Following the release of the Rolling Stones' 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, Technics has created a limited edition wireless earbud in collaboration with the iconic British band.

According to the Japanese audio brand, "this exclusive collaboration unites Technics' signature audiophile engineering with one of music's most iconic legacies," in a joint project designed to "deliver every note as intended".

The new Technics EAH-AZ100 wireless earbuds feature the band's legendary red Lips & Tongue logo on the rubber case, while the earbuds themselves are built for exceptional clarity across the full frequency range, and include new technology like a Magnetic Fluid Driver – supposedly the first of its kind in the industry.

The product enters the market two weeks after the release of the Rolling Stones' new album, which debuted at number one in the UK. It became the group's 15th chart-topping album, and their third consecutive number one LP after 2023's Hackney Diamonds and 2016's Blue & Lonesome.

Mick Jagger recently opened up about his experiences recording Foreign Tongues, explaining how producer Andrew Watt pushed them to use tape for Chuck Berry cover Beautiful Delilah.

"I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference,'" Jagger said. "[But] we cut it on tape and we did it live. That was old style."

Only a limited number of people will be able to experience the new record via Technics' new earbud collaboration, with just 5,000 units available to customers. And compared to other wireless earbuds on the market, they're not cheap: the EAH-AZ100 is currently available via Technics , Amazon and through Bravado for $299/£259.

You certainly can’t accuse Mick Jagger of not promoting the Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues. In addition to doing interviews with the New York Times and many major music and news outlets, the 82-year-old frontman has also done an hour-long sitdown with Conan O’Brien on his Needs A Friend podcast.

So what did we find out? Well, Jagger never met Elvis. How come? Because John Lennon convinced him not to bother.

This tale dates back to August 1965 when the Beatles stopped by to meet Elvis during their second American tour. It was, by all accounts, an awkward encounter, and one that Lennon found unsatisfactory. “Elvis – what a total anti-climax HE was,” he later told the NME. “Either he was on pills or dope... whatever it was, he was totally uninterested and uncommunicative.”

Lennon related his disappointment to his friend, Jagger: “I remember John telling me [gives passable Lennon impersonation] ‘yeah, you should never meet your heroes. I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.’

“So I didn't. I took John's advice. It was really stupid of me, really. I'd have loved to have met Elvis! Why’d I take John's advice? It put me off. I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis. I didn't want my version of Elvis shattered like John's was, but maybe my Elvis version would have been different.”

Later on, Jagger remembers another of his friendship/ rivalries, with David Bowie. “Yeah, we were competitive,” the singer recalled. “David was SO competitive, much more competitive. I was made competitive by David. I mean, had to be.”

“When he was doing like Jean Genie, he was very Stones-y, you know? That was a very Stones-y period. So he would come over and play me, Jean Genie, you know,” Jagger told O'Brien before slipping into character as Bowie: “‘I've got it, you want to listen?’ Yeah, of course. I said, 'God, you’ve nicked all my things.' ‘Yeah, I know, man. I know. It's like a homage to you.’”

O’Brien also asks Jagger about the recent story where he was spotted in an Oxford pub performing a turn at a folk evening. “Yes, I had dinner at an Oxford College. Very interesting people, very pleasant. And then one of the students that I was talking with said, ‘I play mandolin. I'm going down the road to play with an Irish band. So do you want to come?’ So I said, ‘sure.’”

Starting to chuckle, he continued: “So I took a couple of people that I was with and the provost of the college. It was a very small pub, very friendly people. And the band was doing fiddle pieces and the guy joined in with his mandolin. But no one was singing.

“So I thought, oh well, here's an opening. So I did a song that I'd actually recorded. And then I had to rehearse it just mentally because I hadn't sung it in years. And I remembered at least three verses. But it was fun.”

Rolling Stones icon Keith Richards has spoken about his relationship with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, claiming that he "really misses being in a band".

Chatting to Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Richards said: "You know I've realised that Paul really misses being in a band. And his joy of just being in that context is great. So if there's any more songs to do, I'll let you know, Paul."

The conversation came as part of the promo run for the Rolling Stones' new album Foreign Tongues, which is out July 10 and features a wide range of world-famous contributors including Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, The Cure's Robert Smith and, of course, McCartney himself.

A recent trailer posted on YouTube showed the band's three remaining members — Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood — on top form in the studio, an incredible 64 years after the group first formed.

They're joined by new drummer Steve Jordan, who appears to have slotted in seamlessly following the loss of original member Charlie Watts back in 2021.

"It was Charlie Watts that did suggest to me that if ever I was gonna work with another drummer, it should be Steve Jordan," Richards said. "I'm sure Charlie Watts is beaming down on us, so I feel good about that."

Reflecting on those studio sessions, Richards explained: "The only thing you're fighting is the room and the song, you're okay as long as you're not fighting each other. It was fun to make."

Asked by Lowe what the secret is to the Stones' longevity, Richards said: "Healthy living. Go to bed early. There's nothing like it. That's the formula: Be a good boy."

It's a formula McCartney has clearly been following himself; in 2022, he became the oldest solo headliner in Glastonbury festival history at the age of 80, and four years later, he's still going strong. According to Richards, the Beatles legend had an amazing time contributing to the new Stones record.

"I've known Paul… well basically since The Beatles started, since we started. John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] did a couple of backup vocals for us way back when on We Love You and Dandelion, I think way back in like '67 or something like that."

He added: "It's great to have somebody from your own era, from way back when. He's a lovely player and I'd like to do more with him."

