“Rock’n’roll is not supposed to be done in your 70s,” Mick Jagger said a few years ago. Perhaps it’s a good thing, then, that he is now in his 80s.
The Rolling Stones may look like a train that cannot be stopped. One day, it obviously will stop, but in the meantime it continues rolling on at full steam with remarkable stamina and unparalleled longevity. Who would have thought that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would lead the band to release a brand new studio album the very year they both turn 80, and such a vibrating, exciting album at that? They sound more energized and inspired than men 20 years their junior.
Remember when they approached their 50s and the press kept asking them when they would retire? We can laugh at how stupid that was now. At least those questions have long since stopped, because the point has been made. The Rolling Stones will never retire. They will keep on going until it’s physically no longer possible.
At this point, the fact that they are still doing it at 80 isn’t remarkable in the slightest. What is remarkable is how good they still are, and the levels of energy they continually put on display as they keep going forward.
Even their marketing campaign for the new album and initial singles brought with it the excitement that a new release used to have, in the years before things just started appeared on streaming services with less and less fanfare by the year.
Things had been quiet for a while in the kingdom of Rolling Stones when a series of cryptic online teasers started appeared online in August 2023. It wasn’t quite clear what was being teased, but something – most likely new music in some form – was clearly afoot.
Eventually, the band previewed a short snippet of a brand new song called Angry on the website www.dontgetangrywithme.com. The site seemed to experience instability and loaded very slowly, showing a “experiencing heavy traffic” message and frequently ending up in error screens. You frequently had to be patient and try again. While nobody confirmed it, the site was clearly programmed to work that way deliberately. It was not just an unwelcome reminder of how the internet used to work in its infancy, but also a giant tease by the Stones.
Things got more definite on 4 September, when the new album Hackney Diamonds was officially announced. The media hoopla was quite extravagant. Plans were shared for a global livestream hosted by Jimmy Fallon, broadcast on 6 September on the official Rolling Stones YouTube channel directly from the Hackney Empire Theatre in London. Fallon interviewed the band who revealed the album’s track list, release date, details about its creation, and also answered various questions sent in from fans. Finally, the video for the single Angry got its world premiere.
Hackney Diamonds takes its name from the East London neighbourhood of Hackney that is known for its creative spirit and gritty charm. It is a slang term for broken glass, which is often found on the streets of Hackney after a night of partying. During the live press conference with Jimmy Fallon, Mick Jagger said, “It’s like when you get your windscreen broken on Saturday night in Hackney, and all the bits go on the street, that’s ‘hackney diamonds’.”
Immediately following the song’s live premiere, Angry was made available digitally as the album’s lead single. Physical copies of the single were also available from that day, on 7’’ vinyl and CD formats. It is the band’s first new song since 2020’s standalone track Living In A Ghost Town. We have to look much further back for their previous full-length album of all original material, as A Bigger Bang dates back to 2005.
The biggest change since then is obviously the loss of Charlie Watts. The band’s longtime drummer passed away in August 2021 aged 80 after a battle with throat cancer.
Charlie’s final gift to the fans may well be the new album. He does not appear on too much of it, but some of the recordings featuring Watts from recent years were used on the songs Live By the Sword (which also features Bill Wyman on bass, making this track as close as we’ll ever get to an original Stones reunion) and Mess It Up.
All other tracks on Hackney Diamonds features Watts’ replacement Steve Jordan, who has previously worked with Keith Richards in his solo band. Jordan had already been tabbed to fill in for Watts on the last leg of the Stones’ No Filter tour. Suddenly, the position became more permanent.
The band had done sporadic sessions over the last decade, which ultimately didn’t produce a lot they felt they could use. “I told Keith, ‘I think some of the tracks are good, but most of them are not as good as they should be’” Jagger recalled to Rolling Stones Magazine. “I said we should give ourselves a deadline [to finish the album] and then we should go out and tour it. Keith looked at me, and he said ‘Yeah, OK. That sounds like what we used to do.’”
Already having drum recordings featuring Watts, it became important to the band to pay tribute by including him on the album. This contributed strong motivation to create the album that these recording would be part of.
In a recent interview with The Sun newspaper, Keith Richards revealed: “It [Watts’ death] jolted us into thinking we’ve got to make a record. Then last year, we were on the road in Europe and playing Hyde Park… the band’s really hot, with Steve Jordan working out seamlessly. Mick agreed with me about the record. We said, let’s get this thing in the studio. Let’s make this a project – go from A to B and actually finish it. There were some amazing things in the can, but we never felt like it was an album. Whereas, this time we did it all in one block and hit it – I’m still recovering!!”
The band’s long-time bassist Darryl Jones, who joined the Rolling Stones ensamble when Bill Wyman departed in 1992, does not appear on the album. Touring obligations clashed with the album sessions, and some huge cameos by Bill Wyman and Paul McCartney aside, bass duties ended up being shared between Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and producer Andrew Watt. On Angry, Richards performs the bass.
The track Angry came along early in the process, and initially stems from Mick Jagger. He was in the Caribbean ahead of planned writing sessions with Richards, when a riff came to him almost out of nothing.
In an interview on Q with Tom Power, Jagger said “I was in the Caribbean on my own, and just started playing that riff. I had it in my head before I was playing it on the guitar. Then I was playing it to a drum machine. It’s just a really simple beat, and it’s almost the same beat as what we’ve got, although Steve [Jordan] plays it a lot more interestingly, but it’s the same idea.”
