The Rolling Stones have just made their best album since 1978’s Some Girls.
Dedicated
Stones watchers will read that bold statement as faint praise, given
that the band followed their initial 14-year run of thrilling,
game-changing albums with another 30 years of increasingly lacklustre
ones, but it is a huge achievement nonetheless.
Blue
& Lonesome is the first Stones studio album since 2005’s A Bigger
Bang and it consists entirely of the kind of Chicago blues songs Mick
Jagger and Keith Richards first bonded over during their famous meeting
at Dartford railway station on October 17, 1961.
This covers album is less a retrograde step; more a reclaiming of the band’s soul.
It
went wrong for the Stones when they started sounding like technology -
and trends were leading them rather than the other way round.
The joy of
Blue & Lonesome is the way the band ignores whatever has been going
on for the past 50 years. Popular wisdom has it that Keith Richards is
the Stones’ bluesy heart and Mick Jagger its red-trousers-wearing
fashion victim, but it is Jagger’s voice that brings these songs alive.
“Aaaaall your love . . . can it be mine?” he wails against Richards’
fantastically lazy guitar on Magic Sam’s All Of Your Love, and you
realise Jagger has a way of inhabiting the blues better than any other
white singer, bringing out the sensuality, the amorality, the evil,
even.
Jagger’s harmonica is pretty damn
fantastic, too. There’s a sustained note towards the end of his
rendition of Little Walter’s Hate To See You Go that sounds like a
descent into Hell, while he blows through Lightnin’ Slim’s Hoodoo Blues
with sustained menace. Jagger’s genius is in doing an imitation of black
American music that is thoroughly white and English.
If Brian Jones had
had his way the Stones would have remained blues purists, but Jagger,
Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham, then their manager, had other ideas and
turned the band into a songwriting machine. Now, years later, Jagger is
coming back to the blues with an insouciance that suggests he isn’t
going to lose much sleep worrying about what the purists think.
What
keeps the Stones a fantastic live act is their looseness. Unlike almost
every other stadium act, they play in the moment, missed beats and all,
and Blue & Lonesome is similarly imperfect. Charlie Watts’s
drumming on Willie Dixon’s Just Like I Treat You is positively unhinged,
while Richards turns in some gloriously louche guitar on Jimmy Reed’s
Little Rain; twelve-bar blues reduced to a primordial crawl.
It’s
not a perfect album, and on the opener, Just Your Fool, the Stones
could be any competent blues covers band in any theme bar the world
over, but it’s the spirit of Blue & Lonesome that shines through. To
hear the Stones go back to the music they love, and to be so confident
and unapologetic about it, is a joy.
By Will Hodgkinson
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