“All I drank was muddy water,” Mick Jagger hollers on “Rough and Twisted”, the stonking opener to the Rolling Stones’ 25th album, Foreign Tongues. And it does seem like there’s something in the water. Hot on the heels of Paul McCartney and Madonna, the Stones’ new record seals this as the summer of vintage comebacks from musical legends, with the veteran rockers sounding astonishingly good, not just for their age, but for a band 60 years younger.
McCartney and the Stones share producer wunderkind Andrew Watt, 35, whose wide-eyed enthusiasm for good old-fashioned rock’n’roll is clearly catching, but where Macca and Madge are using new material to reflect on their younger years, the Stones have their gaze fixed firmly on the now. So while the drink that Jagger howls about is evidently a play on the foot-stomping blues legend Muddy Waters, whom he idolised as a kid, he has a bad taste in his mouth as he finds himself in a “flyblown town/ In the back of nowhere”, having been lured there on false pretences. “Why don’t you take me,” he snarls, “to where I wanna go?” He’s sick of being dragged down a bad road by the people in charge – and so he snaps against “Mad Mogul Mr Musk” on “Mr Charm” with a punkish bite.
He ups the ante on “Ringing Hollow”, a squelchy, slurring honky tonk ballad in which he emulates a drunk sprawled across the bar. Dartford-born Jagger grew up with silver-screen visions of America – “I was madly in love with you/ Before we ever met/ I saw all your movies/ I smoked your cigarettes” – but is jaded by what he sees today: “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown,” he mourns. But rather than seek comfort in childish nostalgia, he again turns his ire to the leaders who got us into this mess. The Cure’s Robert Smith is an unlikely collaborator on blistering boogie “Divine Intervention”, tussling and tangling with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards on the guitar while Jagger rails against the “billionaires all scuttling, scrambling to their bolt holes in the sky”. In case you were wondering… no, they haven’t mellowed an inch.
Macca himself pops up on “Covered in You” as their session bassist, bringing the funk while Jagger writhes around in punk mode, spit flying as he aims his wrath at the “autocrats/ You know, they seem to be breeding like a swarm of dirty rats with their missiles on parade”. In a recent interview, Wood observed that the frontman expresses himself on harmonica “even better than as a vocalist”. You hear it on their bawdy cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”, Jagger honouring the late Camden star – whom they famously brought out for a duet at the 2007 Isle of Wight Festival – with the same level of respect he’d pay to Howlin’ Wolf or Little Richard. He takes on Winehouse’s role of guilty lover with brilliant conviction, a chorus of judgemental howls at his back.
It’s no surprise that the man who came up with the “Satisfaction” riff in his sleep can still carve out some killer hooks, but the grizzled Richards – whose very survival through decades of hard living is regarded by many as a modern miracle – is gorgeously vulnerable on “Some of Us”. Hardcore Stones fans might complain of a pop polish from producer Watt on certain songs; not so on this song, with Richards’s age and considerable experience allowed to shine through. Incorporating drums by the late Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, on “Hit Me in the Head” might feel mawkish were it not for the defiant, downright belligerent nature of the track: Richards lets rip with some stormy electric squalls as Jagger confesses, with true Elvis swagger, “I’m all shook up.”
On “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, from their 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds, Jagger urged the world to “let the old still believe that they’re young”. If they’re making songs as fantastic as this, then sure, absolutely, let them.
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