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pftw04
Who is the better drummer among the 2?I would say Charlie. Steve sounds boring.

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pftw04
Who is the better drummer among the 2?I would say Charlie. Steve sounds boring.

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GasLightStreet
Jordan did a fantastic job of playing drums on HACKNEY DIAMONDS.

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colonial
Why is Steve Jordan not included in The Stones official band members photo, I sort of feel sorry for him really. Does any other band do that?

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RollingFreak

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colonial
Why is Steve Jordan not included in The Stones official band members photo, I sort of feel sorry for him really. Does any other band do that?

I feel like a LOT of bands do this. I was literally just thinking the other day "Genesis guys loved Daryl Strummer and Chester Thompson but they were NEVER full time members." They never did a tour without them, but for some reason they were never made actual members. Its the same in a lot of other circumstances. Daryl Jones has never been a full time member. At a certain point with these legacy bands, you become part of the "touring" lineup, but you're not "in" the band. I don't agree with it in a lot of cases, but thats just how it is. The Stones aren't getting a new member 60 years in. Honestly, after Ronnie Wood it was clear no one else was going to become a full time member.

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frankotero
Personally I love Steve as well. And I'm saying this with no disrespect to Charlie. Somehow (and sadly) I feel I have to say this. Really happy Mick and Keith didn't decide to throw in the towel. I believe it was the right choice.

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Rockman


....and sometimes the guy wears theeeee wildest hats known ta man .....

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Testify
I think that just comparing two musicians makes no sense.
Charlie is Charlie with his unmistakable style, Steve is Steve with his style, the most hateful thing would be to see Steve imitate Charlie, no one would want that I hope...in fact I think they told him "play how you feel right to play".
I've read crazy things, like the fact that Steve hits the drums hard, but you should know that everything is filtered through a mixer and he decides the volume of the drums regardless of whether one hits the drums hard or not.

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Rolling & Tumbling

(...)Today’s looseness, you suspect, is born of confidence in a record, with its pop hooks, story-friendly celebrity contributions (Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga and Bill Wyman all guest) and au courant producer, that ticks all the Mick Jagger boxes, while featuring moments – the languid, live-sounding Dreamy Skies – that evoke the raw, unvarnished band of legend.

“The way we intended it to be was that it would have the soul of The Rolling Stones,” says Jagger, forcefully. “But nevertheless, sonically, if you put it next to something we recorded in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s not going to sound the same.”

There are plenty of Rolling Stones fans, of course, and maybe one or two Rolling Stones, who wouldn’t mind an album that sounded more like it was recorded in the ’70s, but not Jagger.

“His objective,” says drummer Steve Jordan, Watts’ replacement on-stage and now in the studio, “was, I guess, to be competitive or relevant, relevant to a new generation of people. And also, as Mick said to me, it would be nice to have a couple of hits on the thing.”

There was another imperative. After 18 years, one death, several health scares – notably Jagger’s heart surgery in 2019, and Wood’s brushes with cancer in 2018 and 2021 – and a reported accumulation of 80-plus songs, half-songs and demos, Jagger decided they had to get a move on.

“My plan was just to have a lot of songs and then not have people think about them too much,” he says. “Just play them. Because you don’t want to be thinking, Is this any good? Do I like it? Does it sound like something else I’ve done? Don’t worry if you don’t think it’s the best thing since sliced eggs, Ronnie, just play it.”

Jagger put it more bluntly to Steve Jordan: “‘I don’t want this to be a posthumous album.’”

DOWN THE CORRIDOR, IN A ROOM THAT seems somehow more disreputable, if only through the powerful emanations of its occupant, lurks a man who’s flirted more than once with posthumousness. Keith Richards, 79 – in dark brown trilby, brown shirt and black jacket – fixes MOJO with a gimlet eye and gives his version of why we have a new Rolling Stones album.

“If the lead singer wants to record, you get him while the mood’s on, knowwhatimean?” he gurgles. “Because you can have some good stuff, but if he don’t feel like singing it or he’s not in the mood… I mean, that is the power of a lead singer. He can dangle that in front of me.”

