of the famous "Sister Morphine" (a drug drama narrated with the pitiless cruelty of a Lou Reed), a nervous, throbbing folk track to which Jagger lends voice, blood and heartfelt vocalizations, bordered by muffled piano hammering (Jack Nitzsche) and Ry Cooder's feverish slide guitar. "Dead Flowers" is instead a charming folk-blues vignette inlaid with two guitars in a bewitching mood, while the closing "Moonlight Mile" weaves together a drunken ballad, where a string section with exotic leanings can mate with the most full-blooded of rhythm guitars.

Sticky Fingers shoots to number one on the charts and inaugurates the band's new label (Rolling Stones Records), branded with the famous "Tongue and Lip" logo, which also releases "Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka" (1971), an album of ethnic music recorded by their former bandmate shortly before his death, during a trip to Morocco.

Say now, baby, I’m the rank outsider,
You can be my partner in crime
(“Tumbling Dice”)

Turn to Stone(s)

The band's sound, however, loses every exotic accent and, unexpectedly, goes back to its roots, on a double, granite-hard album that would remain their last masterpiece.
The Stones of Exile On Main Street (1972) break through the barrier of polished form and aim straight for the guts of rock, in its rawest and most brutal shape. The main casualty is the catchiness typical of their riffs (Jagger himself, in the wake of its release, called the sound too raw and poorly produced). Richards, on the other hand, pours all his passion for tradition into it: he works body and soul on the record, recording much of it in his villa in the south of France, also digging up some outtakes from earlier work.
Exile On Main Street is the summa of Richards' musical thinking. Across its eighteen tracks lies everything that obsessed him: boogie blues, gospel, folk and popular tradition, rock'n'roll, country, honky-tonk and certain ancestral rhythms straight out of voodoo rituals. The opening "Rock Off" moves nimbly between rhythm guitars, Stewart's piano and Price's excellent horn work. But it's the boogies that rule the roost: there's the hardened, easy-grab "Rip This Joint" (with a great sax solo from Keyes), the honky-tonk flavored "Casino Boogie", chiseled with slide guitar and sax, the more blues-gospel "Tumbling Dice", with Jagger's voice drowned among the instruments, and the classically rock "All Down The Line".
Elsewhere, tradition reigns, as in the honky-tonk of "Sweet Virginia", splendidly seasoned with harmonica, piano, sax and gospel choruses, in the country of "Torn and Frayed", phrased by piano and Hammond, and in the acoustic sketch of "Sweet Black Angel", for guitar, percussion and harmonica. And "Loving Cup" is pure gospel-sound, with piano and horns taking center stage.
"Hip Shake" is built on a riff that closely resembles Canned Heat's "On The Road Again" in the bassline played by Wyman, while "Stop Breaking Down" is a Robert Johnson blues that the Stones elevate with Richards' excellent lead guitar and a tribal drum pattern that seems to beat out a pagan ritual. Voodoo atmospheres also pervade "I Just Want To See Her Face", amid devilish vocalizing and disorienting, almost psych-rooted effects. Simplicity is the strength of tracks like the raw "Ventilator Blues", with a scratching sax and a piano in perfect honky-tonk style, or "Shine A Light": piano & voice, with a clean Hammond laying down a carpet beneath a pop-rock melody, worked over by gospel-style backing vocals. "Let It Loose" offers memorable piano and electric guitar phrasing, before letting itself be swept away by horns into full gospel territory. Powerful, vibrant, with Jagger's manic voice, "Soul Survivor" closes the record.

With Exile On Main Street, the Stones' golden era comes to an end, worn down by an endless sequence of excess-laden tours. After the big bang of this double monolith, in fact, something breaks. Jagger is mainly busy consolidating his jet-set fame, between racy parties and countless flings, Richards sinks into the abyss of drug addiction, Mick Taylor shows visible discontent over never being properly credited for his compositional contributions.
They seemed to have been around for two centuries, but in reality the Stones had existed for less than ten years, during which they had become, in the collective imagination, the greatest rock'n'roll band on the planet, had produced songs that rose to become symbols of an entire generation, had outlived their eternal rivals the Beatles, proving themselves far more effective live, had lost their founder Brian Jones forever, and had become regular fixtures in courtrooms, banned from England over tax disputes and from nearly the rest of the globe over drug-related troubles.