The release of the 25th Rolling Stones studio album, Foreign Tongues, is just three weeks’ away, which means rounds of interviews for the three remaining core members of the band. And, right on cue, Keith Richards has been sharing his thoughts on where the Stones are at in 2026, his relationship with Mick and technology.

So, what do we find out? Well, regarding the latter, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that Keith is not a fan of modern tech. The 82-year-old guitarist says he's “had it up to here with technology… I mean, personally, I think the world would be better off without the damn phone. AI is killing me, you know. Do I fear for the future of music? I fear for the future of everything. They don’t know what the hell it does, so now we all dangle and wait.”

His relationship to tech extends to “an electric kettle and that’s about it, pal”.

He and Jagger don’t cross swords as much these days either, he suggests: “There’s not as much jousting. He’s broken his sword, he’s broken his lance. It’s another thing that Mick and I gave up, probably down to age. Or at least he hasn’t come at me for a while, so I presume we have.”

“Mick’s been very prolific lately,” he says, “which is one reason this album has come out so quick, because he won’t bloody stop. And the momentum from Hackney Diamonds was such that this is basically carrying on in the same breath. I was just letting it roll – we had enough stuff if we wanted to keep pushing, and so Mick and I gave each other the usual wry look and said: ‘Yeah, let’s keep pushing.’”

Hilariously, Keith seems to have no idea Robert Smith of The Cure is one of the guests on Foreign Tongues: “How did it happen? Don’t know. I wasn’t there. Andrew [Watt, producer] said: ‘Do you mind if I put in so-and-so?’ And I said: ‘No, man, if it’s a piece that’s necessary, do it.’ So that’s how he got slipped in.”

He’s more at ease waxing lyrical about Chuck Berry, whose Beautiful Delilah the Stones cover as the album’s closing track: “There’s something about those early records of his,” he says. “They have an ease about them and a sophistication in a way, particularly in the lyrics, which always made me think that rock ’n’ roll didn’t always have to be the way that everyone used to think about it.”

“I loved his naturalness when he was playing, the way he moved – his whole body became part of the guitar. He made me focus on what was possible for me, at the time, which made my mother shell out for an electric guitar. I just felt a natural affinity for him, even though he was a cussed bugger.”

“He punched me once, years ago, in the 60s, I think,” he reveals. “We were in his dressing room, I was having a peek at his guitar and I was just about to stroke it, and he went: ‘Nobody touches it!’ And bam! Quite right, Chuck! I would have done the same.”

The Rolling Stones are back in business this year with a new album, Foreign Tongues, released on 10 July 2026. Meanwhile, Mick Jagger says he is somewhat bemused by the popularity of a classic Stones song from the ’60s.

In new interviews with MOJO magazine, Jagger and guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood discuss the making of Foreign Tongues and also look back on the Stones’ rich history.

Foreign Tongues was recorded in London with producer Andrew Watt and features an impressive array of guest musicians.

Paul McCartney plays bass on the ballad Covered In You, Steve Winwood plays Hammond organ on several tracks, and The Cure’s Robert Smith adds guitar to Divine Intervention and synthesizer and backing vocals to Never Wanna Lose You.

For all that, Keith Richards insists that with this album, as with any new Stones album, old values still apply.

Referring to his creative partnership with Jagger, Richards tells MOJO: “We are very different people and that’s what makes the gravy, but we all know what the Stones are supposed to sound like.”

Richards describes the new song Ringing Hollow as a kind of love letter to America and its great blues musicians, and says of his own journey of musical discovery: “You go through all the rock ’n’ rollers and realise that these cats all learned from Muddy Waters.

“Even now if I’m stuck for an idea I’ll go back to the blues because the musical form is limited and that makes it all the more intriguing. You’re telling me you can get more out of this thing? Ringing Hollow is our way of saying, ‘We love you.’”

Ronnie Wood suggests that his most important contribution to the band was acting as peacemaker between Jagger and Richards in the ‘80s.

“They definitely would have split at that point,” Wood recalls, “so yes, I am the glue of this band.”

Wood is typically self-deprecating when describing his role as guitar-playing sidekick to Richards.

“Keith might say, ‘I’m the cake and Ronnie’s the icing.’ Which is true. Keith has the riff and I do the fiddly bits, which he thinks doesn’t take any talent and anyone can do. Thanks, Keith.”

In Jagger’s exchanges with MOJO, he is sympathetic when reminiscing about Brian Jones, the guitarist and co-founder of the Stones whose problems with drugs led to his dismissal from the group and his early death in 1969 at the age of 27.

“Brian had all kinds of problems,” Jagger says, “and one of them is that some people should be very careful about going into show business. He might have been psychologically suited to being a session musician.

“To be in a band, in that era, as a young star, it puts a lot of pressure on you. Your music-making takes second place to all the externals you were not ready for and weren’t even expecting. You’ve got to be really tough to survive.”

Jagger also acknowledges Jones’ contribution to the classic Stones song that is far and away their most popular track on Spotify, with 1.7 billion streams and counting – the 1966 single Paint It, Black.

“What a weird song,” Jagger says. “Weird chord sequences, weird everything.

“I have no recall of what was going on in my head when I wrote the lyrics or how Keith came up with it in the first place. Then you have Brian, who is very dominant with that sitar lick.

“The mood is really odd. I wish we could do something like that now, is what I’m trying to say. For that to be your most streamed song… kind of weird, don’t you think?”

The way Ronnie Wood describes it, his home in London in the early ’70s was an open house for musicians – the famous and the not-so-famous. And it was in this house, in 1974, that the guitarist played his part in creating a classic song for the band he was about to join – The Rolling Stones.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 2’s programme Tracks Of My Years, alongside singer Mick Jagger, Wood recalls the years he spent living in The Wick, a four-storey Georgian mansion overlooking the River Thames in Richmond.