Jagger’s response? “I didn’t realise it was that easy! All I have to say is, ‘I want to make a record,’ and everyone gets behind me and works their ****ing arses off? Great!”

In fact, as multiple band members and Andrew Watt will attest, Richards really did work his ****ing **** off on Hackney Diamonds, ending with a week of overdub boot camp with Watt. Wood and Jagger both salute the young producer’s energy and enthusiasm – qualities that bubble over when Watt speaks on the phone with MOJO – and Richards also gives the young man his due.

“He brought exactly what Mick and I needed to make this record,” he says. “A lot of freshness, a lot of knowhow about how records are made these days. Because, I mean, there’s not little spools going around and around – I wish there were. And he’s a great musician himself, which is very important with producers. Jimmy Miller was a great drummer, Don Was is a great bass player. And Andrew, he’s a piece of work, you know.”

He seems like quite a character, MOJO notes.

“Oh yeah.”

Richards emits a slow, somewhat mirthless laugh, his eyes glittering in a way that reminds you of the Richards who once bristled with weaponry. What can it mean? He indicates that he will not elaborate.

Watt’s connection with the Stones goes back to 2019, when Don Was, perhaps sealing his own fate, suggested he try a mix of a track from that session. Subsequently Watt maintained communications with Jagger, all the while accruing garlands for work with Ozzy Osbourne and Elton John, burnishing a reputation made in the pop realm on records for Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. Ronnie Wood remembers Watt’s name coming up over lunch with Paul McCartney.

“I was telling Paul we needed someone to kick us up the ****ing ****,” says Wood, “and he said, ‘I’m working with this young boy, he’s got a lot of front. We’re doing some really adventurous tracks together. You try him.’”

Jagger was already unconvinced by much of the music they had last recorded with Was (“I didn’t feel like it was really happening”). Then, says Wood, Was cancelled sessions and the Stones were “left hanging”. In September 2022, time was booked at New York’s Electric Lady and Watt invited to attend.

“Mick asked if the kid could come in, which I really wasn’t into in the beginning,” says Steve Jordan. “I don’t need someone in there while I’m writing a freakin’ tune. But I agreed.”

Jordan will candidly admit to a not-so-hidden agenda.

“Quite frankly, I’d said from the very beginning that the Glimmer Twins could have produced the record and I coulda helped them,” he says, “but I don’t think Mick wanted to work that hard. There’s a certain amount of nuance that you have to know how to capture. And I’ll just leave it at that.”

Jordan’s focus in New York had been to make “certain things sound edgier. Some of the tunes were a little too poppy in my view.”

The Hackney Diamonds track that cleaves closest to his vision is Dreamy Skies, a languid beauty recorded in Electric Lady that feels like a dusty side-road off the album’s broad commercial highway. At the very least, says Jordan, “Ronnie played the best slide he ever played in his freakin’ life.

“Once we cut it,” continues the drummer, “I immediately said, That’s The Rolling Stones. That is what I signed up for. That thing that happened – that will never happen again. I was very vocal about it. And I was relieved.”

WHEN SESSIONS MOVED TO LA, UNDER WATT’S aegis, Hackney Diamonds took on the shape it largely retains today. For Jordan it is a compromise, but perhaps a necessary one. Meanwhile, some of Watt’s ideas were just really good ideas – like hooking McCartney in to play fuzz bass on the snarling Bite My Head Off (“Macca wanted to put the dirt on it,” says Richards, “and we were like, OK”) or having Elton John play piano on Live By The Sword. “The idea was to keep it real Jerry Lee and Nicky Hopkins,” explains Watt, “because who’s a better rock’n’roll piano player alive than Elton John?”

While the guest spots look superfluous, perhaps even distracting, on paper (“Because the Stones are enough star power, right?” says Jordan), one of the record’s best tracks is a veritable pile-on. Sweet Sounds Of Heaven is an epic gospel blow-out, with Stevie Wonder – another Watt connection – playing piano and Moog. The pièce de résistance is the response vocal to Jagger’s call, performed by Lady Gaga. This time the intervention was serendipitous – Gaga was recording next door.

