I recently discovered that as a teenager, Keith Richards rescued a monkey destined for vivisection from the science lab at Dartford Technical School and briefly raised it as his own baby. This story was mentioned in an article directed by the teen magazine Beloved in the early sixties, aimed to puncture the bad-boy image at the heart of the Rolling Stones’ campaign. It’s hard to imagine now, but the establishment really shook once upon a time in the perspective of Mick, Keith and friends – in their savagery and what it meant for civilization and your girls.
Six decades later, the Stones have been digitally de-aged in the video for their new single “In the Stars,” with the help of AI from Deep Voodoo, a company created by the creators of South Park. In a large room, among a group of additional people who seem to have left the group Daisy Jones & The SixThe Stones perform as themselves in the early seventies, with nine drummers filling in for Charlie Watts (he died in 2021). The song, a soft blues-rock number, instantly catchy in a way that’s slightly annoying, sounds thoroughly modern, so I don’t really see the point of taking the band back in time. The video is reminiscent of the general rock and roll gentrification you sense in the band t-shirt section at Primark: do the Stones have to be seen rocking up alongside a motley crew of young people and semi-famous models to be interesting? No, they don’t.
The Rolling Stones sound – Keith’s weird chords, Mick coming in with a bluesy note on top like a hammer on steel pipes – is so deeply ingrained in us that it feels almost physical, the way two people who grew up together like a pair of old trees behave (they met when they were four and now know each other for 78). You’re not exactly hearing new songs when you listen to a new Stones album – none of the songs are perfectly serviceable Foreign languages will become classics, mainly due to the sheer strength of the back catalogue. Rather, you’re listening for that sound and checking that it’s still there. Jagger’s voice is the same pitch it’s always been – in fact, on the odd song “Jealous Lover” he sings as high as Miss Piggy. I noticed the same phenomenon – sounding both young and old – while watching the Cure’s Robert Smith the other day, who appears doing guitar and backing vocals on some of these tracks.
In the last one Guardian In the interview, Keith Richards admitted that he doesn’t know how Smith ended up on the new album – that it was producer Andrew Watt’s idea. Watt, an American in his thirties, is making a name for himself as a kind of “old-rocker whisperer”—he plays in bands rather than behind a mixing desk, likes to hold imperfect photos because they sound more real than perfect ones, and attentive to his charges with the enthusiasm of a fan.
Although Keith is careless about Foreign languages is par for the course – that’s his role in the double act – the lyrical drive of each new album belongs to Mick. I find that kind of fascinating. To think that Mick, a business tycoon and tour machine who spends three hours a day in the gym and never got around to writing his autobiography (he had to pay the advance), could sit down with a pen and paper and formulate lyrics about Trump’s America: “Lady liberty don’t look so good/When she’s holding a swallow” (“”). Does he really care? I like to think he does.
The album’s trumpet guest stars (Steve Winwood on a Rhodes piano, Bruno Mars on a cowbell) are only hidden ingredients, and Charlie Watts appears from the afterlife on “Hit Me in the Head,” a lover-as-physical-drums analogy with a good metal riff. The Stones’ lyrics like to take a pre-packaged rock phrase and explore it, as in “Side Effects”: “There’s a price to pay for everything you put in your veins.” What is this drug they are talking about? A woman? It doesn’t seem likely. I think it’s a song about the fact that they’re still going. “I’ve got a heart to protect… I can’t stop, I can’t get enough/I’ve got a feeling I’m obsessed…”
There has been quite a negative reaction to the album cover of Amy Winehouse’s song “You Know I’m No Good”. I wonder, is it a little off-putting to hear Jagger sing a line like, “Lick your lips while I wash my feet”? Or does the song belong too much to Amy? In any case, I think she would have loved it. “Some of Us” is Keith’s turn on lead vocals, a ballad more reflective in its melody and more intimate because his voice sounds his age, a great-grandfather on the mic. Although Richards’ pickled body has survived against all odds, his lines hint at mortality: “Some of us are on our knees.”
Foreign languages (Polydor Records) is available for streaming now
(Further reading: Taming of the Wag)