Wood bought The Wick in 1971 when he was a member of the Faces, and had a home studio installed.

He recalls: “My house, The Wick, in Richmond, back in the day, was the hub of musical activity. They were all queuing up down the stairs, you know – everyone from Gregg Allman to Paul McCartney.”

Wood lists other notable musicians who were regular visitors to his place, including his Faces bandmate Rod Stewart, session drummer and ex-Sly And The Family Stone member Andy Newmark, and two acclaimed bassists – Ric Grech (of Blind Faith and Traffic fame) and Willie Weeks (who performed and recorded with George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Randy Newman and many more).

“There were so many people and so much fun over the years,” Wood says.

Talking to Tracks Of My Years, Wood recalls The Wick as “a hub of vibes” where he once gave an impromptu guitar lesson to not one but two legendary drummers.

As he relates the story: “Keith Moon was playing there. Ringo [Starr] was playing there at the same time, and they were going, ‘We’re fed up with this, Ron, where’s the rest of the band?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know where they are, and they said, ‘Well, let’s do guitar lessons.’ So it was me teaching Ringo and Keith Moon the chord of E for a few hours…”

In 1974, when Wood was still with the Faces, he recorded his debut solo album at The Wick. He gave it the tongue-in-cheek title I’ve Got My Own Album To Do.

This was a star-studded project that featured guest appearances from George Harrison, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Rod Stewart and another member of the Faces, Ian McLagan.

Harrison sang and played slide guitar on Far East Man, a song he wrote with Wood.

On the album’s opening track I Can Feel The Fire, Wood was joined by Willie Weeks, Andy Newmark, Jagger and Richards and Bowie. And at the same time this session was recorded, Wood also became involved in the creation of the Stones’ song It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But I Like It).

In a previous interview excerpted on the StonesData fan site, Wood recalled: “Mick and I worked out I Can Feel The Fire and after we’d done that he said, ‘Help me with this song, It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, ’cause I wanna see how it turns out.

“So, say on a Tuesday evening: two guitars – Mick and I – and Mick singing lead vocal and David Bowie and myself on backup vocals.

“Then I overdubbed the rest of the instruments last and it sounded like a good demo. So the next night, we wanted to put it in a more presentable shape, so we got hold of Kenney Jones who plays the drums on the actual record. I ended up with just my acoustic guitar that I laid originally. Keith replaced – rightly so – the guitars that I’d done electrically.”

Wood says on Tracks Of My Years: “There’s only me and Mick and David Bowie and Willie Weeks, Kenney Jones on it, the basic track.”

Reportedly, this basic rhythm track recorded at The Wick was used as the basis for the final version of the – the title track of the Stones’ 12th studio album. That album was released on 18 October 1974.

It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, the song, was credited to Jagger and Richards only.

In December 1974, the Stones’ lead guitarist Mick Taylor quit the band, and while other guitarists were considered and auditioned, Wood was always the leading candidate for the job.

As Wood says now: “Oh, it was easy for me to slide in there. Yeah, because I’d known them on and off for years.”

In 1975, while still with Faces, he recorded and toured with the Stones, and in 1976 – after the Faces disbanded – Wood was made an official member of the Stones.

He eventually moved out of The Wick, but what started there is a journey he is still on today.

It’s confirmed: the new Rolling Stones album is to be called Foreign Tongues and it’s out on July 10.

Their twenty-fifth studio album was launched yesterday in Brooklyn, inside the converted Williamsburg Savings Bank, where the three surviving Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood – were introduced by host Conan O’Brien. “I think this is the one, after years of toiling in obscurity,” O’Brien said of the album, tongue placed firmly in cheek. “This is their time.”

So what do we know about the album? Well, it’s got fourteen tracks, guests on the record include Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney, Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers and, most intriguingly, Robert Smith of the Cure. According to Jagger, it’s one of the Stones' more varied albums: “The thing about this record is – the Stones are a rock band that also has the capacity to do ballads, country music or dance music. So we don’t get stuck in one kind of style.”

As on 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, Charlie Watts makes a posthumous appearance on two of the tracks, including Hit Me In The Head, 'a real punk rocker', in the words of the singer.

Unlike many other Stones albums, which have had long gestation periods, Foreign Tongues was banged out quickly over a month. “Only having four weeks gave us an urgency,” said Jagger. “We’re having fun most of the time in the studio, but it’s a lot of concentration too – you’ve really got to make (a song’s) five minutes count.”

“It was great to be working in London again, and to have that London vibe around us,” Keith Richards added. “It was a month of concentrated punch. To me, it's all about the enjoyment of it. I'm blessed to be able to do this and long may it last.”

The lead single is In The Stars and is out now, with a physical release coming at the end of next week. Initial verdict: yes, the main riff is a variant on one Keith’s churned out many many times before, but hey it’s audibly the Stones. It rocks. Some sweet backing vocals, too. They’ve released a lot worse lead singles down the years.

However, the less said about Foreign Tongues’ cover, the better. It features a painting that’s a nightmarish amalgamation of the three remaining Stones’ faces. “I call him Mr. Ugly. He’s painted by a famous new artist called Nathaniel Quinn,” said Jagger before pointing out that “it’s not computer-generated.”

The run up to yesterday’s official announcement has included a ‘secret’ vinyl single, Rough And Twisted released under the name ‘The Cockroaches’ and a teaser ad campaign, which has featured posters with the words ‘Foreign Tongues’ translated into a number of different languages going up in cities around the world.

