Tell Me :
Talk
Very well said. Very true.
I have to say -the album is much, much better than I anticipated. It is Stones with a very modern, Mily Cyrus-like pumping, grooving and driving sound to it. Luckily Jagger is not on top of the music, and his singing is much better than I would ever expected him to sing at his age.
They sound like they really enjoyed making it, I find it quite an amazing album to be honest.
One thing that sticks out is Bill Wyman's playing. It really is testimony on how incredibly important he is for the sound of the Stones. His bass part makes the track have that wobble and swing that is so missing from modern day Stones.
Mathijs
This is the text version that was posted on SH and where Jordan let's it rip, uncalled for, unprofessional and disrespectful IMO...besides they wasted enough time as it is with Don Was to use another guy who wants them to "sound like the Stones". He must be all the more bitter that Keith is apparently very happy with what Watt brought to the plate..and got the writing credits that he probably thought he would be getting (he mentions "writing a song when Watt showed up"). I must say I was surprised to not see any songwriting credits for neither Clifford or Jordan.
"Rolling & Tumbling
It’s been a tough time for The Rolling Stones – health scares, losing Charlie, plus an album they could never seem to finish. But with a new drummer, new producer and new urgency they grasped the nettle, because who knows what tomorrow might bring? “We needed some real,” they tell Danny Ecclestone, “so we got as real as we could get.”
IN JULY 2022, MICK JAGGER CO-STARRED IN MY LIFE AS A ROLLING STONE, a four-part TV documentary that focused on each of The Rolling Stones in turn. Filmed in time to capture a typically self-effacing interview with Charlie Watts, but debuting nearly a year after his death in August 2021, it became a de facto memorial for the departed drummer.
As the curtain rose on Episode 1, the Stones singer announced that he hoped it would explode some of the more tedious myths about the group. A signal for the doc to retread every cliché around their music and their history, ticking all the boxes marked ‘dark’, ‘dangerous’, ‘sexy’, ‘the anti-Beatles’, ‘rock’n’roll incarnate’ et cetera.
Reminded of this in September 2023, Jagger groans and rolls his eyes theatrically. “Well,” he protests in rubbery Dartford tones. “I didn’t edit the thing…”
So how about some myth-busting in the pages of MOJO? What would Jagger say is the wrongest thing ever stated about his band?
“That’s a difficult one,” he frowns. “I was so full of it on the TV show, wasn’t I? (Pompous voice) ‘Shooting down the myths!’ Now I can’t think of any.”
MOJO wonders if it’s a good idea to mention this but does so anyway. How about the story from 1984, where Jagger and Richards return from a carouse to their Amsterdam hotel in the early hours? The one where Jagger demands “Where’s my drummer?” and insists that Charlie Watts be turfed out of his bed? Whereupon Watts dresses in the sharpest of his suits, marches to Jagger’s room, tells his singer never to call him his drummer again, and drops him with a straight right to the chops?
Jagger shakes his mousy mane.
“Didn’t happen. No, not at all. Keith invented that story. Now, Charlie was annoyed,” Jagger concedes, “and he was very drunk, as was Keith. And he was a bit wound up. But there were so many people there, so many people between me and Charlie, and it never came to blows.”
There’s an embellishment that MOJO read, where Watts knocks Jagger onto a table of smoked salmon and the singer nearly slides out of an open window to his doom. Jagger thinks this is hilarious.
“A table full of smoked salmon!” he hoots. “That’s a good one. How about we go one better? I turned into a smoked salmon and dived out the window? Yeah, that’s what really happened.”
Too good to be true? It’s a scenario that endorses the most cherished stereotypes of the Stones: the camply imperious Jagger; the noble, dapper Watts; and – peddling gossip from the most problematic period in his relationship with the singer – the anarchic, Jagger-baiting Keith Richards. Has the story ever bothered Jagger? Or is it just grist to the mill of the Stones legend – part of their armour, even?
“Yeah, I don’t really care,” chuckles Jagger. “You won’t find me getting all (blustery Rumpole voice) ‘That never happened! I must object!’ I mean, it’s nonsense. But if that’s what Keith wants to believe…”
ENTHRONED IN A PLUSH KNIGHTSBRIDGE HOTEL suite, dressed in a thin white chemise with paintbrushy black swooshes, surrounded by cameras, boom mikes, PRs and other evidence of the world’s fascination, Jagger is doing what he’s been doing very successfully since 1962: selling The Rolling Stones. Down the corridor, in separate suites, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are busy adding their own more freeform variations.
Yesterday, the trio sashayed into east London’s Hackney Empire for a glitzy (for Hackney) launch event for Hackney Diamonds, the first album of new Rolling Stones songs since 2005’s A Bigger Bang – an eon in the lifespan of ordinary bands. Housing material from as far back as 2019 – two tracks feature Watts on drums – it mostly hails from late 2022 sessions in New York’s Electric Lady (September-October) and LA’s Henson studios (November), the latter helmed by 32-year-old hotshot producer Andrew Watt.
But why Hackney Diamonds? And why Hackney? “Because we’re a London band,” announced Richards at the launch. “Says a guy who lives in Connecticut!” laughs Jagger today. “Who never comes here! Still, it sounds good. I’m glad he still feels it.”
Perhaps because MOJO’s mostly-music agenda represents a breather from the socio-political fixations of other interlocutors – for instance, the “French bloke, all good-looking and chicly done up, who showed me ancient pictures of me and Françoise Hardy in, like, 1964. Hilarious” – Jagger seems unusually relaxed, flopping around on his chair, scrunching his face into frequent laughter, comfortable with off-piste lines of questioning. It’s a cliché as boring as any he failed to explode in My Life As A Rolling Stone that Jagger doesn’t look 80. Close up, he looks, sounds and acts almost ridiculously not-80.
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.
“My ‘newfound sobriety’ is now, like, 13 years old,” he says, “and it’s changing all the time. So my concentration span is better, and I have another angle at looking on things. You get a lot of work done, when you’re seeing things clearly.”
ONE OF MOJO’S FAVOURITE ROLLING STONES- related artefacts, we tell Keith Richards, is A Stone Alone – a bootleg of solo Keith recordings, some taped in Toronto in 1977 while Richards waited on his sentence for possession of heroin with intent to traffic. The guitarist is hopeless yearning personified on Merle Haggard’s Sing Me Back Home and Johnny Paycheck’s Apartment Number 9.
“It was the stuff that I’d been playing with Gram Parsons before Gram upped and croaked on me – damn him,” says Richards rheumily. “I thought I was going to jail. I didn’t see how… But I also saw that I definitely was not as guilty as they thought I was. Although I can’t say I was squeaky clean (low chuckle).
“Having that hang over you,” he continues, “it makes you grow up. And, whoa, decide to learn how to deal with society. I’ve got kids. I’ve got the judges on my ass. Yeah, it was a moment of introspection. Time to straighten up, boy.”
The other songs on A Stone Alone are from 1981, recorded on Longview Farm, Massachusetts after rehearsals for the Stones’ Tattoo You tour. We mention Richards’ beautiful version of Hoagy Carmichael’s The Nearness Of You – an occasional solo spot at Stones shows passim – and Richards insists on shaking hands.
“He called me on that, you know, Hoagy,” says Richards. “My lawyer at the time, Peter Parcher, was also Sammy Cahn’s lawyer. And he was playing it in his office and Sammy Cahn was there. And Sammy called Hoagy. Me and Patti were down in Bermuda – no, Barbados – and I get, ‘Mr Richards, there’s a phone call for you. A Mr Carmichael.’ I’m thinking, There’s only one Carmichael I know of and it can’t be him, but sure enough…”
Carmichael told Richards how much the Stone’s version had touched him, but may have had an ulterior motive…
“He reeled off a litany of other songs and I’m like, I know them all, Hoagy! He was giving me the songwriters’ spiel! Then he said, ‘Where are you?’ and I said, Barbados. And he said, ‘Go down to the bar and ask for a corn’n’oil.’ I’m like, Yes sir! I go to the bar and sure enough, corn’n’oil is rum and falernum sweetener, an old famous Barbados drink…”
A nostalgic mist swims in front of Richards’ eyes. He looks like he can taste it now.
