(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / PxHere)
Fri 20 March 2026 19:15, UK
Any band that has been going as long as The Rolling Stones usually needs a bit of a break before they make a record.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may be two of the best songwriters in their genre, but when looking at their track record, there were more than a few times when all they needed to do was take their foot off the gas before they began working on one of their latest records. But sometimes even with a few years away from the fold, ‘The Glimmer Twins’ weren’t always going to be on the same page whenever they started putting together some new material.
Because as much as Jagger and Richards have been through together, it’s not like they were always going to be seeing eye-to-eye. They both loved the blues ever since they first met and started discussing music, but whereas Richards was always the blues purist of the group, Jagger was the one who was always looking for the next trend in music. Everyone would want to keep up with the times, but considering Jagger’s track record, it’s not like every one of his experiments worked.
It was bad enough that they were gaining the reputation of copying The Beatles every single time they made a new record in the late 1960s, but when they hit their legendary period in the early 1970s, it felt like they had finally found their musical identity. And yet when Jagger decided that the world needed to hear them go disco, it wasn’t like they were made for that kind of music. The blues could make people dance, but even for a “disco” song like ‘Miss You’, the beat is painfully lazy when you break everything down.
That’s not even covering the moments where they started working with electronic producers once they reached the 1990s. The Stones are a band of many talents, but when listening to ‘Might As Well Juiced’, you start to realise that they were better left to make badass rock and roll riffs than make a song that ravers could appreciate. But somewhere in between the cracks of their discography is Dirty Work, which is still one of the most faceless records they have ever made.
The album cover might catch everyone’s eyes thanks to the fashion choices, but listening to the songs without Jagger’s voice, no one would have been able to guess that this was a Stones project. They were already starting to work independently from each other, and since Richards had already begun having a few petty spats with Jagger, producer Steve Lillywhite remembered them hardly sharing a word with each other once they played.
It was one thing for band members to be distant from each other, but Lilywhite remembered that ‘The Glimmer Twins’ barely spoke during the album’s production, saying, “I worked with Keith and Mick when they were not talking to each other at all. It was hell. They literally weren’t in the same room. One would come up to me and say, ‘Blah blah blah,’ and then I’d go and repeat it to the other one. I was Henry Kissinger!”
And if that’s what the producer was going through, you could only imagine what the rest of the band was feeling. In fact, Ronnie Wood eventually made a few jokes at his own expense when the album eventually came out, saying that Jagger and Richards must not have been working together properly since he ended up with more songs on the album than he ever had before.
Dirty Work might not have been an outright terrible album, but when it comes to what The Stones were capable of, it was definitely a sore spot compared to what they would be doing later. Jagger could have tried his best to stay relevant next to the other legends in his field, but there’s a reason why people remember the classic sounds of an album as recent as Voodoo Lounge compared to songs like ‘Harlem Shuffle’.