Nearly the rest of the globe: in truth, while it had become impossible for them at the time to get a visa to enter the United States, Jamaica was willing to host them for the recording sessions of what would become the follow-up to "Exile". Topping Goats Head Soup, at that point, would have been objectively impossible. Even the shot chosen for the cover was fiercely debated, that photograph portraying Jagger in an Audrey Hepburn-like pose, which he himself opposed. But it wasn't really a question of songwriting: what was missing was precisely the energy in execution, so much so that the album's lead track, for once, is a ballad - perhaps the quintessential ballad of the Rolling Stones' entire career, "Angie", according to some dedicated to David Bowie's wife. A transitional record, steeped in a listless, decadent atmosphere, between strings, wah-wah and explicit sexual references, among them those contained in "Star Star", originally titled "Starf*cker". But also the record that ferried the English band's damnably bluesy soul into glam-rock.
The fact remains that, despite everything, Goats Head Soup, released at the end of August 1973, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and, even though it never became a true classic for the band, has been sufficiently reassessed over time. The Deluxe edition, released in 2020, finally does the album full justice, first of all through the presence of three unreleased tracks that boost the overall energy level, among which "Scarlet" stands out, featuring Jimmy Page. Secondly, because it includes demos, instrumental versions and alternative mixes that highlight the beauty of certain tracks, revealing interesting aspects of the band's songwriting process. Making this well-deserved deluxe edition even more essential is the recording of the concert the band held on November 17, 1973 at the Forest National Arena in Brussels, which adds immense value specifically to the tracks drawn from Goats Head Soup, proving once again (if proof were still needed) what a diabolically exciting live machine the Rolling Stones were.

The dreams of the night time will vanish by dawn
And time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me
(“Time Waits For No One”)

The following It's Only Rock And Roll (1974) presents an even more polished, formulaic sound (as they admit in the title track, "it's only rock'n'roll, but we like it"), which even slips into the most insipid reggae ("Luxury"), but manages to redeem itself with a few tremors worthy of the golden years, among them the superb electric gallop of "Time Waits For No One", driven by Taylor's hypnotic guitar and a bittersweet Jagger, and the brazen cover of the Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud To Beg".

In December 1974, Mick Taylor, always allergic to his bandmates' excesses, leaves the group, and during the 1975 American Tour is replaced by guitarist Ron Wood (b. 1947, Hillingdon, Great Britain), who had already played alongside Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group and in the Faces.

The new album Black And Blue (1976) climbs the charts thanks to the delicate single "Fool To Cry" and the other intense ballad "Memory Hotel", but confirms a substantial poverty of ideas. Except for a couple of tracks ("Hand of Fate", "Crazy Mama"), the untamed rock'n'roll of their early days gives way to funk-disco syncopations (the exuberant "Hot Stuff") and latin-reggae excitements ("Hey Negrita"). Seasoned erotomaniacs and incurable narcissists, the Stones are now flirting with discotheques, overcoming the very high risk of looking pathetic through sheer irony.

Rolling into the discotheque

During this period, Richards' drug addiction worsens; he is arrested in Canada for heroin possession along with his partner Anita Pallenberg, another Stones muse and previously Brian Jones' longtime girlfriend. Despite this, Some Girls (1978) shows a band in good health, with a handful of bluesy songs (the cover of the Temptations' "Just My Imagination", the ballad "Beast Of Burden", the decadent hard-rock of "Some Girls"), the delightful country parody "Far Away Eyes" and a cleverly cheeky single like "Miss You", which brings them back to the top of the charts.
Facing a new wave of young rockers ready to tear apart the established order, dinosaurs included, to the cry of "Anarchy in the UK", Jagger and co. still manage to hold their ground, cutting their usual fine figure as eternal bad boys.
As fake as few, and cheeky enough to keep selling records by the truckload, these dancefloor-ready Stones manage at least to win over the sympathies of those who had always disliked their rough, surly style.