What else? The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon will feature Mssrs Jagger, Richards and Wood on three nights this and next week. Mick appears on tonight’s show (May 6), Keith is on May 7 and Ronnie Wood on May 13.

As for live dates, there’s no news as yet. “I would love to tour the album,” said Jagger. “I absolutely would love to. I hope to do it as soon as that’s possible.”

It very much looks like the Rolling Stones are teasing… something or other.

A number of posters have been spotted around London with the words ‘The Cockroaches’ emblazoned upon a red background. Below it is a QR code, which apparently is linked via Universal Music, the Stones’ record company, to thecockroaches.com.

Another clue is that back in the dim and distant past - well, in 1977 – the band performed a secret gig under the name Keith and the Cockroaches.

And well, the insects are popularly regarded as the hardiest of living species. When humanity does finally annihilate itself in a nuclear war, it is well known that the ‘roaches’ will in all probability survive. One would imagine that the Stones – still, incredibly, an active group after 64 years – see themselves in much the same vein. No matter what you throw at them, they are still here.

Anyway, one Simon Harper, who runs the Lip Service podcast has done a bit more digging. Posting to Instagram yesterday, he wrote: “The QR code takes you to thecockroaches.com, and a holding page that shows a sparse ‘70s bedroom complete with various ephemera dotted around - some plectrums, concert tickets, and vinyl records - plus a poster for The Cockroaches and a clock stuck on April 11th.”

April 11 is a Friday this year – a release day. Apparently, if you forward the link from the cockroaches website, the accompanying image is the phrase ‘who the f*** are the Cockroaches written in the same font as the ‘Who the f*** is Mick Jagger’ T-shirt that Keith Richards once wore in Ken Regan’s famous shot of the guitarist back in 1975.

Plus we know that the Stones have been working on a new album for a while. Last September Ronnie Wood confirmed to The Sun’s Bizarre column that the band’s follow up to 2023’s Hackney Diamonds was on its way: “Yes, you will be getting a new album next year. It is done.”

All very exciting. Harper signed off his post asking: “What do you think? Have I gone stir crazy on hot cross buns, or could this be the first signs of the album that @ronniewood and @thisiswatt hinted at last year…?” Not at all. Very good detective work, sir.

Keith Richards says he has enjoyed a kind of telepathic understanding with the other guitarists who’ve played alongside him in The Rolling Stones – and hails the band’s founder and former leader Brian Jones as a hugely influential figure.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Richards talks to writer Joel McIver about a whole host of legendary guitar players – not only his fellow Stones, but also Scotty Moore, Elmore James and Jimi Hendrix.

Asked whether he ever wanted to be a virtuoso soloist like Hendrix, Richards replies: “No, I have never really wanted to go down that path. I mean, with solos, I admire the virtuoso and the technique and the nimbleness, but at the end of the day, what are you soloing over? You’re the icing on the cake. And I’m the cake!”

As arguably the most famous rhythm guitarist of all time, Richards is known for putting groove into his playing and hanging back behind the beat, of which he says: “It’s actually nothing you can put into words, because it’s just the way I feel the rhythm.

“I always say that I can only do this because I’ve been blessed with the best drummers in the world. I have the luxury of knowing that the guy knows what he’s doing, you know?”

He adds: “I very rarely play with stiffs! I’ve been lucky to play with the best. Listen, I’ve played with the guys I grew up listening to. Little Richard, Scotty Moore. Jesus Christ, should I go on?”

Richards also discusses his working relationships with the Stones’ other guitarists – Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood.

Asked if the way he weaves lead and rhythm parts playing with Ronnie Wood is an unspoken thing, Richards says: “Oh, absolutely. There’s something between us.

“It was the same with me and with Mick Taylor, and also with Brian Jones, back at the beginning. You’d meet the right guys and automatically they knew that ‘You take over here, I’ll come in underneath’, and there was a beautiful little ballet going on.

“That’s amazing, and that’s what makes it worth doing, you know – this interconnection between musicians.”

He continues: “It is kinda telepathic, in a way. I suppose. You can put that word on it. And it’s something you don’t wanna fuck with.

“Once it’s there, you don’t talk about it amongst yourselves. It’s an unspoken reliance upon each other, which is a beautiful thing.”

Richards also pays tribute to Brian Jones and praises his impact on the Stones in their early days.

“Personally, he was the first steel slide player I heard,” Richards says. “His middle name could have been Elmore, because he used to just play Elmore James stuff.

“He was really, really in front of that game, and that’s what I really admired about him when we first started playing together.

“This band was started by a piano player, Ian Stewart, and he had Brian with him. Once I heard Brian playing Elmore James, I thought, ‘I’ve found a guy here who I can mess with’, and then we got into Jimmy Reed stuff and, of course, Muddy Waters, all of that…”

He says with a laugh: “I wouldn’t call it a university education!”

The full interview is in the new issue of Guitar World out now.

You can subscribe to Guitar World at Magazines Direct.

NAMM 2026: Gibson has turned loose all the considerable forensic guitar-making powers of the Custom Shop’s Murphy Lab to recreate one of rock ’n’ roll’s most iconic electric guitars, Keith Richards’ 1960 ES-355.

Using 3D scans, Tom Murphy’s team has recreated every spot of wear and tear on the Rolling Stones guitarist’s Ebony finished, Bigsby equipped original, and Gibson has got the man himself to sign the f-hole labels for a limited run of 100 Collector’s Edition instruments.

A further 50 are signed on the headstock and the f-hole label, and are available exclusively via Gibson.

These, of course, are megabucks releases. Expect to pay £17,999/$19,999 for the Collector’s Edition model at your local dealer. Meanwhile the Gibson exclusive is priced at a positively oligarchical £25,999/$29,999.