“So I got that tip from Hoagy. And all he’d heard was what you’ve heard… ‘It ain’t the pale moon…’ and my terrible piano playing!”
The Rolling Stones and their ’60s peers are often seen as a rupture in the pop culture, but as we put more distance between ourselves and the late ’60s, their revolution looks less clear-cut. The musicians they admired as teenagers – the tunesmiths, bluesmen, early rock’n’rollers – were already long into adulthood. Some, like Hoagy Carmichael, who would be dead within six months of his call to Richards, were decades past their supposed heyday. The Stones were torchbearers, not always barnburners.
“Y’know, our music has had far more influence than I ever dreamt of or expected,” says Richards. “I can’t really project into the future. But it is a weird feeling… to be an elder statesman. You know, I’m not really built for that. I didn’t expect to get this far, man.
“Getting old is new territory,” he adds. “As long as I can hang and play, personally I feel like I’m 40 or 50. But let’s not push our luck, right? Mick and I are both very physically strong. But I don’t want to make a big deal of it. I’d feel differently about my age if I woke up in the morning, and my leg fell off. Whoops! Something’s wrong here! Otherwise, it’s not something that’s on my mind.”
You suspect being a Rolling Stone makes more sense at 79 than at 40. Their generation of rockers found mid-life music-making a challenge. In the 1980s, they looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves…
“A lot didn’t know what to do with themselves in the first place!” guffaws Richards. “They just hit the lucky spot until it ran out. That’s pop music. You shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people jump on a wagon that the wagon falls over. Stones ain’t like that…”
You’ve never seemed to go in for questioning yourselves much.
“Questioning?!” Richards reels theatrically. “I mean, what kind of question would I ask myself? Sounds like a recipe for disaster! I mean, I think we’ve always felt that we’ve got this little spark going on, this energy, and you don’t really want to intellectualise or question it too much. Basically, you know, you’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth and saying, So far, so good.”
IT’S ONLY ROCK’N’ROLL? Is that all that sustains the Stones’ status? Surely it’s also one of the shibboleths of late-20th century social history that the band were one of the motors of change. Jagger revisits that period in the lyric of Hackney Diamonds’ Whole Wide World, a punky ramalam with the singer imagining himself assailed by multiple outside forces, all in an exaggerated London accent. Is this his first cockney vocal on record?
“Well, I kinda did London on Mother’s Little Helper,” he muses. “But the song’s kind of British punk so I thought, Not too Americanised on this one, no Southernisms. And with the lyric I was thinking, It’s about when the chips are down – why not use some of your old experiences? It’s obviously not exact. I mention the ‘filthy flat Fulham’ – which was actually obviously in Chelsea, but doesn’t alliterate (laughs).”
Then you mention being in jail – revisiting the aftermath of the February 1967 Redlands bust.
“Well, yeah, so I’d covered the difficult student years. Which weren’t that difficult, really, but they weren’t that great either. And then I thought, Being in jail – that was pretty awful. I mean, I wasn’t there long but I mean, not nice.”
Jagger won’t wallow in the timeworn Stones Versus The Establishment narrative. He has previously noted that it was the establishment that got Richards and himself out of prison. Today he returns to that theme: support for the Stones from unexpected corners of the press.
“I’m not sure how I came across this stuff,” he says, “but I found an old piece in the Evening Standard. They compared our sentences with a sentence that was given the week before to someone that possessed two ounces of cannabis. He was given a warning and a fine of 50 quid. So they were saying it wasn’t a level playing field. And that it was overkill for a first offence. There were quite a lot of objections on that level.”
So did The Rolling Stones change the world, or didn’t they?
“(Poo-pooing voice) Well… ‘changed the world’ is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s got to do a lot with economics. So there’s this huge jump in disposable income. You’ve got young people having money for the first time, a target market for clothes, cars, motorbikes, whatever. So your market is not just a middle-class couple. It’s a much bigger market. And that fuels this upheaval in values. And pop culture is just the most visible bit. Everyone can see a miniskirt, everyone wants to take a picture of it. Everyone wants to take a picture of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones…”
In 1967, the year Jagger and Richards were jailed and released, the Stones recorded Their Satanic Majesties’ Request. In other UK news that year, the Family Planning Act made contraception readily available through the NHS. And the Sexual Offences Act…
“Which endorsed the Wolfenden Report,” Jagger interjects.
…permitted homosexual acts between consenting adults over 21. It’s all going on…
“Yeah, it’s all going on. And a lot of it has got nothing to do with pop culture. The Wolfenden Report [delivered to Parliament in 1960] had been an undercurrent for a long time. So nothing to do with pop culture. But the change in sexual mores and the gender stuff we’re dealing with now, started then.”
MICK JAGGER IS SOMETHING OF AN ALL-COURT sceptic. It’s evident in his refusal to embrace received versions of his own history – his refusal to publically embrace very much, it must be said, outside of the Stones, his family, and cricket. Since his appearance at the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration of October ’68 he has not gone out of his way to espouse causes or make pronouncements. And over the years it’s been easy to turn himself and Richards into the allegorical poles of the Stones: the pragmatist versus the romantic, the head versus the heart. Mick is this. Keith is that. And never the twain… Jagger nods.
“Yeah exactly… It’s always very convenient in journalism, as you know, being a journalist… It’s an easy story to write. And then the more you say it, the more it catches on and becomes accepted.”
OK then, in what way isn’t it true?
“I don’t know how we’re gonna…”
Mick’s the pop one, who wants to sell records and…
“…likes business…”
And Keith’s away with the faeries, conjuring music from the ether…
“(Laughs) Yeah, it never works like that… Like, originally, Keith was the pop person, really. I mean, I used to just write the lyrics to his pop tunes. And he wrote all these pop tunes, because he listened to The Beatles all the time, drove me crazy listening to The Beatles when we shared a flat together. Keith sort of left that behind in a way, but he wrote Ruby Tuesday, Let’s Spend The Night Together – these were all Keith’s songs. But yeah, people will say, ‘Keith was the one that liked the blues.’ I mean, there is a difference. I really like pop music now, listen to it all the time. Keith doesn’t. I still like blues. But I like dance music and Keith doesn’t really like it.”
Despite their differences, the phoney war between the two – maintained for whatever reason throughout the ’80s and the ’90s, doubtless with a performative component – has been over for a while.
“I know how it looks – ‘Oh Mick and Keith have had a fight,’” says Richards, “but there’s 15 years since the last fight. Say you and your brother decided to disagree about something? I mean, how many times in your lifetime? But of course when Mick and I have a disagreement, it’s all over the place, ya know? And really, it’s just two normal brothers having spats and making up. We wouldn’t still be doing this if we didn’t have that capability and that respect for each other. I love the silly sod.”
THE LAST TRACK ON HACKNEY DIAMONDS IS I’m A Rolling Stone, a cover of the Muddy Waters song which gave the band their name.
It was Andrew Watt’s idea that Jagger and Richards should end the album on their own, playing a blues. He even provided the 1930 Gibson L-4 guitar – similar to a guitar once favoured by doomed bluesman Robert Johnson – that Richards used on the track. Or rather, eventually used, as both Richards and Watt struggled with the instrument’s unforgiving neck and string tension until one day, looking at the famous picture of Johnson with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, they realised from the position of the capo on the second fret of his guitar, that Johnson must have tuned down a full step, relaxing the string tension. Thus empowered, Richards and the L-4 joined Jagger around a single mike, Jagger singing and playing harmonica, and the tune was nailed in six takes, the pair moving closer together as they played.
“It was almost like Keith was having a conversation with Robert Johnson,” says Watt. But the more immediate conversation is with Jagger, whose harmonica playing is spine-tingling.
“For years I would whisper to Keith,” says Steve Jordan, “When Mick plays the harp, he’s like a different guy. It’s like his alter ego comes in and swoops in and takes him over. It’s the real stuff.”