Their renewed commercial success is confirmed in 1980 by Emotional Rescue, which shifts the axis even further toward dance. The lascivious falsetto of the title track, driven by disco-blues beats, would take them back to the top of the charts. But the most thrilling moments are delivered above all by the primal rock of "She's So Cold" and "Summer Romance".
In April 1981, Sucking In The Seventies instead collects alternative versions, live tracks and b-sides from the four previous studio albums, almost all edited and remixed for the occasion. The album managed to sell over 500,000 copies in the United States, certified gold, reaching number fifteen on the charts; it failed, however, to chart in Britain. A single was released from it, "If I Was A Dancer (Dance Pt. 2)", a longer version, with an alternative mix and a different lyric, of the track that opened "Emotional Rescue".

Spread out the oil, the gasoline
I walk smooth ride in a mean, mean machine
(“Start Me Up”)

The Rolling Stones had been clever in picking up on the sirens of disco music and reinventing themselves draped in the glitter of Studio 54. Yet only a few years removed from the four masterpieces released in the 1968-1972 span, they seemed stuck. Contractually, in 1981 there was a need to deliver a new album of original material, but at that time the first rifts between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were starting to emerge. The intervention of Chris Kimsey, the producer and sound engineer who had already been working alongside them for a decade, proved providential: he pointed out that with the material left unused during those years, they could certainly put together a great record. Together with Jagger, he began digging through the archives, sifting through what had remained locked away in the vaults of the greatest rock'n'roll band on the planet from the period straddling "Goats Head Soup" and "Emotional Rescue".
Having recovered a good stash of unfinished tracks, mostly instrumental, Jagger and Kimsey, working almost entirely alone, re-recorded the vocals and added overdubs, including sax parts performed by Sonny Rollins, invited by Jagger after seeing him play at a New York jazz club. The final result of this restyling found a home across the two stylistically contrasting sides of Tattoo You, released on August 24, 1981 and preceded by a week by the single "Start Me Up", which would become one of their most celebrated songs. The album reached number two on the British charts and number one in the US, selling over four million copies in the States alone. For a record with such disparate origins, it manages, miraculously, to sound cohesive, letting through Jagger's well-known infatuation with disco music and Richards' with reggae rhythms.
The oldest tracks under consideration, "Tops" and "Waiting On A Friend", dated back to the "Goats Head Soup" sessions, with Mick Taylor still on guitars. The iconic "Start Me Up" (initially titled "Never Stop") had instead been recorded with a reggae rhythm in 1975 for "Black And Blue", then reworked three years later for "Some Girls", but something about the track never quite clicked, and despite a memorable riff, it kept being left off the final tracklists. "Worried About You" and the funk-blues "Slave" - drawn from a jam session of over eleven minutes featuring Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend as well - also date back to the "Black And Blue" period. The forceful "Hang Fire" and the hard-blues "Black Limousine" both competed for a starting spot - remaining excluded in the end - on both "Some Girls" and "Emotional Rescue", which also had no room for "No Use In Crying" and "Little T&A", a frenetic rock'n'roll number sung by Richards.

To promote "Tattoo You" the band embarks on a new world tour that runs until 1982, from which a live album (Still Life, June 1982) and a concert film ("Let's Spend The Night Together", directed by Hal Ashby) are drawn. These are turbulent, unstable shows, due to the alcoholism afflicting Richards and Wood above all: the latter even falls asleep on stage during a concert in London!

Jagger, once again at the center of tabloid gossip over his marriage to model Jerry Hall (Bryan Ferry's ex), keeps perpetuating his role as stage animal with increasingly theatrical, almost cartoonish antics. On July 11, 1982, the Stones play their first concert in Italy since 1967, in Turin. It's the night of the World Cup final in Spain: to win over the crowd, Jagger wears a blue shirt with the number 20, Paolo Rossi's number, and predicts a 3-1 win for Italy over Germany. A few hours later, Italy is world champion...

The muddled Undercover (1983) is the clearest sign of the band's decline, by now short on ideas and ready to fall in line with new musical trends (as with the murky funk of "Undercover Of The Night"). Hard-rock, new wave, pop, reggae, dub and soul sounds are grafted onto the band's songs, triggering frequent rejection crises. The nymphomaniac ode "She Was Hot" keeps the suspense up for a moment, but the stale imagery of "Too Much Blood" already tastes like reheated soup, and "Wanna Hold You" is just the desperate last gasp of an increasingly restless Richards.