Jagger continued: “Then, Keith and I went to Jamaica with Steve [Jordan, drums] and Matt [Clifford, keyboardist]. We ran through it, Keith said, ‘Oh, I love it’, and put his own thing on it. That was one that was really easy to come together, and those sometimes feel really good when they come together that quickly, and everyone falls in on their parts. I then had to work on the vocals and had to make it more exciting as it goes on to change the vocal lines and stuff”.
Producer Andrew Watt helped them structure and arrange the track, which landed him something that many of the band’s members had been denied over the years: a co-writing credit on a Rolling Stones song. On this album, he is in fact co-credited on three songs.
Watt has become quite the go-to producer in recent years, having worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Post Malone, Pearl Jam, as well as non-rock names like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, to name but a few.
“You gotta understand, I’m a fucking fan,” the producer admitted to Rolling Stone Magazine. “If I told them how many Rolling Stones concerts I’d seen, I don’t think they’d ever talk to me again. When we were in the studio, I’d tell them, ‘You let a freak from behind the barricade produce the album.’ I wore a different Stones T-shirt in the studio every day.”
Lyrically, Angry is about a troubled relationship that is on the verge of breaking up. The song’s narrator, in the shape of Mick Jagger, pleads with his partner not to get angry with him, as he tries to explain his side of the story and salvage what is left of their love. While he is trying to soothe his partner’s anger, he is also wrestling with his own fury and torment over the situation.
Don’t get angry with me
I never caused you no pain
I won’t be angry with you
But I can’t see straightIt hasn’t rained for a month
The river’s run dry
We haven’t made love
And I wanna know why
Jagger has had an… interesting love life, and you’ve got to wonder how much of his own experiences he put in the song. As it turns out, they seem to have provided some of the inspiration behind the lyrics. The band told Jimmy Fallon that the song was inspired by their own experiences and observations of relationships, with Jagger adding that the song is “a bit autobiographical, but not totally.” He added that he wanted to write a song that was funny and ironic, and that captured the drama and humour of a lovers’ quarrel.
The lyrics showcase intense emotions. There is bewilderment at the levels of rage shown, and imagery of wolves at the door and rain pelting the glass demonstrate the turmoil that is felt both inside and out. Someone needs to mend his battered heart, but the feelings that once burned hot are still there alongside a fear of losing that.
Angry ends up being a roller coaster of passion and fury, love and resentment. At the same time, it displays a sense of humour, and Jagger’s line in the outro, “let’s go out in a blaze” signals a readiness to end their story with a fiery grand finale. When you have nothing to lose, why not?
One of the funniest moments of the press conference where Angry was presented came when Jimmy Fallon wanted to talk about the lyrics. Richards jumped in with his well known guffaw, saying: “The lyrics don’t matter, what you actually have to look at is the guitar riff!” Richards is clearly proud of it and has described as “a killer.”
The song’s opening with simple beat, the direct guitar riff, and the vocals kicking in with the title phrase ahead of the full band, brings back thoughts to prior blockbusters such as Start Me Up. As the song goes on, we find plenty of nuances hiding within its straightforward appearance.
The band do a good job alternating between major and minor chords, which matches the alternating nature of the lyrics between pleading and feeling fury. The song has some lovely lower-register resonance, with a distorted bass part from Richards and a doom-forecasting piano played by Matt Cliffords.
Richards and Wood double up on the riff between verses, then trade off some magnificently moaning solos that conveys pleasure, attitude, and creative hunger.
The song sounds very organic, as does the whole album. A lot of the reason for that would be that it was recorded live with everybody in the room. Multiple takes would be done of every song, after which they would identify the best one, maybe mix in something from another take or do some overdubs as needed, but the core of the track retains that live, organic feeling. In the age when the internet is used to a larger degree, sending individual contributions back and forth, the old way of creating music and communicating musically in person is almost becoming a lost art.
As is becoming of a big album comeback, the first single had to have a huge music video to go along with it. The video stars actress Sydney Sweeney in the back of a red convertible car. She is driven through Los Angeles, passing by numerous large billboards depicting The Stones at various points in their career which all come alive and performs along to the song Angry.
The video makes no attempt whatsoever at hiding the fact that Sydney Sweeney is a very well-endowed young woman. We will learn exactly how much boob it is possible to show in a video without a single nip-slip, and it feels meticulously edited. While I am not by any means a prude or put off by it, the music fan in me feels it isn’t necessary – I want the music to be the focus. By all means, put attractive people in your videos, but do we need to put that much T&A in the video to make people interested? It’s the new Stones, fergodssake!
The animated billboards is really what makes the video for me. They are very endearing and highly effective. It becomes a trip down memory lane where we see the band performing the new song in different locations and in different eras of their career on these giant billboards. It is a tribute to the band’s long and illustrious career, as well as a celebration of their new music. It brings the past and the present together beautifully. It is more than a bit touching when the final billboard depicts the band as they are now.
Francois Rousselet directed the video. He has worked with the stones previously, directing the video for their version of Little Walter’s Ride ‘Em On Down from their 2016 Blue & Lonesome album.
Where will the Rolling Stones go from now? A tour is planned to celebrate the new album, and it is also heartening to know that there won’t be another 18 year wait for the next album. Most of it is already recorded, as the sessions for Hackney Diamonds were exceptionally effective.
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