If it’s to be the last Rolling Stones song on the last Rolling Stones album it would be apt. But for now at least, the Stones are talking up the fight, including the prospect of taking some of their new songs on the road.
“One of the points of this is to be a… bastion!” declares Richards, majestically. “Everything these days is synthesised and artificial. These words are not particularly good words. We needed some real, so we got as real as we could get. This is The Rolling Stones. This is what they can do.”
And will fans have to wait another 18 years for another Stones LP? Or will they soon be able to hear some of this cornucopia of tracks we’re told are in the can?
“Maybe!” laughs Richards, gaily, as MOJO is ushered from his presence. “I ain’t Nostradamus.”
“It’s The Raw ****!”
Producer Andrew Watt on what he did, and didn’t do, to make Hackney Diamonds what it is.
ALREADY A veteran of slick and successful albums by Ozzy Osbourne, Eddie Vedder, Elton John and Iggy Pop, despite his relatively tender years, Andrew Watt was nevertheless pinching himself. It was the day before one of The Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park shows of 2022 and here was the 31-year-old Long Islander “sitting in ****ing Mick Jagger’s house, having tea.”
The pair chatted about Watt’s ongoing projects and the Stones’ stalled album. A week or so later Jagger was on the phone, explaining that, serendipitously, Ronnie Wood had talked with a recent Watt client, Paul McCartney, and that the young man was now in the frame to produce the Stones.
“This is Mick Jagger telling me a story about Paul McCartney talking to Ronnie Wood about me,” raps Watt a mile-a-minute. “Like, I can’t fathom how this is actually real…”
Invited to New York to sit in on sessions at Electric Lady, Watt was aware of the risks. He listened, kept quiet and wrote his thoughts in a journal, “because I didn’t want to be the new guy saying, Hey, why don't you try this out? They would have shown me the door, right?”
It must have been the right approach because Watt got the job (“the ****ing greatest feeling ever”) helming November sessions in Henson Recording Studios in LA. But there was little initial talk about approaches or intentions. “It was more seat of the pants,” says Watt, “informed by the sounds coming out of the speakers, and the songs.”
It was Watt’s idea to draft founding bassist Bill Wyman on Live By The Sword – one of the two Hackney Diamonds songs that feature Charlie Watts – “so that there could be, for the fans, the original Rolling Stones rhythm section reconvened.” Elton John was another Watt suggestion, and it was Watt’s call to Stevie Wonder that led to the soul genius joining the band on the dramatic Sweet Sounds Of Heaven (“I cannot believe I got to witness that”).
But it was the work of Jagger and Richards that really blew him away. “How many Stones shows have you seen?” Watt asks MOJO. “Keith plays the same song different every night, right? Well, it’s the same with takes. He’s very primal and very emotional, but he’s also unbelievably melodic.”
Watt insisted that all Richards’ parts were finished before Jagger added vocals. “Because if you put Mick around Keith, it’s gonna sound like the Stones. You’re not fitting Keith in – **** that.” It was part of an evolving plan to make a “modern”-sounding record that preserved the unique live sound of the Stones, tracking in a room.
“I hope what makes it fresh and modern comes down to the way it’s mixed, with focus on low end and making sure the drums are big,” says Watt. “But the record is recorded like a Stones album. There’s no click tracks. There’s no gridding. There’s no computer editing. This **** is performed live and it speeds up and slows down. It’s made to the ****ing heartbeat connection of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Steve Jordan. And Charlie, when Charlie’s on it.”
And what does he hope fans will hear?
“They’ll hear their favourite band in the world playing raw and un-****ed-with, because that’s what it is. It’s the raw ****.”
Dirtier Work?
How Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood moonlighted on the mid-’80s Stones with a Shepherd’s Bush bouncer’s punky rock’n’roll band. By Andrew Perry.
THE MID-’80S spat between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is the stuff of Stones legend. After the torrid 1981-2 Tattoo You tour, the rift widened circa ’84-85, when Jagger cut his first solo album, She’s The Boss, but less widely remembered is that while Mick swanned about in the Bahamas on that project, Richards and Ronnie Wood were contributing to an album by a rough-and-ready band at the opposite end of rock’s pecking order.
The Dirty Strangers were a ramalama rock’n’roll unit playing in west London pubs, fronted by a charismatic ducker-and-diver named Alan Clayton, who was then dividing his time, he says today, between “building and decorating, security work and doing the band. I was a 48-hours-a-day man.”
Clayton first met Wood via the Stone’s monitor man, and The Dirty Strangers played at Ronnie’s wedding to Jo Karslake in January ’85. The introduction to Richards came through Clayton’s multi-tasking as a bouncer.
“This man-mountain I was working with, Joe Seabrook, became Keith’s bodyguard and thought we’d get on, so he took me up to see him at the Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge, and he was absolutely right.”
Two days later, Richards had Clayton ferry a guitar and, bafflingly, a sword stick to Paris, and the friendship continued over the ensuing year or two. When Clayton mentioned that he planned to record more songs he’d written, “it just happened that Keith was going to be in London, and he went, ‘Can I play on them?’ I wasn’t gonna turn him down.”
With Richards’ buddy Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola (AKA Stash) ‘producing’, recording took place in Hammersmith on the cheaper graveyard shift, “which was OK ’cos Keith didn’t get up ’til two in the morning”. Richards later bankrolled some remixing, and played on six tracks, best of all the Clayton-penned, heart-on-sleeve ballad, Diamonds.
Jagger fumed at his compadres ‘slumming it’, especially when press in some territories reported that Wood and Richards had quit the Stones to join ‘Dirty Al’’s combo, but the self-titled album ran into legal problems, when its Stateside distributors blatantly stickered the sleeve with the two Stones’ names. With Richards himself about to drop a solo record, Talk Is Cheap, his label Virgin forced the album to be withdrawn.
The friendship endured, however. Richards co-wrote one track on 1993’s follow-up, Burn The Bubble, and in the early ’00s after Clayton lost his eldest son Barrie to cancer, aged 22, the superstar guitarist took his grieving amigo under his wing.
“He had me over to stay at Redlands, to help him while he was recording A Bigger Bang. I went down there when the sun was shining and came home when the Christmas decorations were up. That’s what happened when you went to Redlands in those days.”
Richards soon took Clayton off on tour for two years-plus, where he’d line-check Jagger’s microphone every afternoon (“he was great with me, never rude”), and with Alan’s “mojo restored”, ’09’s third Dirty Strangers record was recorded at Redlands. Suitably entitled West 12 To Wittering, it featured Richards on piano on four tracks, such as the co-authored She’s A Real Botticelli – a title the pair admiringly nicked from a Just William story.
Tellingly, Clayton appears as early as page 23 of Richards’ autobiography, Life, loitering with him outside a Sussex sweet shop with the munchies after an all-night bender, but Clayton is ambivalent whether their friendship has advanced his music career.
“But I’ve known him for 40 years now, so we’re like family,” he reasons. “Keith has been there for us in ways he probably wouldn’t want people to know about. The things he does might seem extraordinary from the outside, but from the inside… It’s quite normal, isn’t it, to help?”
The Dirty Strangers’ album, Hunter’s Moon, is out now. "
--------------
IORR Links : Essential Studio Outtakes CDs : Audio - History of Rarest Outtakes : Audio
Yeah I love While Wide World too - I think it’s a great song and it has a great energy - the band sounds much younger and fiery on this track.
The impression I get from a lot of comments here is that people just want the Stones to sound like they did in 1971. Those days are gone - the band has changed, the world has changed, recording technology has changed. What I like about these new songs is that it doesn’t sound like the band are trying to “recreate” anything - they are just doing their art in 2023 and it sounds new and interesting and vibrant.
Yes that's cool
Nice work! Thank you
A gospel choir is involved according to this review..
"And “Mess It Up,” although edging closer to corny than anything else here, in the end makes good use of both a gospel choir and a disco beat. (“You think I’d mess it up, mess it up, mess it up all for you?” Jagger sings to an aspiring mistress who, per the lyrics, seduced his landlord and broke into his residence. We know it’s fiction because there’s no way Jagger rents any of his many homes.)"