The crisis, in fact, finally brings the disagreements between Richards and Jagger fully into the open: the former determined to preserve the band's traditionalist rock imprint, the latter more inclined to ride the musical trends of the moment. Jagger makes his solo debut with She's The Boss (1985), produced by Bill Laswell and Nile Rodgers, later veering toward decidedly bland pop-rock, as also shown by his duets with David Bowie ("Dancing In The Street") and Tina Turner for the Live Aid humanitarian event (July 1985). Tellingly, at that same concert, Wood and Richards choose instead to accompany Bob Dylan on acoustic guitars.

Unfazed by the crisis and bound together by a fate that seems to want them immortal, the Rolling Stones - by then the first band ever inducted into the Hall of Fame - carry on with Dirty Work (1986), produced by Steve Lillywhite and dedicated to their friend Ian Stewart, who had recently passed away. "One Hit (To the Body)" tries (in vain) to shake fans out of their torpor, but it's a cover of the little-known duo Bob & Earl that delivers the most intense moments: "Harlem Shuffle", a seductive exercise in soul darkness, briefly has everyone crying miracle. Too bad, though, that far more predictable attacks, like "Winning Ugly" and "Had It With You", soon bring the listener back down to earth.

Over the following three years, the rift between the band's four members deepened: Watts played jazz with the Charlie Watts Orchestra, Wood toured as Bo Diddley's accompanist, Richards collaborated with Aretha Franklin (“Jumpin' Jack Flash”) and worked on a concert film in honor of Chuck Berry (“Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll”, 1987). When Jagger released his disappointing second album, Primitive Cool (1987), Keith Richards too, by then clean and sober, recorded his first solo album: Talk Is Cheap (1988).

Talk Is Cheap not only proved qualitatively superior to anything the solo Jagger had put out, but was damn well sharper and sexier than any Rolling Stones record of that period. Keef had always sung a track or two on the mother band's albums (“Happy” and “Connection” being his favorites), and would keep doing so afterward: so why not finally step up as frontman on a project all his own? He picked talented musicians capable of keeping pace with his guitar forays and gave them a name: the X-Pensive Winos. A top-notch band, but the album was further graced by the presence of many other notable friends, including the Boss's wife, Patti Scialfa, and former rolling bandmate Mick Taylor.
The songs were written together with drummer Steve Jordan and sum up a wide range of styles: from the driving funk of “Big Enough” (with Bootsy Collins on bass and Maceo Parker on sax) and “It Means A Lot”, to the Stones-style mode of the big single “Take It So Hard”, from the gritty riffs of “Struggle” to the pure rock'n'roll of “I Could Have Stood You Up”, from the stylish bedroom soul of “Make No Mistake” (featuring the Memphis Horns and Sarah Dash on vocals) to the catchiness of “You Don't Move Me” and “Whip It Up” (with Bobby Keys on sax), right down to the endless, aching sweetness of “Locked Away”. With this bouquet of songs, Richards showed the world he still knew how to write a hit, forcefully underlining just how much of the Rolling Stones' songwriting had actually come from his own hand. The tour that followed Talk Is Cheap was immortalized three years later on the explosive Live At The Hollywood Palladium, honored in 2020 with a lavish super deluxe box set featuring three previously unreleased tracks.

Walk the streets of love
And they’re full of tears
(“Streets Of Love”)

The Highlanders

But the Stones' longevity is bulletproof. So along comes Steel Wheels (1989), with the single “Rock And A Hard Place”, the sing-song “Sad Sad Sad”, the rock'n'roll of “Mixed Emotions”, and little else. The sound shows it has lost much of the band's once-visceral expressiveness, and even their fiery jams have progressively cooled down: everything feels dreadfully calculated and half-hearted.
The Stones, however, remain a concert machine without equal. So after the ensuing tour comes the live album Flashpoint (1991), which at least confirms the band's health on stage, also offering two studio-recorded unreleased tracks, “Highwire” and “Sex Drive”. Right after the tour, Bill Wyman leaves the band, and Mick Jagger would go on to release the insipid Wandering Spirit (1993).

