The rolling stones undercover
As is often the way with sequels, not quite the match of its predecessor. Or Some Girls Part 2, with more inspiration drawn from disco (Prince definitely paid attention to the fantastic title track) and more punky thrash – incredibly, the cor-blimeyisms of Where the Boys Go suggests someone had been listening to Sham 69. Tattoo You (1981)īy now, the Stones were just slinging together old outtakes to give them an excuse to rake it in on tour, so Tattoo You has no right to be as good as it is: the punk inflections were becoming a bit preposterous (Neighbours), but Start Me Up was the last truly deathless Stones anthem and Goats Head Soup leftover Waiting on a Friend is fantastic. It’s Only Rock ‘N Roll offers sparks of inspiration – Fingerprint File, Dance Little Sister, the title track – amid stuff that sounds suspiciously like formula and filler: that said, compared to what was to come, it’s a masterpiece.Ī muddled attempt to fit with prevalent pop trends, home to the peculiar sound of the Stones trying to emulate the Kinks’ music hall-inspired songs, Between the Buttons’ best moments – Connection, Miss Amanda Jones, Back Street Girl – tellingly cleave closest to the band’s original blueprint.
This is the moment when the Stones’ excesses began to catch up with them, albeit slowly. Neither the disaster it has been reviled as nor the masterpiece some revisionist critics have claimed, Satanic Majesties is a likable, undisciplined psychedelic mess – Sing This All Together’s subtitle, See What Happens, sums it up – flecked with moments of genuine greatness: not just 2000 Light Years From Home and She’s a Rainbow, but Citadel and the delicate 2000 Man. When they actually wrote songs – Fool to Cry, Memory Motel – they still sounded great. It’s essentially a collection of jams recorded while auditioning for a new guitarist. The sense that the Stones were losing interest in making albums was hard to avoid when confronted with Black and Blue. On Undercover, Jagger won: a lot of the then-cutting edge 80s production falls flat, but when it does work, as on the hip-hop-influenced opener Undercover of the Night and Too Much Blood, you can really hear what he was driving at. Most post-70s Stones albums seem rooted in a power struggle between Richards’ traditionalism and Jagger’s desire to stay relevant. Steel Wheels (1989)Ī comeback of sorts, this set the template for latterday Stones albums: solid rather than amazing, a few decent tracks, some obvious filler, the odd lunge for contemporaneity, the sense of feral menace that once powered them noticeable by its absence and the whole business clearly a secondary consideration to going out on tour to crank out the hits.