When it comes to growing old disgracefully, it doesn’t get much more disgraceful than The Rolling Stones.
Fifty-nine years after their first album and seventeen years after their last self-written one, they’re back with new material, crunchy riffs and a whole lot of attitude. As a Hackney resident myself, I gotta love the title, though I do think they missed a trick by calling it Hackney Diamonds instead of Exile On Mare Street.
I have to admit, though, I approached this one with a fair bit of trepidation, because it could so easily have been shit. The single, “Angry”, I liked well enough. It’s very much as you’d expect: some fun, sneering blues rock; but aside from a riff that you could see from space and still identify as one of Keith Richards‘, it all felt a bit Stones-by-numbers. A whole album of that would have been pleasant, but not particularly awesome.Apart from a brief excursion into disco on “Mess It Up” and some wonderful fuzz bass from Paul McCartney (a man I have found inexplicably annoying for so long now that I have forgotten what it was he did to annoy me in the first place and am slowly coming to the conclusion that he’s actually a decent bloke after all) that wouldn’t have been out of place in ’90s Seattle on the punky “Bite My Head Off” (guaranteed to get you awkwardly duck-walking around the living room and confusing your dog, and by “you” I mean “me”), this is pretty much all as you’d imagine. It’s the Stones doing what the Stones do best, and doing it really well.
Mick Jagger‘s still got the voice, simultaneously cocky, threatening, lascivious and petulant; and you better believe Richards still knows how to crank out those riffs. I mean, this is a man who is almost unique among musicians in that he wrote an autobiography in which he actually talked a lot about music, not to mention being, along with Hendrix, the creator of a tradition still upheld to this day — that of putting a cartoon pirate on guitar.
It’s not doing anything particularly new, but a) nobody in their right mind really wants it to and b) the Stones have traditionally not fared overly well when they stray too far from their winning formula. Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters Of Mercy once said that there were only ever two bands that could touch The Stooges — Motörhead and The Birthday Party (concluding by saying “and we’re not as good as Motörhead but we’re better than The Birthday Party”. And you can trace them both back to the Stones (and, of course, The Stooges).
Motörhead took the Stones’ rock-and-roll blues and pumped it full of amphetamines, The Birthday Party took their looseness and drowned it in a swamp. And both aspects are still front and centre on Hackney Diamonds. And they’ve still got the attitude, which by all that’s holy should be embarrassing in men with a combined age approaching seven million, but isn’t. Not even a little bit. A lot of it’s down to that nebulous (and irritatingly cliched, but hey) concept of “authenticity” — not actually being deep South bluesmen, they dragged the bayou to London and created their own style in which they could be 100% authentic.
Henry Rollins wrote a great article a while back about why he’d given up doing music in favour of spoken word — he essentially said that it’s all over once you start playing the music, instead of the music playing you. And on the evidence of Hackney Diamonds, it’s still playing the Stones. They close out with a heartfelt rendition of Muddy Waters‘ “Rolling Stone Blues”, which would make for a nice epilogue to a massive career, were it not for the fact that it doesn’t sound like they’re planning on going anywhere anytime soon.Hackney Diamonds has already pretty much booked its seat for various “best albums of 2023” lists, and it’s been a fucking strong year so far. Honestly a million times better than it has any right to be.
-Justin Farrington-