In October 1992, Keith Richards instead released Main Offender. Less inspired than his debut, Keef's second solo work nonetheless confirms that he still had both the chops to cut potential hits (“Wicked As It Seems”, “Eileen”) and the heart to write enveloping midtempo numbers (“Yap Yap”) and soft ballads of great emotional impact (“Hate It When You Leave”, “Demon”). Besides the usual blues'n'roll forays (“Bodytalks”, “Runnin' Too Deep”, “Will But You Won't”), the album also shows off its author's inexhaustible curiosity, folding in decisive dub-reggae contaminations – already a great passion of his for some years – across the more than six minutes of “Words Of Wonder”.
The thirtieth anniversary of Main Offender was then celebrated in 2022 with a deluxe box set containing, alongside the remastered original album, an 88-page booklet with unreleased photos, a vast amount of memorabilia, and above all a bonus disc with twelve tracks recorded during a concert held at London's Town & Country Club in 1992, during the European promotional tour, which was followed by a North American one in early 1993. Besides a few songs drawn from Keith's two solo albums, the set also includes performances of “Gimme Shelter” and “Happy”, pulled from the mother band's repertoire.

Main Offender, despite generally positive reviews, failed to climb higher than number 43 on the UK charts, and had to settle for a meager number 99 in the US, confirming just how much better the Rolling Stones worked as a unit.
A new Keith Richards solo album would not arrive until 2015, when Crosseyed Heart, once again recorded with the X-Pensive Winos, received decidedly better reviews.

Voodoo Lounge (1994) sees bassist Daryl Jones (formerly with Miles Davis and Sting) taking Wyman's place. The Stones, if nothing else, drop the clumsy nods to current trends, focusing instead on hard, tight rock, helped along by new producer Don Was behind the controls. “Love Is Strong”, “You Got Me Rockin'” and “Sparks Will Fly” stay within the bounds of classic 70s-style guitar rock, but perhaps the album's peak lies in the melancholy atmosphere of “Out Of Tears” and the exotic scents of “Moon Is Up”.

A year later came Stripped, an album recorded partly live and partly during breaks on the latest tour. Once again a mediocre record, save for the successful cover of the Dylan-penned “Like A Rolling Stone”, which in this version takes on a new, ironic meaning.

Not even Bridges To Babylon (1997) manages to reverse the decline of the longest-running rock band of all time. Jagger tries to freshen up the group's sound by bringing in collaborators like the Dust Brothers (Beck, Beastie Boys) and Danny Saber (Black Grape). But aside from a few adrenaline rushes (“Gunface”, “Flip The Switch”, “Low Down”), the script holds few surprises, stumbling over the clumsy ballad “Anybody Seen My Baby?” and the tired reggae number “You Don't Have To Mean It”, penned by a Richards who by then seemed a stand-in for himself.

After a long hiatus, filled only by sporadic shows while Jagger busied himself releasing his new solo record, Goddess In The Doorway (2001), the pathetic attempt at a facelift that was A Bigger Bang (2005) would prove even more disastrous. Except, of course, for the band's bank accounts, which were magically catapulted to the top of the charts thanks to a massive marketing operation. “Rough Justice”, the track that opens this festival of clichés, is classic rock without any bite. The first single released, “Streets Of Love”, is in some ways disarming, so conventional does it sound.
The record sounds bloodless and devoid of real spark. A thesis backed up by the following “Let Me Down Slow” and “It Won't Take Long”, where the sense of déjà vu becomes unbearable. The funk tinged with black-and-blues of “Rain Fall Down” just about saves itself, at least for its first thirty seconds, before sinking into banality. The tide of filler, which sweeps up the drunken blues of “Back Of My Hand”, the Jet-style guitars and choruses of “She Saw Me Coming” and the prepackaged sentimentality of “Biggest Mistake”, reaches its peak with the weary “This Place Is Empty”.
The rest is no less predictable, with the harmonica of the politicizing “Sweet Neo Con”, the 80s aftertaste of “Look What the Cat Dragged In” and the reckless (sic!) swing of “Driving Too Fast”. Closing things out, “Infamy”, sung by Keith Richards, sounds a bit like a kind of release.

