Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Sat 3 October 2026 16:00, UK
Mick Jagger didn’t need to spend his time making the same songs over and over again in The Rolling Stones.
He lived to switch things up on every record he made, and while that might have annoyed the band to no end, it’s not the worst thing in the world to keep in touch with what the biggest names in music are doing. But sometimes it takes a while before people like Jagger see that the devil is in the details whenever working on the right riff that Keith Richards brought to the table during a Stones rehearsal.
But it’s not like Jagger was always in love with the same kind of music that Richards was. Sure, both of them came together thanks to the blues, but in terms of personal taste, they were on different wavelengths when it came to what a good rock and roll song could sound like. Richards had no problem pumping out tunes that sounded a bit closer to country every now and again, and while Jagger did a decent job singing most of them, he said numerous times that he wasn’t cut out for that kind of music whenever he opened his mouth.
Granted, he did have a fair point in letting Richards sing some of the country tunes, but throwing them into disco territory probably wasn’t going to help that much. ‘Miss You’ did end up being a decent enough song, but if you look at the perfect tunes that they had written throughout the course of their career, their attempt at disco is one of the last things that people should listen to first in order to truly “get” The Stones.
If there’s one deciding factor for Jagger, though, it was his ability to dance to it. Rock and roll was something that got people moving when he was growing up, and when you look at some of the best tunes of their career, you could still move your body to even their filthiest songs, whether that was ‘Brown Sugar’ or ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. That being said, it’s not like Jagger could see the danceability of all of his songs half the time.
I mean, a song literally called ‘Harlem Shuffle’ would have been a no-brainer, but the whole thing ended up sitting on a cassette for years before Richards finally found the right time to ask Jagger about it. The frontman may have still been trying to find the best way to stay relevant, but when working on a project like Dirty Work, it actually managed to fit a lot better next to tunes like ‘One Hit to the Body’.
Richards may have had to go on a huge runaround to get there, but he knew that the song belonged to Jagger, whether he was ready to sing it or not, saying, “I’ve been trying to get ‘Harlem Shuffle’ on an album, without actually telling Mick, for five or six years. I thought that was a natural number for him to sing – it was made for him.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Adding, “I’ve been giving him cassettes with ‘Harlem Shuffle’ stuffed in the middle somewhere for a long time, but I never got any real response. One night, we were in the studio, and Woody and I started plunking away at it. We were amazed at how simple the song was.”
The song is still one of the highlights of the band’s career in the 1980s, but the sad fact is that it’s connected to an album that just isn’t that good. Dirty Work isn’t nearly as bad as everyone made it out to be at the time, but considering how little Jagger and Richards were communicating during that time, a lot of the record sounds like you’re listening to The Stones at a distance instead of getting the real deal half the time.
It’s just a shame that ‘Harlem Shuffle’ ended up sitting in the background of their sessions before having to be thrown onto a record like this. Jagger still has a decent vocal performance, but for a tune that had spent its entire lifespan waiting to be released on an album, it deserved a much better fate than to just be dropped on an album that feels like it was made as an afterthought for the rest of the band.
