Double miracle. The first: there will be a new Rolling Stones album on Friday, their first since 2005 and the death of Charlie Watts in 2021. The second: Hackney Diamonds is their best since Tattoo You in 1981.
Every day during the recording of Hackney Diamonds, director Andrew Watt, 32, showed up at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles wearing a T-shirt from a different era in Rolling Stones history, drawn from his vast collection of vintage clothing, which we envy.
The sartorial anecdote largely sums up the process behind this first album of new material in 18 years, in which each song seems to have been designed to evoke a specific period in the rich discography – often exhilarating, sometimes laughable – of the best band English not to be called the Beatles.
The burning sax of Get Close, that libidinously syncopated rhythm? It’s a bit as if tracks left out of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking (on Sticky Fingers in 1971) had been exhumed. The country lament Dreamy Skies, set with slide guitar and a tip of the hat to Hank Williams? Slip it somewhere on the B side of the second disc of Exile on Main St. (1972) and neophytes will see nothing but fire. The pleading, beautifully maganed Keith of Tell Me Straight? It’s a bit the same as that of Thru and Thru, a rare unforgettable moment from Voodoo Lounge (1994).
Renowned for his ability to restore to rockers belonging to the good age (Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne) the tone of their fertile and tumultuous years, Andrew Watt does not however work like a Rick Rubin or a T-Bone Burnett, in whom the quest of a kind of original authenticity often takes the place of the only way to age gracefully, at the risk of it smelling like mothballs.
But in general, the person who also co-signs three titles finds the judicious balance between his desire to place this album in a six-decade-old story and that of writing, in the present, a new chapter.
What about the exhilarating beat of Mess It Up? The naughty boys have never grooved so naughtily since the days when Mick spent his nights dancing with Bianca at Studio 54. No coincidence: Mess It Up is one of the two songs on which, for the last time, the another Rolling Stones disco fan, Charlie Watts.
This way of machine-gunning his snare drum, like a boxer alternating between uppercuts and jabs, belongs only to him; you will recognize it in a few measures.
Which does not prevent the pirate Keef from being haunted by the absence of his comrade. You had to see his eyes veiled with a sadness that we know little about, last Tuesday, during his visit to Howard Stern’s show. And hear this touching confidence: every morning, after having unfolded himself as best he can, the guitarist greets a portrait of his late friend, hanging on the staircase at the exit of his bedroom.
“Nobody was taking charge,” Mick Jagger told the New York Times last September. “No one set a deadline. » In 2022, the singer thus issued an ultimatum to his colleagues Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood: by Valentine’s Day 2023, you will have to have a new album under your arm, a finish line that the manufacturing of vinyl records will have pushed back of a few months.
There is no question of the album being released and the vinyl copies arriving later, a concern that is certainly commercial, but only partly so. It was by taking into consideration the length of an 33 rpm record that the 48 minutes of Hackney Diamonds were designed, a salutary decision, preventing the bloat, typical of the compact disc era, of Voodoo Lounge (1994), Bridges to Babylon (1997) and A Bigger Bang (2005).
In terms of guests, Paul McCartney comes for a spin on the (not so) punk Bite My Head Off, although it would be impossible to know if Mick didn’t greet him during his bass solo. In the role of the show-stealing backing vocalist, formerly held by Merry Clayton (Gimme Shelter), Lady Gaga truly steals the show on Sweet Sounds of Heaven. Stevie Wonder is also part of this gospel escapade to the gates of heaven, a first collaboration with the Stones since their joint tour in 1972.
“Let the old still believe / That they’re young,” sing Madame Gaga and her 43-year-old senior (Jagger became an octogenarian in July) in this piece de resistance, a pagan prayer in the form of an offering to the power of music , thanks to which time and death suddenly no longer exist. We already knew it: Mick never gives as much of himself as when he is in the presence of a young woman.
By concluding their album with their duet interpretation of Rollin’ Stone, the blues of Muddy Waters from which they stole their name, the Glimmer Twins seem to want to signal that a loop is being completed, even if Jagger already speaks in interviews of a following.
“Solos come and go,” Keith Richards said last week on the BBC’s Global News Podcast. “Riffs last forever. » But Mick, Keith and Ronnie – life is like that – will all end up joining Charlie. Until then, let’s measure our luck. You can’t always get what you want, but it still sometimes happens that one fine Friday, a new Stones album lands in record stores.