But these are nonetheless a fraction of what you would pay for a vintage equivalent, and are ostensibly high-end electric guitars for the collector’s market – we would fully expect these to be an appreciable asset for anyone lucky enough to own one. They’ll also get one heck of a guitar.

As signature guitars go, this is hard to top. There’s something about the ES-355 in Ebony, the gold hardware, the tuxedo stylings of the split diamond headstock inlay, the multi-ply binding and block inlays on the ebony fingerboard, the Bigsby B7 giving it some rock ’n’ roll wobble.

With all that lacquer checking and the gold looking very much like it has spent 65 years being exposed to air, smoke, and sweat, the mojo is off the charts.

Gibson has outfitted these with a pair of Custombuckers, each of which has an aged Alnico V magnet for that time-machine tone. These are hooked up to a pair of volume knobs, a pair of tone knobs, with CTS 500K audio taper pots and paper-in-oil capacitors.

Switchcraft jacks and switches as standard. There are Grover Rotomatics with “milk bottle” buttons. The controls are True Historic black ‘Top Hats’ with dials, just like the original; everything is just like the original.

That’s the idea. Gibson describes it as “a love-letter to one of the coolest guitars of all time”.

“Is there a more iconic guitar player on Earth than Keith Richards?” says the brand. “For more than six decades, the ‘Human Riff’ has been the heartbeat of The Rolling Stones, inspiring millions of fans and musicians the world over to get out of their seats and rock ’n’ roll.

“It’s impossible to imagine the popular music landscape without the monolithic presence of Keith Richards looming over it with impossible cool, godlike nonchalance, and, of course, impeccable taste in guitars.”

This, of course, is not just a love letter to Richards’ instrument. It’s really another of Gibson’s time-capsule tributes to the Golden Era of guitar manufacturing, a vintage instrument born anew, with period-correct appointments such as the long neck tenon and the medium-wide fretwire.

As for the key dimensions, it’s totally on brand with a 24.75” scale, 12” radius fingerboard. It has a 41.28mm bone nut. The neck profile again harks back to the 3D scans; it is the same shape as Richards’ guitar. The body is 3-ply maple/poplar/maple with a weight-relieved maple centre block to nix feedback and red spruce bracing.

“This is my standard-tuning six-string; this is the other side of my thing,” says Richards, speaking to Stones producer Andrew Watt on the Gibson TV YouTube demo. “My six-string stuff has always been, you know, a great Gibson – that’s where I feel the most comfortable. And also with the sound. Put it through just about any amp, and it will sound the way you want it, because this has so much more room for expression.”

Inside the case there is a leather guitar strap and a black scarf with white skull print just like Keef’s. Just add a knitted watchcap and that’s your Halloween look sorted.

These guitars ship in custom hard-shell guitar case, lined with blue velvet, and they are available now. Get ‘em while they’re hot. Head over to Gibson and the Gibson Gazette for more details.

• Learn 4 key Keith Richards chords from classic Rolling Stones songs
• Keith Richards on the simple guitar trick at the heart of the Rolling Stones' sound

The Rolling Stones began 1968 in a state of some disarray. Their recently-released album – Their Satanic Majesties Request had been a critical flop, widely regarded as a misguided attempt to adopt the trappings of psychedelia.

The previous year had been a turbulent one, overshadowed by the Redland drug busts and the threat of prison that hung over the three highest profile members of the group - Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones. And in the midst of this turmoil, just when they needed a steady hand on the tiller, manager Andrew Loog Oldham had gone missing and would later quit.

So when the band reconvened at Olympic Studios in March to start recording the follow-up, there was much riding on it. After self-producing on Their Satanic Majesties the two lead Stones felt they needed an outside producer. “They wanted an American,” remembers Glyn Johns in his 2014 memoir Sound Man.

“A few weeks earlier, I had met Jimmy Miller, who was working with Traffic in the next studio to me at Olympic. He seemed like a really nice guy and was doing a great job, so I told Mick that we did not have to import anyone as there was an extremely accomplished guy in London.” Miller got the job.

Miller was just what the Stones needed at this juncture. “He had such a wonderful ability to sense where a band was at, get into their heads, get their confidence, and then fire them up in the studio and get great performances out of them,” says engineer Eddie Kramer, who worked with Miller on the Beggars Banquet sessions.

“He was an extremely impressive individual. He could help them with song structures and be very involved on that level, or be a fly on the wall when he needed to be.”

Most of the sessions at Olympic began with the Stones sitting in a circle with acoustic guitars and Charlie on a pillow drum – this was the chosen methodology of Glyn Johns. But Miller soon had to throw on one of a producer’s many hats – that of diplomat – in his dealings with the elephant in the room at Olympic: Brian Jones.

Essentially, the Stones were a man down. Their former leader, who had originally christened the band, was not the asset he once was. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2002, Miller described Jones as “sort of in and out” of the Beggars Banquet sessions.

"He'd show up occasionally when he was in the mood to play, and he could never really be relied on. . . When he would show up at a session - let's say he had just bought a sitar that day, he'd feel like playing it, so he'd look in his calendar to see if the Stones were in. Now he may have missed the previous four sessions.

"We'd be doing, let's say, a blues thing. He'd walk in with a sitar, which was totally irrelevant to what we were doing, and want to play it.”

“I used to try to accommodate him. I would isolate him, put him in a booth and not record him onto any track that we really needed. And the others, particularly Mick and Keith, would often say to me, 'Just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here'."

