How The Rolling Stones got fired up and recorded Hackney Diamonds

NEW YORK – In 2022, 17 years after The Rolling Stones released their most recent album of original songs, Mick Jagger decided the band had dithered and procrastinated long enough.

Sessions had come and gone, and unfinished songs were stacking up.

Charlie Watts, the band’s lifelong drummer and rhythmic cornerstone,

had died in 2021,

but the band kept on touring without new material.

“No one was being the taskmaster,” singer Jagger recalled. “No one was saying, ‘This is the deadline.’”

So he did just that. The result is Hackney Diamonds, a loud, cantankerous, unrepentant collection of new songs from a band that refuse to mellow with age.

For the new album, the sometimes fractious songwriting partnership of Jagger and Keith Richards found a way to realign.

Near the end of the sessions, they even completed writing one song – Driving Me Too Hard – in a room together, as they had in their early years.

“We’re a weird pair,” Richards said via video from his manager’s New York City office, surrounded by Stones merchandise and memorabilia.

His grey hair was tucked into a headband, and framed cover art of the 1981 album Tattoo You, with Jagger’s striated face, hung above him. “I love him dearly, and he loves me dearly, and let’s leave it at that.”

Hackney Diamonds,

due on Oct 20,

is both a new blast and a summing up. It digs into the Stones’ long-established style: sinewy guitar riffs, Jagger’s proudly intemperate vocals, bluesy underpinnings and ever-improvisatory guitar interplay.

“You know, it goes like this – but maybe it could go like that,” Richards said. “Without improvisation, it wouldn’t be anything in the first place. I mean, there are no rules to rock ’n’ roll. That’s the reason it’s there.”

In the band’s new songs, Jagger sings about frustration, longing, escape, endurance and transcendence.

Angry, the album’s opener, moves between conciliation and exasperation. The punky Bite My Head Off – which has English singer-songwriter Paul McCartney playing a jabbing, distorted bass – barks back at someone’s attempts at control.

And the wistful, country-ish Depending On You bemoans a lost romance. “I was making love but you had different plans,” Jagger sings.

The songs are unapologetically hand-played and organic; they speed up and slow down with a human pulse. And the album honours the band’s elder-statesman status, drawing guest appearances from McCartney and artistes Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga and Elton John.

Jagger scoffed at the idea of the Stones as an institution. “It’s only a band,” he said.

But guitarist Ronnie Wood, who joined in 1975, cherishes the band’s six decades of continuity.

“That has been my thing all these years, to keep my institution going,” he said in a video interview from his apartment in Barcelona, Spain. “When Mick and Keith fell out, I’d do my best to get them together again – at least get them talking and start the engines roaring again.”

The album’s title comes from London slang.

Hackney is a borough in East London that had long held a rough reputation, though it has lately gone more upscale.

Wood explained that “Hackney diamonds” are bits of broken glass from car windshields after break-ins leave them, in a word, shattered.

“A lot of the tracks on the album have that explosion,” he said. “This is a really in-your-face album.”

Making the new LP, the band regained “a sense of urgency”, Jagger said via video from Paris.

The long-time members of the Stones – Jagger, 80, Richards, 79, and Wood, 76 – were not getting any younger.

Jagger also realised, he said, that “we need to get someone involved who can crack the whip”.

That was American record producer Andrew Watt, who won a Grammy as producer of the year in 2021.

Watt, 32, has made pop hits with singers Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber and revved up late-career albums by Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop. He is also a guitarist and Stones fan who has studied every lick in the band’s catalogue.

As a producer, he was “results-oriented”, Watt said. “I was the newcomer. So I didn’t have the baggage that comes with a band that’s been together for over 60 years.”

After the years of inconclusive sessions and self-conscious second-guessing, the Stones made Hackney Diamonds in what Richards called “a blitzkrieg” – a matter of months instead of years.

“We worked fast, but that was the idea,” he said and added, with a cackle, “I’m still recovering.”

The tight recording schedule pushed aside second thoughts, Jagger said. “We do like four or five takes. ‘Okay,’ and we move on,” he said. “So no one had time to really think, ‘Well, was this a good song? Should we be doing this song?’ Because I get introspective, you know. Is this song as good as the other one? Is this song like another one I’ve done? You can figure that out later. Let’s keep moving.”

A tour was put off, delayed by the lag in pressing vinyl and by stadiums already booked for the tours of singer-songwriters Beyonce and Taylor Swift.

But the album got done. It was indeed recorded, though not fully mixed, by Feb 14.

The Stones groove got its foundation from Watts, who died at 80.

“He was one of the warmest guys I ever, ever met, just so tolerant of other people. He would actually stop me from murdering people,” said Richards. “When I just thought his name, I started to weep. Thanks for bringing me to tears.”

Watts’ final full album with the band was Blue & Lonesome, a set of blues covers, in 2016.

But his drumming, from sessions with the Stones’ previous producer Don Was, drives two songs on Hackney Diamonds.

One of them, Live By The Sword, also includes the Stones’ retired original bassist, Bill Wyman, and some two-fisted honky-tonk piano from John.

When Watts grew too frail to perform, the Stones continued touring with new drummer Steve Jordan, whom Watts had recommended to Richards in the 1980s, when Richards started the X-Pensive Winos.

“Charlie was like a fireworks display, and Steve is like a train.” Wood said. “With the passing of Charlie and the baton handed over to Steve from Charlie, that was a very special moment.

“We were rehearsing in Boston when Charlie passed away. We were rehearsing when we heard the news, and we had one day off. And we thought, Charlie didn’t want us to sit around and mope and everything. We went straight back to the grindstone and carried on – kept the flame going.” NYTIMES