Let’s face it: it’s still the Beatles and the Stones. An as-yet-unnamed Rolling Stones album is coming out in July — with Paul McCartney expected to release a solo album in late May. The two bands that defined the 1960s remain the two most important acts in rock and pop history. While the Beatles had the edge on pushing things forward musically, the Rolling Stones had the sex and glamour, the best haircuts and the wildest tales, even if Paul McCartney did once dismiss them as a “blues covers band”.
It’s no surprise that their greatest albums came from a 1965-1972 golden age, when the Stones were pushing up against the limits of society and seeing what they could get away with. Yet there is a magical energy to them, especially in the crackling electricity between Jagger and Richards, that continues to this day. Below is a highly subjective guide to their ten best records — and I didn’t even give extra points to Let It Bleed for having a cake baked by Delia Smith on its album cover.
10. Hackney Diamonds (2023)
It is something for a band to come back with a solid, dynamic album after 60 years in the game, but the Stones were galvanised by the enthusiasm of the new producer Andrew Watt and Mick Jagger being “actually really worried, because nobody had any f***ing urgency to do a record”. Sweet Sounds of Heaven, featuring Lady Gaga, is a gospel-tinged highlight, while Jagger indulged his punky side on Bite My Head Off — with Paul McCartney on bass.
9. Black and Blue (1976)
Arriving as punk changed everything, this is the album that resulted in the Stones being written off as a spent force, although it has aged remarkably well. Memory Motel, a tale of a one-night stand in Montauk, is up there with Angie as a lovelorn, lamenting ballad, and the tear-jerking soul of Fool to Cry puts the Stones up with soul greats such as Solomon Burke and Otis Redding. However, the less said about the cod reggae of Cherry Oh Baby, the better.
8. Between the Buttons (1967)
A neglected gem, this is the Stones stepping out and taking risks before collapsing into the psychedelic disaster of Their Satanic Majesties Request (which I actually rather like). A still functioning Brian Jones turns his hand to everything from kazoo to mellotron with aplomb, while Let’s Spend the Night Together and Ruby Tuesday find the Stones capturing both sides of the Swinging Sixties party: the night before and the morning after.
7. Some Girls (1978)
The ultimate Mick Jagger album, as he gets his way and drags the rest of the Stones screaming toward disco, punk and other fashionable fripperies. Miss You is one of the sleaziest New York disco tracks of all time, and one of the greatest, while Keith Richards, facing a prison sentence in Toronto for heroin possession, was back to being an outlaw on Before They Make Me Run. The title song made the Stones controversial once more, mostly because of Jagger’s enthusiastic assessment of black girls’ sexual proclivities.
6. Goats Head Soup (1973)
Marking the end of the Stones’ imperial phase, this was made in Jamaica because, according to Richards, “it was one of the few places that would let us all in”. By this point the outlaw lifestyle was taking its toll, which you can hear in the careworn tenderness of Angie and the junkie’s lament Coming Down Again, a tribute to Richards’s partner at the time, Anita Pallenberg. Elsewhere, Jagger gets Mephistopheles-like on the funky Dancing with Mr D, and downright dirty on the groupie anthem Star Star.
5. Aftermath (1966)
Recorded in California during breaks between tours, here is the Stones’ mid-Sixties masterpiece and their first true rival to the Beatles’ output, which marked them out as a darker, sexier presence. Courtly love is captured in Lady Jane, but then come down-with-girls classics such as Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl — nasty misogyny turned into rock’n’roll gold. It is the Stones’ first truly coherent album from beginning to end.
4. Sticky Fingers (1971)
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With Andy Warhol’s zipper cover confirming the Stones as a band where sex is equally as or perhaps more important than drugs and rock’n’roll, the first album made after the death of Jones is a back-to-basics heavy soul classic. There isn’t a bad song on it, but special mention must go to the gorgeous country rocker Wild Horses, Brown Sugar (because it has Richards’s most iconic riff bar Satisfaction), and the tragic Sister Morphine, into which the co-writer and former Jagger partner Marianne Faithfull poured her heart.
3. Exile on Main Street (1972)
When I first played this on vinyl I thought there was something wrong with the record player. Once you sink into the dense, murky, soul, blues and country stew, however, there is no getting out. Shine a Light is a moving tribute to Jones, and Torn and Frayed captures the essence of the Stones as a band barely holding on but being absolutely electric with it. Narcotic, decadent and rather sentimental, this is the ultimate Keith album.
2. Let It Bleed (1969)
As Jones collapsed into druggy abandon, the Stones held it together enough to replace him with Mick Taylor and complete one of the best albums of the 20th century. Nothing captures the end of the Sixties better than Gimme Shelter, while You Can’t Always Get What You Want is the Stones at their most glorious and anthemic. As for Midnight Rambler, who else could have written a truly evil first-person song about the Boston Strangler and made it so exciting?
1. Beggars Banquet (1968)
This will always be my favourite Stones album because it is the one on which they sound like a revolutionary force, particularly on Street Fighting Man. Writing a song called Sympathy for the Devil and setting it to a groovy samba is really sticking it to the man, while Jagger’s writing has never been more thoughtful and reflective than on the slow blues of No Expectations and the Appalachian folk of Factory Girl. A back-to-basics album that pointed the way forward, this is the glorious high point of the Rolling Stones.