Miller did coax some exquisite slide guitar playing out of Jones for No Expectations, one of several tracks on the album that use country and blues, or in this case, an amalgam of the two. What’s often overlooked about Beggars Banquet is how many of the tracks on this rock classic were driven by acoustic guitars – Salt Of The Earth, the Appalachian folk-influenced Factory Girl (featuring Charlie Watts on tabla) and the blues cover Prodigal Son.

And also Street Fighting Man. Partly this was down to a trick that Keith Richards had stumbled upon using a tape player. “I realised that I could use a cassette machine, basically as a pick up,” he told the Netflix Under The Influence series. “And play an acoustic guitar though it and slam it through so loud that it was totally overloaded. You have an electric guitar but with the feel of an acoustic.”

Street Fighting Man would come to be seen as the Stones’ take on the various uprisings of 1968, with Jagger’s lyrics inspired by what he saw when he attended an Anti-War demo that ended in a riot in Grosvenor Square that March.

It was an important track for the Stones and was seen as the band unequivocally allying themselves with the new left. But Jagger’s lyrics are more an expression of the frustration at innate English (small c) conservatism. In a contemporary interview with Barry Miles for International Times, Jagger said of Britain: “This country's so weird...It always does things slightly differently, always more moderately, and always very boringly, most of it, the changes are so suppressed. The people suppress them."

Barry Miles later told the Independent in 2008: "He was there because he felt angry and rebellious but he had no way of formulating this, of giving it any kind of structure, and in a sense he was looking for anything to rebel against.

"I don't think he had a carefully worked-out policy against Vietnam; I mean, he had a moral outrage against the war and that was about it."

Whatever, it covered the Stones with a patina of radical chic, to add to the diabolical shapes thrown by the album’s most famous track.

In some ways, Sympathy For The Devil overshadows the rest of the album, so ingrained has it become with the Stones' legend. It draws its influence from a trip Jagger made to Brazil in early 1968 although, according to an interview the singer gave to Rolling Stone in 1995, it was Keith who suggested the samba rhythm.

Charlie Watts later recalls in the 2003 book According To The Rolling Stones: “It was one of those sort of songs where we tried everything. The first time I ever heard the song was when Mick was playing it... and it was fantastic. We had a go at loads of different ways of playing it.”

The subject matter was literally a gift from Marianne Faithful. The manuscript of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel The Master and Margarita, in which the devil visits the Soviet Union, had been smuggled out of Moscow in 1967.

Faithful gave an English translation to her boyfriend and it became the basis of his lyric in which he takes on the persona of “a man of wealth and taste” who pops up throughout history to create death and mayhem.

The piece de resistance, of course, are the ‘woo woo’ backing vocals, which were a complete accident. This came about when Anita Pallenberg overheard Miller ask ‘Who? Who?’ whilst Jagger sang. Pallenberg suggested it be kept in as a backing vocal chant and another sinister layer was applied to the song.

Capturing all this was Jean-Luc Godard, then in town filming what was to become One Plus One or Sympathy For The Devil, an esoteric attempt to join the dots between the Stones and the global uprisings of 1968.

At one point, Godard fixed tissue paper to the hot lights in the studio, with a predictable outcome. “I think we have a fire,” said Glyn Johns calmly, before Miller gathered up the masters, left with the band and Sympathy For The Devil’s legend swelled a little more.

The album was in the can by the end of July and the band threw a party the following month at London’s Vesuvio club, which Jagger and Richards part-owned. Beggars Banquet was played in full and was deemed to be a success by those present. But the event was upstaged by Paul McCartney who thrust a disc into the hands of DJ Tony Sanchez: the acetate of Hey Jude. “It was the first time anyone had heard it and we were all just blown away,” remembers Marianne Faithful. Sanchez recalled that: “When it was over, Mick looked peeved”.

Beggars Banquet should have been released in early autumn but was held up by its sleeve – the original cover of a grubby graffiti-ed toilet was deemed to be in poor taste by Decca and an alternative white sleeve replaced it. When it did eventually hit the shops on December 6, it was garlanded with praise. The Chicago Sun-Times said that: "The Stones have unleashed their rawest, rudest, most arrogant, most savage record yet. And it's beautiful." Whilst Time described the Stones as "England's most subversive roisterers since Fagin's gang in Oliver Twist.”

The album brought the Stones into line with what was happening in music and culture. With the psychedelic dream over, blues rock – which the Stones had virtually invented, after all - was now the common currency in both US and UK pop/rock.

With its perceived musical authenticity and nods to radical politics, Beggars Banquet drew approving nods from across counterculture. It sounded both proletarian and cool; the original ‘return to form’ of critical cliche.

And it set the Stones up for world domination, a golden era by the end of which they undisputedly were the ‘greatest rock n’ roll band in the world’. Beggars Banquet was the turning point, as Keith Richards – then, as now, the heart of the band – once neatly summarised: “It helped take the Stones to a different level. This is where we had to pull out our good stuff. And we did.”

Ronnie Wood was given the honour of being the Desert Island Discs castaway this weekend just gone.

Though he’s best known as a guitarist, the 78-year-old Rolling Stone is competent on a number of instruments. Indeed, he told host Lauren Laverne that he started on the drums.

“My brother Ted used to play," Wood said, "and he had his kit underneath the stairs and when my parents were at work and I was at home either on sick leave or doing a dodge from school, I’d get the drums out, play all afternoon and then pack them away before anybody got back.

"Anyway, the neighbours said ‘there was this awful crashing and banging coming from the house all afternoon, Mrs Wood.’ (She’d say) ‘Was that you, Ronnie?’ (And I’d go) ‘No, I had nothing to do with it.’”

