The 'best since (insert album of your choice)' hype has started. This is from today's edition of The Times. Its behind a paywall so thanks to Nils from IORR for copying it
'I've Heard Hackney Diamonds. It's the best Rolling Stones album since 1978'
To the satisfaction of Rolling Stones fans everywhere, the band have announced their first album of new songs in 18 years. Hackney Diamonds, the first LP of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang, will be released on October 20. It was launched by the band at an event in the once-gritty London borough of the title, a long way from St Tropez, where Mick Jagger got hitched to his first wife in Bianca in 1971, and the Côte d’Azur, where Keith Richards rented a villa of legendary decadence to make the Stones’ louche masterpiece Exile on Main Street.
Jagger, 80, Richards, 79, and Ronnie Wood, 76, discussed the record in an event at the Hackney Empire with the American TV presenter Jimmy Fallon.
The title, Ronnie Wood has revealed, was the idea of the British artist Marc Quinn. “He told us that shattered glass from a broken windscreen is called Hackney diamonds,” Wood said. “Nothing personal or direct: it is a collision of music, of forces coming together . . . and we’re bringing the Hackney Empire back into use again.” The first single, Angry, is out today.
I have been lucky enough to hear the whole thing, and although I’ll be crushed to death by a giant tongue logo if I announce the song titles or the guest artists popping up throughout, I can say that it is unquestionably the best Stones album since 1978’s Some Girls. Variously poignant, irreverent, anarchic and, in one gospel-tinged moment, quite spiritual, it touches on all the aspects we love about the band, glued together by the rambunctious energy they have made their own since the early Sixties.
It wasn’t a particularly easy album for Jagger, Richards and Wood to make. Not least because of the shadow cast by the death of Charlie Watts, for whom the album forms something of a tribute and whose contributions feature on a couple of tracks. “I did start thinking this was never going to happen,” Jagger said. “I didn’t want to make an album that was just an assembly of what we had done over the past five years, which would mean three good tracks, five OK, three mediocre. And to be perfectly honest I thought that was where we were heading.”
Jagger’s answer to the problem was to erase any overthinking by going in fast, in a fashion similar to Some Girls, which was recorded in the space of a few weeks at EMI’s Pathé Marconi studio in Paris. After knocking a few songs into shape with Richards, the pianist Matt Clifford and the drummer Steve Jordan at GeeJam Studios in Jamaica, Jagger hired Andrew Watt, an enthusiastic 32-year-old producer with a love of classic rock and credits on recent Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne albums.
Once the Stones and their cohorts were assembled the bulk of the album was cut at Henson Studios in Los Angeles and Sanctuary Studios in the Bahamas, mostly in the space of a month. And if you want a taste of it, listen to Angry. It is a classic rocker featuring a crunchy riff with shades of the unforgettable one in Start Me Up and Jagger asking: why is everybody so angry?
Why indeed? At least the Stones have returned to remind us how to have a good time.
- Will Hodgkinson
Photo by Dave Hogan / Hoganmedia / Shutterstock
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"We" got a new Stones Album (Read 93,272 times)
