From Music Week:Rolling Stones extend span of No.1 albums to more than 62 years
by Alan Jones
Friday, Jul 17th 2026 at 5:30PM
The Rolling Stones have the opposition licked, as they stroll to a No.1 debut with 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, as the UK albums chart celebrates its 70th anniversary.
Racking up first week consumption of
38,016 units (20,891 CDs, 12,825 vinyl albums, 471 cassettes, 2,074 digital downloads and 1,755 sales-equivalent streams), Foreign Tongues is the legendary band’s third consecutive No.1 album, albeit on considerably lower consumption than 2016 blues covers set Blue & Lonesome, which was their first new album in more than a decade, and had first week consumption of 105,830 units; and follow-up Hackney Diamonds, which sprinted to a 72,204 opening frame in 2023.
The Stones were also No.1 in September 2020, when the reissued and expanded 1973 album Goats Head Soup topped on sales of 13,107 units.
Already the oldest band to have a No.1 album, and the one with the longest span of chart-toppers, they lengthen their lead in both categories. Comprising lead vocalist Sir Mick Jagger, who will be 83 a week on Sunday (July 26), fellow founder member Keith Richards (82) and ‘new boy’ Ronnie Wood (79), who didn’t join until 1975, they are the first group to have a No.1 album with an average age of more than 80. Paul McCartney – who plays bass on Foreign Tongues track Covered In You – and Tom Jones are the only solo acts to have an album of new material top the chart as octogenarians.
Twelve of Foreign Tongues’ 14 songs are Jagger/Richard originals, two of which were co-written by producer Andrew Watt, and two more by session musician Matt Clifford, who plays keyboards in their tour band. There’s also a cover of 2007 Amy Winehouse hit, You Know I’m No Good, and Beautiful Delilah, a 1958 song by Chuck Berry, whose Carol, from the same year, was on their first album 62 years ago.
Foreign Tongues extends The Rolling Stones’ span of No.1 albums to more than 62 years, and is arguably their 13th No.1 album, following their eponymous debut (1964), The Rolling Stones No.2 (1965), Aftermath (1966), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile On Main Street (1972), Goats Head Soup (1973), Emotional Rescue (1980), Voodoo Lounge (1994), Blue & Lonesome (2016) and Foreign Tongues (2023).
If chart-topping reissues of Exile On Main Street and Goat’s Head Soup are included alongside their similarly high-achieving originals – Exile On Main Street and Goats Head Soup returned to the summit in 2010 and 2020 respectively, with extra content – their tally of No.1s to 15. However, those same sources don’t credit the only group with more No.1 albums – The Beatles – with a 16th chart-topper for the 2017 return to No.1 of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, even though it too had masses of new material in some of its 50th anniversary editions.
To muddy the waters still further, when BMRB became the UK’s first official chart compilers in 1969, the chart was carried by both Record Retailer and Record Mirror – the former being renamed Music Week in 1972, the latter consumer magazine being folded into Music Week in 1991. With earlier deadlines, Music Week initially ran the album chart a week in arrears of Record Mirror. They caught up in October 1969, which meant missing a week’s chart. The missing chart was the one in which supergroup Blind Faith’s eponymous only album was dethroned by The Rolling Stones’ compilation Through The Past Darkly (Big Hits Volume 2). It was published in Record Mirror, but Music Week simply skipped that week and showed positions which were really from two weeks prior as ‘last week’ for continuity purposes.
The only group to have new No.1 albums in six different decades (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, 2020s), The Rolling Stones have indisputably had 12 No.1 studio albums, the most by any group, surpassing The Beatles’ tally of 11. Ahead of them are solo star Taylor Swift (13). Robbie Williams also has 12 (excluding his Better Man soundtrack, on which multiple other singers take lead, and XXV, which includes re-recordings and re-ocrhestrations).
With The Rolling Stones replacing 67-year-old Madonna’s Confessions II (1-9, 7,758 sales) at the top, we have the oldest pair of consecutive No.1 artists in the chart’s history.
01 38,016 The Rolling Stones - Foreign Tongues [20,891 CDs, 12,825 vinyl, 471 cassettes, 2,074 downloads, 1,755 streaming]02 16,380 My Chemical Romance - Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys
03 16,350 Olivia Rodrigo - you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love
04 16,090 Michael Jackson - The Essential
05 13,035 December 10 - On Your Side
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2025 no songs sung, but 2026 brung FOREIGN TONGUES (Read 129,489 times)
