This is the moment when the Stones’ excesses began to catch up with them, albeit slowly. Neither the disaster it has been reviled as nor the masterpiece some revisionist critics have claimed, Satanic Majesties is a likable, undisciplined psychedelic mess – Sing This All Together’s subtitle, See What Happens, sums it up – flecked with moments of genuine greatness: not just 2000 Light Years From Home and She’s a Rainbow, but Citadel and the delicate 2000 Man. When they actually wrote songs – Fool to Cry, Memory Motel – they still sounded great. It’s essentially a collection of jams recorded while auditioning for a new guitarist. The sense that the Stones were losing interest in making albums was hard to avoid when confronted with Black and Blue. On Undercover, Jagger won: a lot of the then-cutting edge 80s production falls flat, but when it does work, as on the hip-hop-influenced opener Undercover of the Night and Too Much Blood, you can really hear what he was driving at. Most post-70s Stones albums seem rooted in a power struggle between Richards’ traditionalism and Jagger’s desire to stay relevant. Steel Wheels (1989)Ī comeback of sorts, this set the template for latterday Stones albums: solid rather than amazing, a few decent tracks, some obvious filler, the odd lunge for contemporaneity, the sense of feral menace that once powered them noticeable by its absence and the whole business clearly a secondary consideration to going out on tour to crank out the hits.
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