“I thought she would just be watching in the control room,” recalls Jagger, “but she walked in the live room, starts looking at me and I think I know what she wants to do. So we give her the headphones and the iPad with the lyric sheet and she started singing.”

“She’s such a ****ing badass,” declares Watt. “I watched her follow Mick’s phrasing. It’s such a natural thing. It wasn’t like, OK, second verse – here’s the feature. She joined the band on that song. She’s almost embodying [Gimme Shelter’s] Merry Clayton.”

One line from Sweet Sounds Of Heaven’s lyric goes, “Let the old still believe that they’re young…” Is that part of the Stones’ job? Jagger laughs.

“I guess so… now. It wasn’t always our job of course. I’ve heard people who come to the shows saying, ‘It takes me back to my youth…’ (Unimpressed) ‘Yeah great, so my job is to take you back to your youth… (Brightens) But I’ll buy it! Whatever makes you happy. You’re payin’ to get in. I’m just doin’ what I do. But I suppose I did make some of those references on this album – slightly tongue-in-cheek references to ageing.”

While they were making it, were they at any point thinking, This could be the last Rolling Stones album?

“It always can be,” says Jagger. “But listen, you don’t really think like that. We could both walk across the road and have a drink and fall under a bus. But that’s not how I think. We’ve got so much material in the can, this can’t be the last Rolling Stones record…”

THE SHADOW THROWN ACROSS HACKNEY DIAMONDS is not so much its possible finality, but the absence of Charlie Watts, so long the band’s motor and their anchor. The Stones were rehearsing in Boston when they heard that he passed. Ronnie Wood had seen him in London not long before.

“I happened to be in the hospital for check-ups,” says Wood, reflective where he is normally effusive. “They weren’t really letting anyone in – visitors or nothing. But they said that Charlie was in, and they let me see him.

“So I’m sat with him in his room watching the racing, we’re watching Frankie Dettori on the telly, and he’s going, ‘I’m so pissed off, I wanna get out of here.’ But he did mention to me, he said, ‘Until I get better, you’ve got to use Steve Jordan. He’s the only one I trust to keep it going.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry Charlie, we’ve got it covered.’ And that’s the last time I saw him.”

Two years before, June 21, 2019, Steve Jordan was watching The Rolling Stones perform at Soldier Field, Chicago. Showing MOJO film on his phone of Watts power the band through Midnight Rambler that night, he shakes his head in disbelief.

“I mean, Midnight Rambler is the essence of the Stones,” Jordan says, “where you see the creativity, the improvisation happen. And here’s this guy, 78 years old, just cracking the whip. Now it’s true that Charlie’s heroes – guys like Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones – they were playing brilliantly in their seventies, but that’s jazz. They’re playing clubs to people who are listening. Charlie is playing to 80,000 people and he’s making them move their ass.”

Jordan grins widely, then leans forward, his face deadly serious.

“This was not my dream,” he says. “I wish Charlie Watts was still alive. I did have a dream about playing with the Stones where I was like [Sympathy For The Devil percussionist] Rocky Dzidzornu. But I never ever, ever, ever, ever thought about this.”

Jordan is spoken of by all of the Stones as Watts’ personally-anointed successor. It helps everyone feel better that the group are sailing on without him but it also appears to be true. Jordan first encountered the Stones in October 1978 at the first show of the fourth season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Jordan was the drummer in the house band. That day, the Stones performed Shattered – still one of his favourite songs. Backstage, he found himself watching baseball with Charlie Watts.

“Here I am, 19 years old, and I’m explaining baseball to Charlie Watts! He was just so unassuming. And I said to him, Could you do me a favour? Could you get me an autograph? And he went out and came back with autographs from the entire band.”