[www.stereogum.com]
Yeah, old school me too. I have been imagineing a queue Friday morning, but then again I guess a new album by the Stones is a niche product these days like any other act. However, will they sell out? Who knows? Nostalgia ain`t what it was either, so I think I have to prepare for anything. Norwegian shops are charging around 40 Euro for this album. I think you should know.
I seem to recall that Mick does, in fact, rent out his place in Mustique.
When the album is released, the credits will also be available.
rightly observed
Talk about your favorite band.
For information about how to use this forum please check out forum help and policies.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
gotdablouse
()
Date: October 18, 2023 15:53
ER is not my favorite album but yes, oddly, HD has its eclecticism and 'atmosphere". BMHO and LBTS slightly reminiscent of WTBG or SR and MIR/Dance. No dud like SITM fortunately or the dreary Indian Girl. Keith's tune is also a bit similar. Oh and WWW takes after the ER (I think) "Never Too Into" outtake !
ER has nothing as good as Angry or SSOH though and HD has much stronger tracks overall though, almost all potential singles. ER would have been a lot stronger with SMU of course ;-)
--------------
IORR Links : Essential Studio Outtakes CDs : Audio - History of Rarest Outtakes : Audio
ER has nothing as good as Angry or SSOH though and HD has much stronger tracks overall though, almost all potential singles. ER would have been a lot stronger with SMU of course ;-)
--------------
IORR Links : Essential Studio Outtakes CDs : Audio - History of Rarest Outtakes : Audio
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
MartinB
()
Date: October 18, 2023 16:42
Quote
caschimann
Reading through all this is so different like back in 2003 for instance.
Even during the last tour it was different.
More open.
More good tempered.
More relaxed.
But with this new record coming out something happened to this board.
And I am not talking about the Waldorf & Stadlers. They belong to the show.
I am talking about those dry, analytical, soulless and cold comments, thoughts and opinions on a new Stones record.
It's not about that those people, this many people here, doesn't refer to the age, neither to the evolution of The Rolling Stones.
And it's not about that they talk about Rock'n Roll like discussing the stock market.
What it is about, and what makes me, well helpless and sad and of course angry is that those many here think the Stones are owing us something. That they don't await the new record - they expect it and they expect a thousand things from this band.
At last - and this is the most depressing issue - they expect that the 80years old Rolling Stones will give them back their youth with this new album.
Nobody can deliver that. Not even God.
The Stones are always about now. This minute. And to be happy with it.
That's their simple mission.
I am happy with this minute because when its over I am one minute nearer to the release of the new album
Very well said. Very true.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Mathijs
()
Date: October 18, 2023 16:53
Quote
StoneageQuote
SpudQuote
Mathijs
I love Sweet Sounds of Heaven, I like the track with Bill and Charlie, but for now really underwhelmed with all the other tracks. I know it always takes a while before I like new Stones material, but for now I just can't get over Jagger's nasal and gnarly voice, and I can't get through his mannerisms and over-pronunciation.
Let's hope it grows on me.
Mathijs
Those mannerisms and the over enunciation have always been there to a degree...
It can be a very effective part of his delivery...but, in recent times, he's far too high in the mix and it doesn't work quite so well as a result.
He got away with this in the 1980s. Unfortunately, his voice hasn't aged that well since. But he kept the mannerisms.
I have to say -the album is much, much better than I anticipated. It is Stones with a very modern, Mily Cyrus-like pumping, grooving and driving sound to it. Luckily Jagger is not on top of the music, and his singing is much better than I would ever expected him to sing at his age.
They sound like they really enjoyed making it, I find it quite an amazing album to be honest.
One thing that sticks out is Bill Wyman's playing. It really is testimony on how incredibly important he is for the sound of the Stones. His bass part makes the track have that wobble and swing that is so missing from modern day Stones.
Mathijs
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
gotdablouse
()
Date: October 18, 2023 16:54
This is the text version that was posted on SH and where Jordan let's it rip, uncalled for, unprofessional and disrespectful IMO...besides they wasted enough time as it is with Don Was to use another guy who wants them to "sound like the Stones". He must be all the more bitter that Keith is apparently very happy with what Watt brought to the plate..and got the writing credits that he probably thought he would be getting (he mentions "writing a song when Watt showed up"). I must say I was surprised to not see any songwriting credits for neither Clifford or Jordan.
"Rolling & Tumbling
It’s been a tough time for The Rolling Stones – health scares, losing Charlie, plus an album they could never seem to finish. But with a new drummer, new producer and new urgency they grasped the nettle, because who knows what tomorrow might bring? “We needed some real,” they tell Danny Ecclestone, “so we got as real as we could get.”
IN JULY 2022, MICK JAGGER CO-STARRED IN MY LIFE AS A ROLLING STONE, a four-part TV documentary that focused on each of The Rolling Stones in turn. Filmed in time to capture a typically self-effacing interview with Charlie Watts, but debuting nearly a year after his death in August 2021, it became a de facto memorial for the departed drummer.
As the curtain rose on Episode 1, the Stones singer announced that he hoped it would explode some of the more tedious myths about the group. A signal for the doc to retread every cliché around their music and their history, ticking all the boxes marked ‘dark’, ‘dangerous’, ‘sexy’, ‘the anti-Beatles’, ‘rock’n’roll incarnate’ et cetera.
Reminded of this in September 2023, Jagger groans and rolls his eyes theatrically. “Well,” he protests in rubbery Dartford tones. “I didn’t edit the thing…”
So how about some myth-busting in the pages of MOJO? What would Jagger say is the wrongest thing ever stated about his band?
“That’s a difficult one,” he frowns. “I was so full of it on the TV show, wasn’t I? (Pompous voice) ‘Shooting down the myths!’ Now I can’t think of any.”
MOJO wonders if it’s a good idea to mention this but does so anyway. How about the story from 1984, where Jagger and Richards return from a carouse to their Amsterdam hotel in the early hours? The one where Jagger demands “Where’s my drummer?” and insists that Charlie Watts be turfed out of his bed? Whereupon Watts dresses in the sharpest of his suits, marches to Jagger’s room, tells his singer never to call him his drummer again, and drops him with a straight right to the chops?
Jagger shakes his mousy mane.
“Didn’t happen. No, not at all. Keith invented that story. Now, Charlie was annoyed,” Jagger concedes, “and he was very drunk, as was Keith. And he was a bit wound up. But there were so many people there, so many people between me and Charlie, and it never came to blows.”
There’s an embellishment that MOJO read, where Watts knocks Jagger onto a table of smoked salmon and the singer nearly slides out of an open window to his doom. Jagger thinks this is hilarious.
“A table full of smoked salmon!” he hoots. “That’s a good one. How about we go one better? I turned into a smoked salmon and dived out the window? Yeah, that’s what really happened.”
Too good to be true? It’s a scenario that endorses the most cherished stereotypes of the Stones: the camply imperious Jagger; the noble, dapper Watts; and – peddling gossip from the most problematic period in his relationship with the singer – the anarchic, Jagger-baiting Keith Richards. Has the story ever bothered Jagger? Or is it just grist to the mill of the Stones legend – part of their armour, even?
“Yeah, I don’t really care,” chuckles Jagger. “You won’t find me getting all (blustery Rumpole voice) ‘That never happened! I must object!’ I mean, it’s nonsense. But if that’s what Keith wants to believe…”
ENTHRONED IN A PLUSH KNIGHTSBRIDGE HOTEL suite, dressed in a thin white chemise with paintbrushy black swooshes, surrounded by cameras, boom mikes, PRs and other evidence of the world’s fascination, Jagger is doing what he’s been doing very successfully since 1962: selling The Rolling Stones. Down the corridor, in separate suites, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are busy adding their own more freeform variations.
Yesterday, the trio sashayed into east London’s Hackney Empire for a glitzy (for Hackney) launch event for Hackney Diamonds, the first album of new Rolling Stones songs since 2005’s A Bigger Bang – an eon in the lifespan of ordinary bands. Housing material from as far back as 2019 – two tracks feature Watts on drums – it mostly hails from late 2022 sessions in New York’s Electric Lady (September-October) and LA’s Henson studios (November), the latter helmed by 32-year-old hotshot producer Andrew Watt.
