(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 12 December 2025 15:00, UK
The Rolling Stones have always been a band that lives and dies on the road half the time.
Even though their records are among the most celebrated in rock history, it’s easier to picture them making an entire stadium move the minute that Keith Richards kicks into a song like ‘Start Me Up’ or ‘Satisfaction’. But for as great as they sound to this day, Richards knew that it was going to be tough trying to dust the cobwebs off themselves every now and again.
Then again, The Stones are one of the few bands that have managed to face nearly every setback that any band could have asked for. There was always going to be the looming shadow of Brian Jones across all of their work, but listening to the tragedies of their Altamont concert, as well as Richards losing many years to drug use, they all still managed to find that music was the one thing that connected all of them together.
At least most of the time. Because when you look at the way that the band’s records have shaped up, it always comes from that push and pull between Richards and Mick Jagger. They were all on the same page when it came time to work on the right album, but whenever Richards started putting together the right riff, Jagger would always be pushing towards sounding more current, which is why we ended up with the more commercial disco tunes in the late 1970s.
It was still keeping with The Stones’ vibe, but when the 1980s rolled around, Richards started to have enough. Jagger had been convinced that he didn’t need the band half the time, and when he was off making solo records, Richards wasn’t going to sit on his hands and wait for his frontman to get to work. He had his own music to make, and when they finally got back together to make Steel Wheels, it was more than a little bit tense when they eventually took to the road.
Although Richards was willing to drop any of the pettiness, he felt that the dynamic that they had in their prime had changed a great deal by the time they got onstage, saying, “Steels Wheels was a bit difficult, mainly because we hadn’t played together for so long. It was really start-again time, and it was very difficult to pull everything together. Otherwise, I don’t think of things in terms of tours —it’s ‘the next gig.’”
While that’s a much better outlook on every single gig they play, it’s not like there weren’t a few bright spots to be found around that time. By this point, the Stones’ tours had grown to become massive spectacles rather than the average rock concert, and they were getting closer to adopting their greatest hits setlist into every show they played, half the time, usually only saving a handful of new tunes as bonus tracks during the show.
And while Ronnie Wood was still considered the new boy by this point, seeing him and Richards go back and forth was the perfect way to keep them rooted to the ground. There was no stopping Jagger from wanting to be the consummate pop star, but the twin guitarists were practically partners in crime whenever they started throwing different licks at each other onstage.
Jagger still wanted the sense of wonder that he saw out of the entertainers that he loved, but Richards never forgot the importance of what the live show is supposed to be. It’s a different conversation with the audience every single night, and most people were more than happy to see the living legends cutting loose rather than throwing everything they could at the wall to see what stuck.
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