An old person’s guide to the Rolling Stones

Glimmers of genius: Mick ’n’ Keef in their pomp in 1975. Photo / Getty Images

With the release of the Stones’ 32nd studio album, Foreign Tongues, Graham Reid looks back on the band’s vast catalogue and reviews the new record.

We begin our survey with four cornerstone albums from a band that started out by covering old blues and recent soul songs then
developed a distinctive voice and – against expectation – survived well into the 21st century (admittedly with just Mick Jagger and Keith Richards remaining from the original five-piece).

Four for Fine Focus

The Rolling Stones No. 2 (1965)

This UK album (US versions of early albums had different tracks) offered three passable Jagger-Richards originals but hit the mark with covers of earthy southern soul-blues, Chuck Berry rock’n’roll, Muddy Waters’ raw blues, Dale Hawkins’ rockabilly and the pop R ’n’ B of the Drifters: the bedrock on which they built their style and would repeatedly return to.

It also included their slow burning hit Time Is On My Side.

The Stones were on their way.

Beggars Banquet (1968)

After the psychedelic debacle of Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) the Stones got back to blues-rock, capturing the politically volatile mood of the times with Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man.

They reached to the blues (No Expectations, Parachute Woman and Stray Cat Blues), and went Dylanesque (Jigsaw Puzzle) and folky (the ambivalent class politics of Salt of the Earth).

The beginning of their golden period with the equally essential Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St to follow.

The Stones as we know them had arrived.

Some Girls (1978)

In the era of disco and punk, the Stones, no longer musically relevant, embraced New York clubland (Miss You), punk attitude (Respectable, Lies), dug into soul (the Temptations’ Just My Imagination) and country (Far Away Eyes). Meanwhile, Lou Reed could have written When the Whip Comes Down.

Richards’ Before They Make Me Run was about the OD death of his friend and country music mentor Gram Parsons and his own impending heroin possession court case.

There was inevitable controversy over the salacious title track. After a fallow period, the Stones were back.

Tattoo You (1981)

The last great Stones rock ’n’ roll album (although Dirty Work five years later gets some grudging approval), opening with the standard bearer Start Me Up and closing with the brotherhood of Waiting on a Friend (sax by the late Sonny Rollins).

Between those they rocked out (Hang Fire), got typically sleazy (Little T&A) and went back to the blues again (Black Limousine). The coming decades would be less kind to them and they would abandon recording.

But here, the Stones were hanging in there. And, 45 years later, they still are.

Top row: The rolling Stones No. 2; Beggars Banquet; Some Girls; Tattoo You. Bottom row: The Unusual One; The Live One; The Dismissed one; The Solo One. Images / Supplied

Four on the Widescreen

The Unusual One

Not the ill-advised 1967 foray into psychedelics with Their Satanic Majesties Request but the often-overlooked previous album, Between the Buttons.

The UK version sprung no hit single (the US added Ruby Tuesday as an enticement) and wobbled from downbeat pop (Yesterday’s Papers) and quasi-folk (Back Street Girl) to drug references (Connection, the woozy Something Happened to Me Yesterday) and psychedelic pop (She Smiled Sweetly).

A disjointed album of songs worth discovering.

The Live One

For decades, Stones fans would default to Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out (1970) as their definitive live album. It should be in any serious collection but there’s also – out of the dozens of live albums – Live at El Mocambo 1977, released in 2022. In a small Toronto club with keyboard player Billy Preston and percussionist Ollie Brown, they ripped through songs from the then current Black and Blue album, plus blues covers, classics and deep cuts.

The Dismissed One

When Bridges to Babylon was released in 1997, many were quick to damn it. The Stones had brought in producers (Don Was, the Dust Brothers and others), flirted with rap and samples, had many guests, and Jagger and Richards weren’t on speaking terms. Jagger’s vocals are sometimes ropey and like a self-parody, but the downbeat mood and sonic experiments offer a different Stones sound.

The Solo One

No Jagger solo album stands up in its entirety and Richards’ Talk is Cheap (1988) has its flaws (you wanted Keith polished?) but it’s funky, ragged and has enough Stones’ swagger to remind you who the lynchpin was in the band Jagger was distancing himself from.

And let’s mention the little-known Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project (2000) where the two drummers – who’d bonded during Bridges to Babylon sessions – experimented with loops, samples, electronica and more.

Left-field “techno-world beat exotica,” according to Keltner.

Singing in tongues: 60+ years in, Wood, Jagger & Richards are still fascinated by the music of Black America. Photo / Peggy Sirota

Southern Accents

For studio album No 32, the Stones’ Foreign Tongues remain distinctly American.

As a barometer of our impatient times, the internet jury came back on this new 14-song Stones album after just a couple of pre-release singles.

The verdict? It’s missing the late drummer Charlie Watts’ subtle groove; there’s left-over material from 2023’s Hackney Diamonds so they’re bereft of ideas; Mick Jagger’s vocals sound like self-parody; they’re trying too hard …

Some of that’s true, but Watts appears on the furious Hit Me in the Head which didn’t make Hackney Diamonds, although Jagger does reach for his Fool to Cry/Curtis Mayfield falsetto on Jealous Lover, which a Listener online reviewer likened to Miss Piggy. Cruel but fair.

But The Cure’s Robert Smith adds guitar swathes on the house-rockin’ Divine Intervention and synths on Never Wanna Lose You, Paul McCartney joins in (bass on the slashing funk of Covered in You) and Steve Winwood’s somewhere here, too.

However, it’s the Stones’ game, often aggressively familiar with a blues-rock cover of Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good and Keith Richards’ endearingly croaky ballad Some of Us.

Foreign Tongues is available digitally, on CD and double vinyl. Image / Supplied

As with McCartney’s recent The Boys of Dungeon Lane (also produced by Andrew Watt), there’s reflection and assessment of the past, but without Macca’s misty-eyed sentimentality.

The country ballad Ringing Hollow is a love letter to the America that shaped the band (“I was madly in love before we ever met, I saw all your movies, I smoked your cigarettes”) and a lament for what it has become.

Black American music seduced the young Stones. On the rowdy and raw Rough and Twisted, they tap into 60s Chicago barroom blues and, in another nod – their 1963 debut single being Chuck Berry’s Come On – they pick up Berry’s Beautiful Delilah for a slide guitar acoustic workout.

Foreign Tongues – their 32nd studio album, with Ronnie Wood earning Most Valuable Player plaudits – is more coherent than Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s kindergarten/Francis Bacon cut-up cover, more monolingually American than the title suggests and, perhaps to the annoyance of those who rushed to judgment, another surprisingly good Stones album.

Foreign Tongues is available digitally, on CD and double vinyl.

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