But why Hackney Diamonds? And why Hackney? “Because we’re a London band,” announced Richards at the launch. “Says a guy who lives in Connecticut!” laughs Jagger today. “Who never comes here! Still, it sounds good. I’m glad he still feels it.”
Perhaps because MOJO’s mostly-music agenda represents a breather from the socio-political fixations of other interlocutors – for instance, the “French bloke, all good-looking and chicly done up, who showed me ancient pictures of me and Françoise Hardy in, like, 1964. Hilarious” – Jagger seems unusually relaxed, flopping around on his chair, scrunching his face into frequent laughter, comfortable with off-piste lines of questioning. It’s a cliché as boring as any he failed to explode in My Life As A Rolling Stone that Jagger doesn’t look 80. Close up, he looks, sounds and acts almost ridiculously not-80.
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.
“My ‘newfound sobriety’ is now, like, 13 years old,” he says, “and it’s changing all the time. So my concentration span is better, and I have another angle at looking on things. You get a lot of work done, when you’re seeing things clearly.”
ONE OF MOJO’S FAVOURITE ROLLING STONES- related artefacts, we tell Keith Richards, is A Stone Alone – a bootleg of solo Keith recordings, some taped in Toronto in 1977 while Richards waited on his sentence for possession of heroin with intent to traffic. The guitarist is hopeless yearning personified on Merle Haggard’s Sing Me Back Home and Johnny Paycheck’s Apartment Number 9.
“It was the stuff that I’d been playing with Gram Parsons before Gram upped and croaked on me – damn him,” says Richards rheumily. “I thought I was going to jail. I didn’t see how… But I also saw that I definitely was not as guilty as they thought I was. Although I can’t say I was squeaky clean (low chuckle).
“Having that hang over you,” he continues, “it makes you grow up. And, whoa, decide to learn how to deal with society. I’ve got kids. I’ve got the judges on my ass. Yeah, it was a moment of introspection. Time to straighten up, boy.”
The other songs on A Stone Alone are from 1981, recorded on Longview Farm, Massachusetts after rehearsals for the Stones’ Tattoo You tour. We mention Richards’ beautiful version of Hoagy Carmichael’s The Nearness Of You – an occasional solo spot at Stones shows passim – and Richards insists on shaking hands.
“He called me on that, you know, Hoagy,” says Richards. “My lawyer at the time, Peter Parcher, was also Sammy Cahn’s lawyer. And he was playing it in his office and Sammy Cahn was there. And Sammy called Hoagy. Me and Patti were down in Bermuda – no, Barbados – and I get, ‘Mr Richards, there’s a phone call for you. A Mr Carmichael.’ I’m thinking, There’s only one Carmichael I know of and it can’t be him, but sure enough…”
Carmichael told Richards how much the Stone’s version had touched him, but may have had an ulterior motive…
“He reeled off a litany of other songs and I’m like, I know them all, Hoagy! He was giving me the songwriters’ spiel! Then he said, ‘Where are you?’ and I said, Barbados. And he said, ‘Go down to the bar and ask for a corn’n’oil.’ I’m like, Yes sir! I go to the bar and sure enough, corn’n’oil is rum and falernum sweetener, an old famous Barbados drink…”
A nostalgic mist swims in front of Richards’ eyes. He looks like he can taste it now.
“So I got that tip from Hoagy. And all he’d heard was what you’ve heard… ‘It ain’t the pale moon…’ and my terrible piano playing!”
The Rolling Stones and their ’60s peers are often seen as a rupture in the pop culture, but as we put more distance between ourselves and the late ’60s, their revolution looks less clear-cut. The musicians they admired as teenagers – the tunesmiths, bluesmen, early rock’n’rollers – were already long into adulthood. Some, like Hoagy Carmichael, who would be dead within six months of his call to Richards, were decades past their supposed heyday. The Stones were torchbearers, not always barnburners.
“Y’know, our music has had far more influence than I ever dreamt of or expected,” says Richards. “I can’t really project into the future. But it is a weird feeling… to be an elder statesman. You know, I’m not really built for that. I didn’t expect to get this far, man.
“Getting old is new territory,” he adds. “As long as I can hang and play, personally I feel like I’m 40 or 50. But let’s not push our luck, right? Mick and I are both very physically strong. But I don’t want to make a big deal of it. I’d feel differently about my age if I woke up in the morning, and my leg fell off. Whoops! Something’s wrong here! Otherwise, it’s not something that’s on my mind.”
You suspect being a Rolling Stone makes more sense at 79 than at 40. Their generation of rockers found mid-life music-making a challenge. In the 1980s, they looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves…
“A lot didn’t know what to do with themselves in the first place!” guffaws Richards. “They just hit the lucky spot until it ran out. That’s pop music. You shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people jump on a wagon that the wagon falls over. Stones ain’t like that…”
You’ve never seemed to go in for questioning yourselves much.
“Questioning?!” Richards reels theatrically. “I mean, what kind of question would I ask myself? Sounds like a recipe for disaster! I mean, I think we’ve always felt that we’ve got this little spark going on, this energy, and you don’t really want to intellectualise or question it too much. Basically, you know, you’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth and saying, So far, so good.”
IT’S ONLY ROCK’N’ROLL? Is that all that sustains the Stones’ status? Surely it’s also one of the shibboleths of late-20th century social history that the band were one of the motors of change. Jagger revisits that period in the lyric of Hackney Diamonds’ Whole Wide World, a punky ramalam with the singer imagining himself assailed by multiple outside forces, all in an exaggerated London accent. Is this his first cockney vocal on record?
“Well, I kinda did London on Mother’s Little Helper,” he muses. “But the song’s kind of British punk so I thought, Not too Americanised on this one, no Southernisms. And with the lyric I was thinking, It’s about when the chips are down – why not use some of your old experiences? It’s obviously not exact. I mention the ‘filthy flat Fulham’ – which was actually obviously in Chelsea, but doesn’t alliterate (laughs).”
Then you mention being in jail – revisiting the aftermath of the February 1967 Redlands bust.
“Well, yeah, so I’d covered the difficult student years. Which weren’t that difficult, really, but they weren’t that great either. And then I thought, Being in jail – that was pretty awful. I mean, I wasn’t there long but I mean, not nice.”
Jagger won’t wallow in the timeworn Stones Versus The Establishment narrative. He has previously noted that it was the establishment that got Richards and himself out of prison. Today he returns to that theme: support for the Stones from unexpected corners of the press.
“I’m not sure how I came across this stuff,” he says, “but I found an old piece in the Evening Standard. They compared our sentences with a sentence that was given the week before to someone that possessed two ounces of cannabis. He was given a warning and a fine of 50 quid. So they were saying it wasn’t a level playing field. And that it was overkill for a first offence. There were quite a lot of objections on that level.”
So did The Rolling Stones change the world, or didn’t they?
“(Poo-pooing voice) Well… ‘changed the world’ is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s got to do a lot with economics. So there’s this huge jump in disposable income. You’ve got young people having money for the first time, a target market for clothes, cars, motorbikes, whatever. So your market is not just a middle-class couple. It’s a much bigger market. And that fuels this upheaval in values. And pop culture is just the most visible bit. Everyone can see a miniskirt, everyone wants to take a picture of it. Everyone wants to take a picture of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones…”
In 1967, the year Jagger and Richards were jailed and released, the Stones recorded Their Satanic Majesties’ Request. In other UK news that year, the Family Planning Act made contraception readily available through the NHS. And the Sexual Offences Act…
“Which endorsed the Wolfenden Report,” Jagger interjects.
…permitted homosexual acts between consenting adults over 21. It’s all going on…
“Yeah, it’s all going on. And a lot of it has got nothing to do with pop culture. The Wolfenden Report [delivered to Parliament in 1960] had been an undercurrent for a long time. So nothing to do with pop culture. But the change in sexual mores and the gender stuff we’re dealing with now, started then.”