Ronnie is self-taught and, as he explained to Laverne, can read some music, up to a point. “I thought, I don’t want to know every note I’m playing. It takes the element of ad lib out of it and inventiveness.”

He’s even played drums on one Stones track, Sleep Tonight from the band’s 1986 album Dirty Work. “He (Charlie Watts) tried it when he came in and he said ‘I can’t do it as good as you, Ronnie. You get back on the drums.’

"So I played on that song. It’s pretty good drums, even if I say it myself.”

He should. Dirty Work is widely regarded as the nadir of the band’s career. Jagger and Richards weren’t talking, or collaborating much – Ronnie ended up with an unprecedented three co-credits on the album.

Even their doyen of dependability, Charlie Watts, had a heroin problem at the time. Wood’s contributions on that album - and during that whole period - were crucial in keeping the Stones’ show on the road at a time when they could easily have fallen apart.

Elsewhere during the interview, the guitarist confirmed that he had been working on some songs with Rod Stewart, which presumably will be for a putative Faces reunion album: We’ve got these songs that we’re working on from back in the day, but it’s hard to make our times tally,” he said. “When we do get a chance to get in the studio again, we will finish off these songs. We’ve got a good body of songs going.”

If you missed the Radio 4 show, it’s up on BBC Sounds now.

It’s been a quiet year for the Rolling Stones so far. The band were to have played dates in the UK and Europe this summer but those plans were scrapped due to, allegedly, ‘scheduling issues’. But, if reports are to be believed, the Stones have been hard at work on a new album, which should see the light of day in 2026.

This intel comes from a reliable source: Marlon Richards, who in an interview with a special Stones edition of Record Collector said, when asked what the band are currently up to: “They’re in town right now, recording.”

“They’re in Chiswick or somewhere like that; I think they’re nearly done. They still maintain these ridiculous hours: after lunch until, like, two in the morning. I’d rather be somewhere else at that time of night! Unless you’re in it, it’s pretty boring.”

When asked specifically what the band were working on, Richards said: “I guess an album – they have enough left over from the last one.”

“They gave them a Grammy (for 2023's Hackney Diamonds), so now they’re all hyped up on that: ‘Oh, yeah – we can do another one like that! We’ve got more like that if you want…’ I think they’re doing the follow-up.”

Marlon had good news for fans regarding live dates: “I think they’re planning a tour of Europe.”

This tallies with reports in The Sun over the summer regarding the Stones’ plans: “Originally, the plan was for them to bring their huge US tour to the UK and Europe this summer but promoters couldn’t get the dates to work,” a source told the paper in June. “Instead, the Stones decided to get back into the studio and put down their next album. It’s massive for their fans who didn’t get a chance to see them live this year.”

The next album would be coming, comparatively, hot on the heels of Hackney Diamonds, which came out in October 2023. At the tim,e Jagger counselled against seeing that record as ‘the last Stones album’, telling the New York Times that the band were already “three-quarters through the next one”.

And Keith Richards, back in 202,3 told SiriusXM that “There’s plenty more stuff left over from Hackney Diamonds to work on. There’ll always be another one until we drop… This is what we do. We’ve gotta see this Rolling Stones through.”

On Tuesday 4 June 1968, The Rolling Stones began recording a song that would come to be regarded as one of their greatest compositions.

The five members of the group arrived at Olympic Recording Studios in the leafy south-west London suburb of Barnes for what would be an 18-hour recording session.

They were almost three months into recording Beggars Banquet, an album that would kickstart a stream of Stones classics, mark a creative high point for the band and signal a return to their raw blues-rock roots.

The song they were about to record that day was Sympathy For The Devil, destined to become the album’s dramatic opening track.

Over the course of five days – 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10 June 1968 – the song would evolve from a plaintive folk-inspired composition to a samba-infused rock masterpiece.

By 1968, the Stones had left their psychedelic posturing behind them and were hitting a whole new creative peak.

The previous year had been a tough time for the band. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had narrowly escaped serving long jail sentences for drug possession. Jagger in particular was looking to new paths for inspiration.

“I was educating myself,” Jagger told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. “I was reading a lot of poetry, I was reading a lot of philosophy.”

From his girlfriend, the singer Marianne Faithfull, Jagger had been given a novel called The Master And Margarita, by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. That book, along with the works of French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, would provide inspiration for Sympathy For The Devil.

The song was initially called Fallen Angels and had a working title of The Devil Is My Name. Lyrically, it delves into the nature of evil and its presence throughout history.

Sympathy For The Devil is written in the first person, with Jagger taking on the persona of Satan and reeling off a veritable roll call of atrocities — the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Hundred Years’ War and the 1918 massacre of the Russian Romanov royal family, to name a few.

As a narrative, it is grandiose. But it was also relevant at a time of widespread conflict, particularly in the US — social upheaval, the push for civil rights, anti-war protests and inner-city riots following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.

Jagger’s lyrics also referenced the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, but on 5 June 1968, one day after the Stones began recording Sympathy For The Devil, JFK’s younger brother Robert Kennedy was also gunned down and killed.

Jagger promptly changed his lyric from “Who killed Kennedy” to “Who killed the Kennedys”.

From the outset, Sympathy For The Devil was controversial, prompting media rumours and fears from religious groups that the Stones were devil worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth.

The opening lines of the song were delivered by Jagger in dark, seductive tones: “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste/I've been around for a long, long year/Stole many a man's soul and faith…”

Jagger inhabits the character with zeal and conviction. It’s a far cry from the original rendition of the song that he played to the band on 4 June 1968.