The subsequent tour, however, is yet another triumph, not least for their already flourishing finances (with $138.5 million grossed, they're the richest musicians of 2006), until the curious accident that befalls Keith Richards: while on holiday in Fiji, he falls out of a palm tree, suffering a concussion. Operated on at a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, he emerges with his usual irony intact: “They fixed my head up.” On March 23, 2007, Mick Jagger announces the continuation of the “Bigger Bang Tour”.
Their live activity carries on tirelessly into the start of the following decade too, but Jagger's private life is struck by fresh tragedy: his longtime partner L'Wren Scott, the renowned fashion designer, dies by suicide. The tragedy, however, only briefly interrupts the Rolling Stones' never-ending tour, which on June 22, 2014 also reaches Rome, for a historic concert at the Circus Maximus.

In December 2016 the Stones release a new album after a full eleven years. Blue And Lonesome contains no original tracks; the quartet instead chose to reinterpret twelve blues songs, almost all from the late 50s and early 60s, recorded over the course of three days under the care of co-producer Don Was. A kind of return to their roots, given that the young Jagger and Richards had spent countless hours at the start of their career playing along to imported blues records they managed to get hold of back then. Blue And Lonesome is a covers album (nearly all covers) made up of songs so little known that they end up sounding like unreleased Stones compositions. Everything is played to perfection, both the more driving numbers (“I Gotta Go”, “Ride 'em On Down”, “Just Like I Treat You”) and the more anguished ones (“All Of Your Love”, “Hoo Doo Blues”, “Little Rain”), always with great respect for the originals. Jagger proves he still has an extraordinary voice, and that he's a formidable harmonica player, much like Little Walter, who seems to be one of the key inspirations behind this project, given how often his catalogue is drawn from, starting with the 1962 hit “Just Your Fool”, chosen to open the selection.
As if Richards and Wood's guitars weren't enough, Eric Clapton also steps in to add his own on “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” and “I Can't Quit You Baby”, the most famous track on the tracklist thanks to the untouchable version cut by Led Zeppelin on their legendary debut album. Tributes to Howlin' Wolf, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, and plenty of eagerness to prove they're not ready for retirement yet, all while managing to put together a record for true connoisseurs, purist yet firmly rooted in the present. Blue And Lonesome is an elegant, thoroughly convincing album of blues standards played by the greatest rock'n'roll band of all time, a sincere and visceral work, voluptuous and sensual, the way only a Stones record can be.

Between 2020 and 2021, the pandemic brings the Rolling Stones' live activity to an abrupt halt; it's during lockdown that they surprise everyone by releasing a homemade version of “You Can't Always Get What You Want”. When the time comes to get back on the road, Charlie Watts (who had already undergone two surgeries in 2004 to remove throat cancer) is forced to step aside for health reasons.
It's a warning sign that foreshadows the announcement of his death, which occurred on August 24, 2021 in a London hospital, following emergency heart surgery. Charlie Watts was 80 years old.

Meanwhile, neither the touring nor the reissuing of old records lets up. From late September to late November 2021, the Rolling Stones bring the “No Filter Tour” to the United States, with Steve Jordan on drums. To mark the fortieth anniversary of its release, on October 22 comes the expanded reissue of Tattoo You: alongside the remastered original album, a second disc titled “Lost & Found: Rarities” is included, containing nine unreleased tracks from the same period, to which vocal parts and layers of guitar have since been added. We thus discover killer new Richards riffs shaping – among others – a “Living In The Heart Of Love” that had been left in the drawer only because it was too similar to “Brown Sugar”, and an irresistible cover of the Chi-Lites' “Troubles A' Comin'”.
Rounding out the box set is the complete recording of a concert held at Wembley Arena in London in June 1982, lining up an enviable run of original evergreens (special mention for the unexpectedly chosen “Let It Bleed”) plus a healthy handful of covers, including the Temptations' epic-length “Just My Imagination”. A snapshot of the tour supporting Tattoo You, which that summer also touched down on Italian soil, with Jagger immortalized on stage at the Turin stadium (the first concert in Italy since 1967) wearing the unforgettable number 20 shirt – Paolo Rossi's – of the Italian national football team, which that very evening, July 11, would be crowned World Champions.

