(Credits: Press)
Wed 17 December 2025 16:30, UK
No one gets to the status that Mick Jagger has without having a few stinkers every now and again.
As much as The Rolling Stones are heralded as history’s greatest rock and roll band, there are bound to be a few tunes that don’t manage to stick the landing as much as ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. But there are plenty of eras that Jagger would much rather forget about altogether than have to relive night after night whenever he struts up and down the stage.
Granted, it’s not like he’s been in love with the court of public opinion, either. Exile on Main St is known to be one of the most acclaimed Stones albums they ever made, and yet he was the one who wanted to distance himself from it from the moment it came out. It was never out of spite by any stretch, but he was sure that the band had a lot more in them than their signature mixture of rock, country, and blues that everyone had known them for for so many years.
Then again, was anyone really asking them to change? Any band of their ilk was always going to have people who didn’t care for their music, but if you ask Keith Richards, switching things up was usually the kiss of death whenever they were making a new record. ‘Miss You’ was a success thanks to them capitalising on the disco craze at the time, but there’s still the question of whether the band wants to be remembered for that mellow groove over their major hits.
But Jagger was more content to take a chance and fail than get stuck in a rut. He lived to make new music that the world might not have been ready for yet, and even if that meant a few misguided choices, it was better to serve his muse or follow the dollar if it meant the band stayed in the cultural conversation. If you look back at their early reinventions, there was a lot more clumsiness involved than most people would have liked to admit.
Although they needed to go past their early hits somehow, it was clear that they were trying to outdo The Beatles at their own game half the time. Nothing was going to manage to go beyond John Lennon and Paul McCartney by any stretch, but whereas an album like Between the Buttons was a different look for The Stones, Jagger would have sooner forgotten about the entire thing.
The Fab Four may not have done anything with this kind of baroque arrangement before, but over time Jagger felt that the tunes didn’t hold up in the slightest, saying, “It’s a good record, but it was unfortunately rather spoiled. We recorded it in London on four-track machines. We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times, we lost the sound of a lot of it. They sounded so great, but then, later on, I was really disappointed with it. I don’t think the rest of the songs are that brilliant. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ is good. I don’t think I thought they were very good at the time, either.”
If there’s one saving grace of the album, though, it’s seeing what a diverse musician Brian Jones was behind the scenes. It was clear that Jones was starting to become less of a leader of the band the more time he stayed in the group, but if he could get more eclectic instruments into the mix, it was always worth it to hear something new on their records, whether that meant bringing in the horns on their records or having the occasional piano solo in between guitar breaks.
This album doesn’t seem to fit in the same universe as the same band who wrote ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Brown Sugar’, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist, either. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but this is almost like looking at an alternate timeline where The Stones rebranded themselves as musical stylists rather than rock and rollers.
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