What terrifying visage is this? A Cubist monster with mismatched eyes, a lopsided nose and a strangely familiar pout. Could the image be promoting a new Tate exhibition or warning of the dangers of drugs? Or might it be the cover of the next Rolling Stones album?
Over the weekend Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood posted different parts of an illustration on their Instagram accounts.
Combined, they make a caricatured composite face featuring Jagger’s lips, Richards’s headband and two eyes belonging to different owners, at least one of whom is Wood.
Mick Jagger’s portion of the portrait and, below, Keith Richards’s
It’s all about fragments at this stage. Separate social media posts teased snippets of what appear to be new music: wordless ooh-ooh vocals in the vein of Gimme Shelter and a swaggering guitar riff of the kind that Richards has been rolling out for six decades.
The social media posts confirmed that the title of the album is Foreign Tongues, as long rumoured, and posts elsewhere appeared to establish a release date of July 10.
Foreign Tongues is a provocative title for an age in which immigration has become a hot-button issue. The Stones rarely wade into politics, though. Might it instead suggest we will hear Jagger singing in Portuguese, Swahili or Korean? That’s almost more disturbing.
The merging of the bandmates’ faces on Instagram
We already know the identity of one song from the new album, Rough and Twisted, which features a heavy blues riff and was released as a limited-edition white-label vinyl last month by the Cockroaches, a well-worn alias for the Stones.
We also know that the album was produced by Andrew Watt, the American who worked on the Stones’ last album, Hackney Diamonds, their most critically admired in decades. Watt is the present producer of choice for the mature megastar — he twiddled the knobs on Elton John’s last album, Who Believes in Angels?, and Paul McCarney’s next one, The Boys of Dungeon Lane.
It’s all about the images at the moment, though, and the fact that Jagger and co were happy to become cartoon grotesques on the cover of Foreign Tongues suggests a winning lack of vanity.
Performing in Amsterdam in 2022paul bergen/Redferns
As the drip feed of information before their new album becomes a trickle, one thing is certain: these octogenarians have a digital marketing game to rival the savviest of Gen Zers.