In October 2023, just a few months after celebrating sixty years together, the Rolling Stones return with an album of new material after a full eighteen years. Hackney Diamonds is also the first work completed after the death of drummer Charlie Watts, who appears on two songs, “Mess It Up” and “Live By The Sword”. A record of driving, radio-friendly rock'n'roll featuring some notable guests: Paul McCartney plays bass on “Depending On You”, Elton John is on piano on “Live By The Sword”, while the seven minutes of “Sweet Sounds Of Heaven” feature Lady Gaga on vocals and Stevie Wonder on piano and keyboards. Once again there's a small spot reserved for Keith Richards, who sings on the brief, dusty ballad “Tell Me Straight”. The closing track is a raw, stripped-down cover of a Muddy Waters classic, “Rolling Stone Blues”, performed solely by Richards and Jagger, on acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Hackney Diamonds sends the Rolling Stones back to the top of the charts across much of the world and makes them protagonists in early February 2025 at the Grammy Awards ceremony, where the album wins in the “Best Rock Album” category, beating out competition from Fontaines D.C., Idles, Pearl Jam, Jack White, Green Day and Black Crowes. Producer Andrew Watt collects the award and delivers the following acceptance speech from the stage: “I spoke to Mick [Jagger] yesterday and he just wanted to send a huge thank you to the Academy from the whole band. For a kid like me, who grew up playing guitar, spending time with the Rolling Stones has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.”

Eighteen years passed between “A Bigger Bang” and “Hackney Diamonds” to complete a new album of original material, then less than three to arrive at Foreign Tongues, released on July 10, 2026. It's not just a matter of a third or fourth youth (for the Rolling Stones, the second one already arrived a few decades ago…): Keith Richards makes that clear in a recent interview: “The only reason 'Foreign Tongues' came out is that we did so much work on 'Hackney Diamonds' that me and Andrew [Watt, the producer] looked at each other and realized that, basically, that was a double album, only we preferred to take a year or two off.” Clearly, eighteen years of hay in the barn adds up to quite a lot, but Foreign Tongues is no B-side affair compared to its predecessor, no record made up of leftover scraps from the sessions: quite the opposite. And that becomes fully clear listening closely to some of the brightest songs crowding the record: “In The Stars”, “Divine Intervention”, “Covered In You” and “Side Effects” carry a pop infectiousness, a renewed vitality that few would have expected from the Rolling Stones in 2026, in spite of any melancholy over time inexorably slipping away. Then, across the fourteen songs on Foreign Tongues, there are plenty of other ingredients we know well, which in some way make the record comforting for longtime fans and appealing to newcomers alike: formidable blues'n'roll (“Rough And Twisted”, “Mr Charm”), Mick Jagger's falsetto on “Jealous Lover” taking us back to the soft disco of the Seventies, the usual little corner reserved for Richards' voice (“Some Of Us”), the trademark guitar solos, among which one by Ronnie Wood on “Back In Your Life” stands out. And there's also a personal tribute to Amy Winehouse, a kindred spirit to the Stones, whose “You Know I'm No Good” they cover, plus “Ringing Hollow”, essentially the record's “political” song, which shifts the groove heard up to that point into a country-leaning interlude touching on America and the disillusionment toward a country that, many years ago, held a very different kind of allure. There's no shortage of star guest spots either, the kind only the Rolling Stones can afford: Paul McCartney on bass on “Covered In You”, Robert Smith on keyboards and backing vocals on “Never Wanna Lose You” and on guitar on “Divine Intervention”, contributions from Steve Winwood, Benmont Tench of the Heartbreakers, even Bruno Mars (on cowbell on “Never Wanna Lose You”) and Chad Smith (bass on the closing track). There's also Charlie Watts on “Hit Me In The End”, one of his last recordings, and rounding out the core lineup, Darryl Jones on bass and Steve Jordan on drums. Will this be the Rolling Stones' last record? The closing track, “Beautiful Delilah”, a Chuck Berry cover, could prove to be the most fitting ending imaginable, but Keith Richards himself says he's skeptical: who's to say Andrew Watt hasn't quietly set aside enough material to release yet another project in a couple of years?

Contributions by:
 – Cristian Degano – “Aftermath”
 – Andrea Fedeli – “Beggars Banquet”
 – Stefano Pretelli – “Let It Bleed”
 – Nello Giovane – “Sticky Fingers”
 – Graziano Edi Corazza – “Exile On Main Street”
 – Emilio Saturnini – “A Bigger Bang”

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