MICK JAGGER IS SOMETHING OF AN ALL-COURT sceptic. It’s evident in his refusal to embrace received versions of his own history – his refusal to publically embrace very much, it must be said, outside of the Stones, his family, and cricket. Since his appearance at the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration of October ’68 he has not gone out of his way to espouse causes or make pronouncements. And over the years it’s been easy to turn himself and Richards into the allegorical poles of the Stones: the pragmatist versus the romantic, the head versus the heart. Mick is this. Keith is that. And never the twain… Jagger nods.
“Yeah exactly… It’s always very convenient in journalism, as you know, being a journalist… It’s an easy story to write. And then the more you say it, the more it catches on and becomes accepted.”
OK then, in what way isn’t it true?
“I don’t know how we’re gonna…”
Mick’s the pop one, who wants to sell records and…
“…likes business…”
And Keith’s away with the faeries, conjuring music from the ether…
“(Laughs) Yeah, it never works like that… Like, originally, Keith was the pop person, really. I mean, I used to just write the lyrics to his pop tunes. And he wrote all these pop tunes, because he listened to The Beatles all the time, drove me crazy listening to The Beatles when we shared a flat together. Keith sort of left that behind in a way, but he wrote Ruby Tuesday, Let’s Spend The Night Together – these were all Keith’s songs. But yeah, people will say, ‘Keith was the one that liked the blues.’ I mean, there is a difference. I really like pop music now, listen to it all the time. Keith doesn’t. I still like blues. But I like dance music and Keith doesn’t really like it.”
Despite their differences, the phoney war between the two – maintained for whatever reason throughout the ’80s and the ’90s, doubtless with a performative component – has been over for a while.
“I know how it looks – ‘Oh Mick and Keith have had a fight,’” says Richards, “but there’s 15 years since the last fight. Say you and your brother decided to disagree about something? I mean, how many times in your lifetime? But of course when Mick and I have a disagreement, it’s all over the place, ya know? And really, it’s just two normal brothers having spats and making up. We wouldn’t still be doing this if we didn’t have that capability and that respect for each other. I love the silly sod.”
THE LAST TRACK ON HACKNEY DIAMONDS IS I’m A Rolling Stone, a cover of the Muddy Waters song which gave the band their name.
It was Andrew Watt’s idea that Jagger and Richards should end the album on their own, playing a blues. He even provided the 1930 Gibson L-4 guitar – similar to a guitar once favoured by doomed bluesman Robert Johnson – that Richards used on the track. Or rather, eventually used, as both Richards and Watt struggled with the instrument’s unforgiving neck and string tension until one day, looking at the famous picture of Johnson with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, they realised from the position of the capo on the second fret of his guitar, that Johnson must have tuned down a full step, relaxing the string tension. Thus empowered, Richards and the L-4 joined Jagger around a single mike, Jagger singing and playing harmonica, and the tune was nailed in six takes, the pair moving closer together as they played.
“It was almost like Keith was having a conversation with Robert Johnson,” says Watt. But the more immediate conversation is with Jagger, whose harmonica playing is spine-tingling.
“For years I would whisper to Keith,” says Steve Jordan, “When Mick plays the harp, he’s like a different guy. It’s like his alter ego comes in and swoops in and takes him over. It’s the real stuff.”
If it’s to be the last Rolling Stones song on the last Rolling Stones album it would be apt. But for now at least, the Stones are talking up the fight, including the prospect of taking some of their new songs on the road.
“One of the points of this is to be a… bastion!” declares Richards, majestically. “Everything these days is synthesised and artificial. These words are not particularly good words. We needed some real, so we got as real as we could get. This is The Rolling Stones. This is what they can do.”
And will fans have to wait another 18 years for another Stones LP? Or will they soon be able to hear some of this cornucopia of tracks we’re told are in the can?
“Maybe!” laughs Richards, gaily, as MOJO is ushered from his presence. “I ain’t Nostradamus.”
“It’s The Raw ****!”
Producer Andrew Watt on what he did, and didn’t do, to make Hackney Diamonds what it is.
ALREADY A veteran of slick and successful albums by Ozzy Osbourne, Eddie Vedder, Elton John and Iggy Pop, despite his relatively tender years, Andrew Watt was nevertheless pinching himself. It was the day before one of The Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park shows of 2022 and here was the 31-year-old Long Islander “sitting in ****ing Mick Jagger’s house, having tea.”
The pair chatted about Watt’s ongoing projects and the Stones’ stalled album. A week or so later Jagger was on the phone, explaining that, serendipitously, Ronnie Wood had talked with a recent Watt client, Paul McCartney, and that the young man was now in the frame to produce the Stones.
“This is Mick Jagger telling me a story about Paul McCartney talking to Ronnie Wood about me,” raps Watt a mile-a-minute. “Like, I can’t fathom how this is actually real…”
Invited to New York to sit in on sessions at Electric Lady, Watt was aware of the risks. He listened, kept quiet and wrote his thoughts in a journal, “because I didn’t want to be the new guy saying, Hey, why don't you try this out? They would have shown me the door, right?”
It must have been the right approach because Watt got the job (“the ****ing greatest feeling ever”) helming November sessions in Henson Recording Studios in LA. But there was little initial talk about approaches or intentions. “It was more seat of the pants,” says Watt, “informed by the sounds coming out of the speakers, and the songs.”
It was Watt’s idea to draft founding bassist Bill Wyman on Live By The Sword – one of the two Hackney Diamonds songs that feature Charlie Watts – “so that there could be, for the fans, the original Rolling Stones rhythm section reconvened.” Elton John was another Watt suggestion, and it was Watt’s call to Stevie Wonder that led to the soul genius joining the band on the dramatic Sweet Sounds Of Heaven (“I cannot believe I got to witness that”).
But it was the work of Jagger and Richards that really blew him away. “How many Stones shows have you seen?” Watt asks MOJO. “Keith plays the same song different every night, right? Well, it’s the same with takes. He’s very primal and very emotional, but he’s also unbelievably melodic.”
Watt insisted that all Richards’ parts were finished before Jagger added vocals. “Because if you put Mick around Keith, it’s gonna sound like the Stones. You’re not fitting Keith in – **** that.” It was part of an evolving plan to make a “modern”-sounding record that preserved the unique live sound of the Stones, tracking in a room.
“I hope what makes it fresh and modern comes down to the way it’s mixed, with focus on low end and making sure the drums are big,” says Watt. “But the record is recorded like a Stones album. There’s no click tracks. There’s no gridding. There’s no computer editing. This **** is performed live and it speeds up and slows down. It’s made to the ****ing heartbeat connection of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Steve Jordan. And Charlie, when Charlie’s on it.”
And what does he hope fans will hear?
“They’ll hear their favourite band in the world playing raw and un-****ed-with, because that’s what it is. It’s the raw ****.”
Dirtier Work?
How Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood moonlighted on the mid-’80s Stones with a Shepherd’s Bush bouncer’s punky rock’n’roll band. By Andrew Perry.
THE MID-’80S spat between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is the stuff of Stones legend. After the torrid 1981-2 Tattoo You tour, the rift widened circa ’84-85, when Jagger cut his first solo album, She’s The Boss, but less widely remembered is that while Mick swanned about in the Bahamas on that project, Richards and Ronnie Wood were contributing to an album by a rough-and-ready band at the opposite end of rock’s pecking order.
The Dirty Strangers were a ramalama rock’n’roll unit playing in west London pubs, fronted by a charismatic ducker-and-diver named Alan Clayton, who was then dividing his time, he says today, between “building and decorating, security work and doing the band. I was a 48-hours-a-day man.”
Clayton first met Wood via the Stone’s monitor man, and The Dirty Strangers played at Ronnie’s wedding to Jo Karslake in January ’85. The introduction to Richards came through Clayton’s multi-tasking as a bouncer.
“This man-mountain I was working with, Joe Seabrook, became Keith’s bodyguard and thought we’d get on, so he took me up to see him at the Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge, and he was absolutely right.”
