“WE STARTED TO FEEL THE PRESSURE...”
MICK Jagger has a room with a view. It is mid-afternoon in Tuscany and the sun is overhead. Thankful for the breeze, Jagger works through a problem that has been bugging him lately.
“A couple of days ago, I was working on this ballad,” he confides. “The reading of it is quite difficult to do. It’s not technically difficult, but it’s not an easy song to interpret. I’m very aware I’ve got to get it over in the right way. It’s got to come out like you mean it!”
This ballad is the latest evidence of new music from a resurgent Rolling Stones. In April, at the height of lockdown, they released the trim, muscular “Living In A Ghost Town” – their first new material for eight years. Dating from sessions with producer Don Was in Los Angeles last year, Jagger revised the lyrics during Covid isolation, giving them a contemporary urgency. “When I look back on my original lyric notes, I’d written it about being left in a semi-alive state after a plague,” he says. “It was weird because it wasn’t really that different, if you know what I mean. I’d done some of the vocals, but I hadn’t really finished them. I redid my guitar, because I hadn’t really finished that either.”
From his home in Connecticut, Keith Richards wonders if this might be the way forward for the Stones, at least for now. “I’m talking to Don and Mick and trying to figure it out,” he explains. “If this thing goes on much longer we might try to put out another track. Work differently, instead of making an ‘album’ album, just release tracks. After all, ‘Ghost Town’ worked.”
Not for the first time, The Rolling Stones are making the best of difficult circumstances. As if to underscore this point, Jagger reveals that while he was working on “Living In A Ghost Town” at his home in Pocé-sur-Cisse, France, he was also prepping bonus tracks for a deluxe reissue of the band’s 1973 album, Goats Head Soup. By the early ’70s, the tragedies and harsh lessons of the previous decade had been replaced by a new set of challenges as the Stones negotiated acceptance in a more mainstream context. The five-year run of albums that began in 1968 with Beggars Banquet and ended with Goats Head Soup represented a period of wild inspiration and creativity for the band. It has groove, sweep and drama – from the stage of Hyde Park via a basement in southern France to a former colonial mansion in Jamaica. But as Jagger readily admits, “it’s not an upward graph, it’s got downward bits!”
“Those albums were a burst of energy done under fire,” says Richards, always the romantic of the group. “Yeah, the Stones were on the run, but I also thought we were out in front.”
“We had a lot of problems by the time we made Goats Head Soup, extraneous problems in all kinds of directions,” explains Jagger, the realist. “Tours – were they going to go or were they not? Would we get a visa to go to the US, or not? We couldn’t get visas at that point because of all the drug busts.”
Abandoning England in April 1971 for the South of France – “We were broke andin France, we’d just left home and had stuff to do. We just carried on. But was the first album where we had to learn to work differently, to work apart and put songs together while actually being in exile.”