In 1985, Jordan was working in Paris with Duran Duran offshoot Arcadia, while across town the Stones were wading through Dirty Work. He sent a ‘hi’ message to Watts and received an invite to drop by. Turfed out of a cab in the vague vicinity of Pathé Marconi studio, he wondered what he’d let himself in for. “It’s freezing cold,” he says. “There’s no reason for me to be in this neighbourhood close to midnight. It looks like I’m gonna rob somebody’s house or something. I’m screwed.”

Jordan actually hears the Stones before he sees the studio entrance, and as he’s let in he beholds something wondrous.

“They’re playing like they’re set up on a stage to play live,” he says. “And then I realise that I’d never seen a Rolling Stones gig before! So this is my first gig and it was like a private gig. It’s me, some engineers, [Ronnie’s then wife] Jo Wood and Keith’s dad sitting on a couch. And this is like so surreal, the whole thing.”

Jordan remembers exactly what Watts was wearing that night – an olive-green corduroy suit with cordovan loafers – and that he wasn’t in the best of shape: “It was his turn, the one time he wasn’t the rock for the rest of the band.” And for the rest of the week, whenever Stones pianist and tour manager Ian Stewart summoned him, after he knocked off with Arcadia, he would turn up at Pathé Marconi and help out. It was the beginning of an open relationship with multiple Stones – sessions for Jagger’s solo theme for the 1986 film Ruthless People; a stint with Wood on a Fats Domino TV special in the same year; Hail! Hail! Rock ’N’ Roll in 1987 with Richards and a notoriously recalcitrant Chuck Berry (“That thing wore my ass out”) and subsequently, Richards’ X-Pensive Winos band.

Jordan’s current status in the Stones, he admits, is “tricky”. He honours Watts in what he plays, but he also has his own style.

“I’m not like, a tribute band drummer,” he says. “That’s not my goal here. Where Charlie would do his interpretation of a [Chuck Berry/Chess records drummer] Fred Below thing I do full Fred Below, because I know where Charlie was coming from, what his intent was. I’m pushing the band a little bit more. Charlie’s relationship with Keith was almost, he waited for Keith. Counterpunching, kinda. But I’m not waiting for Keith. My version of playing with Keith is, I gotta drive.”

STEVE JORDAN REGARDS HIMSELF AS THE GUY “WHO knows what The Rolling Stones should sound like.” Since his incorporation into the touring band in 2021, some of his work has been akin to restoration.

“Why is Honky Tonk Women so funky?” he asks MOJO. “It’s the space. The guitar, the cowbell… the arrangement is brilliant.” But, he notes, the Stones hadn’t played that arrangement for years. “They’d evolved into a thing where by the second verse, everybody’s playing, and all of a sudden, it sounds like a freaking bar band. It doesn’t sound like The Rolling Stones.”

Jordan wanted to spring clean other staples of the Stones’ set too.

“…Like the stomp beat in Satisfaction. Fifteen to 20 years ago Charlie stopped playing the stomp beat; he just played back beat. And I can see why – it can take everything out of you. But as a fan I wanna hear BAM BAM BAM BAM!”

He pauses. He knows he’s coming on a little strong. “Look, I know there’s a danger of, You just got here and this is not your role, guy, so calm down,” he concedes. “I’m very cognisant of all that.”

The irony is that, in some respects, The Rolling Stones’ Jordan-era shows are more faithful to Rolling Stones records than latter-era Watts. Besides which, Jordan’s extra power applied boot to rear at just the point when his seventysomething bandmates most needed it. Witnesses of the group’s London Hyde Park shows in July 2022 rank the performances among the best they’ve seen. But beyond the beat, there was a new-found intensity shared by all the band. Wood, for instance, stowed the clowning and found a focus that was evident every time the screens showed his face.

“He was focused, yeah,” agrees Jagger. “Some of that’s got to do with it being London, and a home crowd. Your kids are there and mates you’ve known for 30 years. And I think that’s when you’ve got to do your best job. Whereas, when you’re in Düsseldorf…”

Wood thinks there’s another reason, apart from almost constant guitar playing, for his current performance levels.(...)