Two days later, Richards had Clayton ferry a guitar and, bafflingly, a sword stick to Paris, and the friendship continued over the ensuing year or two. When Clayton mentioned that he planned to record more songs he’d written, “it just happened that Keith was going to be in London, and he went, ‘Can I play on them?’ I wasn’t gonna turn him down.”
With Richards’ buddy Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola (AKA Stash) ‘producing’, recording took place in Hammersmith on the cheaper graveyard shift, “which was OK ’cos Keith didn’t get up ’til two in the morning”. Richards later bankrolled some remixing, and played on six tracks, best of all the Clayton-penned, heart-on-sleeve ballad, Diamonds.
Jagger fumed at his compadres ‘slumming it’, especially when press in some territories reported that Wood and Richards had quit the Stones to join ‘Dirty Al’’s combo, but the self-titled album ran into legal problems, when its Stateside distributors blatantly stickered the sleeve with the two Stones’ names. With Richards himself about to drop a solo record, Talk Is Cheap, his label Virgin forced the album to be withdrawn.
The friendship endured, however. Richards co-wrote one track on 1993’s follow-up, Burn The Bubble, and in the early ’00s after Clayton lost his eldest son Barrie to cancer, aged 22, the superstar guitarist took his grieving amigo under his wing.
“He had me over to stay at Redlands, to help him while he was recording A Bigger Bang. I went down there when the sun was shining and came home when the Christmas decorations were up. That’s what happened when you went to Redlands in those days.”
Richards soon took Clayton off on tour for two years-plus, where he’d line-check Jagger’s microphone every afternoon (“he was great with me, never rude”), and with Alan’s “mojo restored”, ’09’s third Dirty Strangers record was recorded at Redlands. Suitably entitled West 12 To Wittering, it featured Richards on piano on four tracks, such as the co-authored She’s A Real Botticelli – a title the pair admiringly nicked from a Just William story.
Tellingly, Clayton appears as early as page 23 of Richards’ autobiography, Life, loitering with him outside a Sussex sweet shop with the munchies after an all-night bender, but Clayton is ambivalent whether their friendship has advanced his music career.
“But I’ve known him for 40 years now, so we’re like family,” he reasons. “Keith has been there for us in ways he probably wouldn’t want people to know about. The things he does might seem extraordinary from the outside, but from the inside… It’s quite normal, isn’t it, to help?”
The Dirty Strangers’ album, Hunter’s Moon, is out now. "
--------------
IORR Links : Essential Studio Outtakes CDs : Audio - History of Rarest Outtakes : Audio
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
PaintMonkeyManBlack
()
Date: October 18, 2023 17:39
Get Close is a great great song. Guitars sound fantastic.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Christiaan
()
Date: October 18, 2023 18:17
Quote
Irix
Here's MOJO 12-2023:
[www.PressReader.com]
Great sharing, thanks
Irix
Here's MOJO 12-2023:
[www.PressReader.com]
Great sharing, thanks
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Topi
()
Date: October 18, 2023 18:20
"Get Close" doesn't do it for me for some reason.
My favorites so far are "Bite My Head Off", "Dreamy Skies", "Depending On You", "Sweet Sounds of Heaven" and "Angry". Not necessarily in that order.
My favorites so far are "Bite My Head Off", "Dreamy Skies", "Depending On You", "Sweet Sounds of Heaven" and "Angry". Not necessarily in that order.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
TheBlockbuster
()
Date: October 18, 2023 19:33
I like the album so far. The only real clunker is Whole Wide World.
Very generic pop-rock that could've been made by any band. The chorus sounds like something from Eurovision Song Contest.
Very generic pop-rock that could've been made by any band. The chorus sounds like something from Eurovision Song Contest.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Topi
()
Date: October 18, 2023 19:40
Yeah, not a fan of Whole Wide World either.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
LorenzAgain
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:11
Funny, Whole Wide World is one of my faves. The riff is so cool!
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Topi
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:19
Guitars are good all throughout the album. There's just some melodies that are a bit "meh" in my book.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
john lomax
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:20
Quote
LorenzAgain
Funny, Whole Wide World is one of my faves. The riff is so cool!
Yeah I love While Wide World too - I think it’s a great song and it has a great energy - the band sounds much younger and fiery on this track.
The impression I get from a lot of comments here is that people just want the Stones to sound like they did in 1971. Those days are gone - the band has changed, the world has changed, recording technology has changed. What I like about these new songs is that it doesn’t sound like the band are trying to “recreate” anything - they are just doing their art in 2023 and it sounds new and interesting and vibrant.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
HardRiffin
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:23
Quote
treaclefingersQuote
HardRiffin
At this point in your career (and at that age) i had hoped for a fresh-sounding, eclectic and really catchy album. Nothing more. And you have satisfied me! Thank you old bastards!!!
PS: And although I don't like to make comparisons with past albums, i feel the same positive vibe as "Emotional Rescue", which is one of my favorite albums. I think that ER is the only album with which a comparison can be made.
Great album, I hope HD is as good or better!
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
amg077
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:24
Quote
john lomaxQuote
LorenzAgain
Funny, Whole Wide World is one of my faves. The riff is so cool!
Yeah I love While Wide World too - I think it’s a great song and it has a great energy - the band sounds much younger and fiery on this track.
The impression I get from a lot of comments here is that people just want the Stones to sound like they did in 1971. Those days are gone - the band has changed, the world has changed, recording technology has changed. What I like about these new songs is that it doesn’t sound like the band are trying to “recreate” anything - they are just doing their art in 2023 and it sounds new and interesting and vibrant.
Yes that's cool
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out soon!
Posted by:
exilestones
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:26
Quote
Irix
Paul Smith alternative artwork - €46.99 / £39.99 / $39.99 - [www.PaulSmith.com] , [TheRollingStonesShop.co.uk] , [TheRollingStonesShop.com]
Zoetrope Edition - £29.99 - limited to 10,000 copies - [Blood-Records.co.uk] . Barcode is 602455464637 .
Picture Disc - €32.99 / £29.99 / $38.00 - [TheRollingStonesShop.co.uk] , [TheRollingStonesShop.com] , [www.Bravado.de] , [Platenzaak.nl] , [TheSoundOfVinyl.com]
RS No.9 Carnaby Red Exclusive - [www.Instagram.com]
Stones x MLB - White Vinyl - 30 different versions - [TheRollingStonesShop.com] .
Diamond Clear - Indie Store Exclusive - [RecordStoreDay.com] . Barcode is 602455464606 .
Clear Green Vinyl - [www.Amazon.com] , [www.Amazon.fr] , [www.Amazon.es] , [www.Amazon.it] , [www.Amazon.de] , [www.Amazon.co.uk] , [www.Amazon.co.jp] . Also at [Tower.jp] . Barcode is 602455464620 .
Transparent Purple (Fuchsia/Violet) Vinyl - [www.Platomania.nl] , [www.jpc.de] , [HMV.com] and [www.Fnac.com] , [Tower.jp] . Barcode is 602455464613 . Interpretations of the Fuchsia color - Wikipedia .
FNAC Édition Limitée Exclusivité Pop-Up Vinyle Rouge - [www.Fnac.com] . Barcode is 0602455808394 . See also: [Leclaireur.FNAC.com] .
Target Exclusive Vinyl - [www.Target.com] . The Hype-Sticker also says 'Transparent Purple' and Barcode is 602455464613 .
Crystal Clear Blue Vinyl - [TheRollingStonesShop.co.uk] , [TheRollingStonesShop.com] , [www.Bravado.de] , [Platenzaak.nl] , [Store.uDiscoverMusic.com] , [TheSoundOfVinyl.com] .
Nice work! Thank you
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Topi
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:38
Who's on backing voc on Mess It Up?
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
amg077
()
Date: October 18, 2023 20:46
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
maumau
()
Date: October 18, 2023 21:06
Get Close (what I heard of it) is one of my fav at the moment just because it lacks any fancy bridge or "posh" interlude
Still waiting to put the record on to make a real idea on it
Still waiting to put the record on to make a real idea on it
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
strat72
()
Date: October 18, 2023 21:38
I'm old school so I have not heard the album, and will not until I go to HMV on Friday to buy it. Reading the reviews is encouraging though. You know that a lot of critics would love to give The Stones a bad review because The Stones are not social justice warriors, unlike so many critics themselves these days. Boxes are not ticked and they don't like that. The reviews are all similar, which just goes to show how poor a lot of these critics are. Like kids copying their homework from another kid. Many are very begrudging in their praise.
I look forward to Friday where I will judge for myself.
I look forward to Friday where I will judge for myself.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
bv
()
Date: October 18, 2023 21:53
I understand some want to talk about songs before they are available to the public, but please show some respect. The majority of fans do not yet have access to the album, so reports about songs not yet available to the public is really not appropriate, in my opinion.
This thread will be closed tomorrow afternoon, and separate threads will be opened, when the album is out for the public Friday morning. I don't really see the point in reporting on songs that 90% of the fans have not yet got access to legally.
Bjornulf
This thread will be closed tomorrow afternoon, and separate threads will be opened, when the album is out for the public Friday morning. I don't really see the point in reporting on songs that 90% of the fans have not yet got access to legally.
Bjornulf
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: October 18, 2023 22:40
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
MisterDDDD
()
Date: October 18, 2023 22:43
Quote
Topi
Who's on backing voc on Mess It Up?
A gospel choir is involved according to this review..
"And “Mess It Up,” although edging closer to corny than anything else here, in the end makes good use of both a gospel choir and a disco beat. (“You think I’d mess it up, mess it up, mess it up all for you?” Jagger sings to an aspiring mistress who, per the lyrics, seduced his landlord and broke into his residence. We know it’s fiction because there’s no way Jagger rents any of his many homes.)"
[www.stereogum.com]
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
PaintMonkeyManBlack
()
Date: October 18, 2023 22:45
Who is the dj mess it up was for?
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
noughties
()
Date: October 18, 2023 22:53
Quote
strat72
I'm old school so I have not heard the album, and will not until I go to HMV on Friday to buy it.
Yeah, old school me too. I have been imagineing a queue Friday morning, but then again I guess a new album by the Stones is a niche product these days like any other act. However, will they sell out? Who knows? Nostalgia ain`t what it was either, so I think I have to prepare for anything. Norwegian shops are charging around 40 Euro for this album. I think you should know.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
MelBelli
()
Date: October 18, 2023 23:01
Quote
MisterDDDDQuote
Topi
Who's on backing voc on Mess It Up?
A gospel choir is involved according to this review..
"And “Mess It Up,” although edging closer to corny than anything else here, in the end makes good use of both a gospel choir and a disco beat. (“You think I’d mess it up, mess it up, mess it up all for you?” Jagger sings to an aspiring mistress who, per the lyrics, seduced his landlord and broke into his residence. We know it’s fiction because there’s no way Jagger rents any of his many homes.)"
[www.stereogum.com]
I seem to recall that Mick does, in fact, rent out his place in Mustique.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
HardRiffin
()
Date: October 18, 2023 23:01
The one who said they were a "blues cover band" ended up playing in one of their punk-sounding songs!!!
Mick you are a genius!! >
<
Mick you are a genius!! >
<Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Roc
()
Date: October 19, 2023 00:29
Do either of you know if Chuck Leavell was involved in the album?
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Irix
()
Date: October 19, 2023 00:40
Quote
Roc
Do either of you know if Chuck Leavell was involved in the album?
When the album is released, the credits will also be available.
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
Roc
()
Date: October 19, 2023 00:45
Quote
IrixQuote
Roc
Do either of you know if Chuck Leavell was involved in the album?
When the album is released, the credits will also be available.
rightly observed
Re: Hackney Diamonds - New Rolling Stones album due out Oct 20, 2023
Posted by:
bye bye johnny
()
Date: October 19, 2023 01:10
Documentary About New Rolling Stones Album Readied as TV Special From Fulwell 73 and Mercury (EXCLUSIVE)
Chris Willman
October 17, 2023
Getty Images
The making of the Rolling Stones‘ forthcoming album, “Hackney Diamonds,” is explored in a new one-hour TV documentary, “The Stones: Still Rolling,” produced by Fulwell 73 and Mercury Studios. Mercury is looking to sell the project at Mipcom, taking place this week in Cannes.
The TV doc is described as “a rare glimpse of the Rolling Stones as they power forward” that is “told vividly through a first-ever roundtable conversation between the band (members)… giving viewers access to places they have never been.”
Director Paul Dugdale is coming off the recent success of “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium” and “Adele: One Night Only.” Previous Dugdale credits include “Taylor Swift: Reputation Stadium Tour” and “Coldplay: Music of the Spheres — Live at River Plate.”
Said Alice Webb, CEO and co-president of Mercury Studios, in a statement, “Following last year’s ‘My Life as a Rolling Stone’ series, Mercury Studios couldn’t be happier to present a fresh look as the guys as they are today, during the creation of their first new music in 18 years. Collaborating with the Stones over the past few years has been a great privilege for us.”
Fulwell 73 is a partnership between Ben Winston, Leo Pearlman, Ben Turner, Gabe Turner and James Corden.
Mercury is a production studio whose efforts include the upcoming “American Symphony,” a Jon Batiste doc that has been touted for awards consideration, and “If These Walls Could Sing,” Mary McCartney’s documentary about Abbey Road Studios. The company’s “My Life as a Rolling Stone” was a four-part docuseries with installments about Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, seen on the BBC and MGM+. Mercury is described as “powered by” but “editorially independent” from Universal Music Group, producing content around UMG’s extensive music catalog, which includes all of the Stones’ music since the late ’60s.
The album “Hackney Diamonds” comes out Friday.
[variety.com]
Chris Willman
October 17, 2023
Getty Images
The making of the Rolling Stones‘ forthcoming album, “Hackney Diamonds,” is explored in a new one-hour TV documentary, “The Stones: Still Rolling,” produced by Fulwell 73 and Mercury Studios. Mercury is looking to sell the project at Mipcom, taking place this week in Cannes.
The TV doc is described as “a rare glimpse of the Rolling Stones as they power forward” that is “told vividly through a first-ever roundtable conversation between the band (members)… giving viewers access to places they have never been.”
Director Paul Dugdale is coming off the recent success of “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium” and “Adele: One Night Only.” Previous Dugdale credits include “Taylor Swift: Reputation Stadium Tour” and “Coldplay: Music of the Spheres — Live at River Plate.”
Said Alice Webb, CEO and co-president of Mercury Studios, in a statement, “Following last year’s ‘My Life as a Rolling Stone’ series, Mercury Studios couldn’t be happier to present a fresh look as the guys as they are today, during the creation of their first new music in 18 years. Collaborating with the Stones over the past few years has been a great privilege for us.”
Fulwell 73 is a partnership between Ben Winston, Leo Pearlman, Ben Turner, Gabe Turner and James Corden.
Mercury is a production studio whose efforts include the upcoming “American Symphony,” a Jon Batiste doc that has been touted for awards consideration, and “If These Walls Could Sing,” Mary McCartney’s documentary about Abbey Road Studios. The company’s “My Life as a Rolling Stone” was a four-part docuseries with installments about Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, seen on the BBC and MGM+. Mercury is described as “powered by” but “editorially independent” from Universal Music Group, producing content around UMG’s extensive music catalog, which includes all of the Stones’ music since the late ’60s.
The album “Hackney Diamonds” comes out Friday.
[variety.com]
This Thread has been closed
Online Users
agureggae07 , babyblue , blackadder , bv , dishevelmentblues , Donnebr , Doxa , EJM , highgatehillbilly , Irix , kidquick185 , makemeburnthecandle , mike567 , MonkeyMan2000 , monkeymantoo , More Hot Rocks , Papo , perkmo , quarkie , rastakeith , spunky , Stonesfan2146 , voodoodrew , Vuudo
Guests:
1684
Record Number of Users:
206
on June 1, 2022 23:50
Record Number of Guests:
9627
on January 2, 2024 23:10