“Mick came in with a song, but it was very Dylanesque,” recalled Keith Richards in an interview with Matt Sweeney on the Guitar Moves web series in 2016. “It was like a ballad. And, you know, you go through the process in the studio, which is the process I love of everybody going, ‘No, no. Let’s rethink. What if we, like, push the beat up a bit?’”

The evolution of the song is comprehensively captured by Jean-Luc Godard in his film Sympathy For The Devil (originally titled One Plus One).

Godard’s film also provides a glimpse of the sad demise of Stones’ co-founder Brian Jones, once such an invaluable, multi-faceted musician yet here consigned to the margins, haunted by anxieties and struggling to function due to drug and alcohol use.

One of the first scenes shows Jagger, seated on a high stool, playing a Gibson Hummingbird and strumming the chord pattern to Richards and Jones who are also playing acoustics. Before long, the folk-style song has been transformed into something far more intense and raucous.

It was Keith Richards who suggested changing the tempo, and adding additional percussion, transforming the song into a samba.

It was then down to drummer Charlie Watts to nail the groove that would give the song its intoxicating, hypnotic feel.

“It was all night doing it one way," Watts is quoted as saying on the BBC website in 2021, “then another full night trying it another way, and we just could not get it right. It would never fit a regular rhythm.”

In the end, they settled on an Afro-Brazilian samba groove known as Candomblé.

Ghanaian-born percussionist Rocky Dijon was brought in to play congas, while Stones bassist Bill Wyman added a shekere, an African percussion instrument.

By this point, Wyman would normally have been laying down his bass part. But things didn’t quite pan out that way.

“So suddenly I’m on bass [and] it’s a samba,” chuckled Keith Richards in his 2016 interview with Matt Sweeney on the Guitar Moves web series.

And there Richards is in the Godard footage, with his dense black signature ‘rooster’ haircut, grooving contentedly away on a gleaming new sunburst Fender Precision.

Richards plays with a pick and gives it a punchy, percussive Stax/Motown-style feel over Watt’s fiery Latin-jazz flavoured beat.

The transformation from plodding folky ballad to blisteringly infectious groove is dramatic.

“But that to me is the beauty of recording, of going to a studio,” continued Richards. “You go in with some sort of semi-conceived idea of what you think this song is supposed to come out like, and it comes out something totally different because it’s been filtered through all of the other guys in the band.”

One musician who was pivotal to the song and the Beggar’s Banquet album was in-demand session pianist and organist Nicky Hopkins. His percussive piano playing is a prominent feature of Sympathy For The Devil and helps propel the song along.

Another defining element of the song came from Anita Pallenberg, the Italian-German actor, artist and model who was romantically involved with Keith Richards at the time. The charismatic Pallenberg was in the engineering booth at Olympic Studios, with producer Jimmy Miller, when Jagger was laying down vocal takes for the song.

At one point, between takes, Miller reportedly asked Jagger, “Who you singing about Mick? Who? Who?”

According to Pallenberg, Miller then repeated the words “Who? Who?” to himself while Jagger sang on, and Pallenberg realised how great this sounded.

She then suggested to Jagger that “Who? Who?” be used in the song as a background chant.

It was an inspired suggestion.

They tried it out and after the first attempt changed it from “Who? Who?” to “Woo woo”.

Marianne Faithfull and photographer Michael Cooper soon joined Pallenberg in the vocal booth, alongside Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, to record the iconic “Woo woo” backing vocal chant.

Godard’s film gives an enthralling insight. A few feet away from the backing vocal pack, behind a large screen, stands Mick Jagger, dressed in white ruffled dandy-esque shirt and lemon yellow trousers.

Jagger is midway through a vocal take and wholly immersed in the live moment, his left leg moving furiously to the groove, both hands clutching the headphones, then pulling away in a dramatic flutter of hands and arms.

His voice has rarely sounded better.

For all the late-’60s frippery and flamboyance, this is a vocal performance rooted firmly in the blues.

One of the strengths of Sympathy For The Devil is its organic nature — how it builds slowly and instinctively, beginning with percussion and high echoey wailing vocals that are both catchy and menacing.

African-style congas are the first sound to be heard, before a shekere, maracas and Jagger’s echoey high-pitched yelps and grunts enter the mix.

21 seconds in, Jagger’s main vocal, Nick Hopkins’ full piano chord and Keith Richard’s bass create a resounding opening to the song.

While the piano is prominent throughout, the rhythm guitars are far more subtle as they nestle within the groove.

At 1:57, the first ‘woo-woo’s are introduced and they appear on each line of the song from that point on – 154 times in total to be precise.

By 2:30 the pace and urgency is really picking up as the rhythm guitar comes through with more prominence.

Then, at 2:48, Keith Richards unveils one of his greatest guitar solos, played on a ’57 Les Paul Custom through a Vox AC30 with a treble boost.

It’s a beautifully judged piece of playing that is incisive, searing and melodic.

At 3:23, Jagger launches back into the chorus and from that point on the whole thing just flies, building in momentum and power with added elements such as a cowbell enhancing the infectious rolling groove. By then there’s a real attack to Keith Richards’ blistering stabs of lead, which continue to punctuate the song as it begins its slow fade almost six minutes in.

Sympathy For The Devil was released as a single in its edited 4mins 9secs version on 6 December 1968.

Six days later, the Stones performed the song live for the first time in front of a live audience at the filming of The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus.

One year later, on 11 December 1969, the band had to stop the song halfway while performing at the Altamont Speedway when a fight broke out between Hells Angels.

The subsequent fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels hired to police the Altamont concert is often believed to have occurred during Sympathy For The Devil. In fact, the tragic event actually occurred during the Stones’ performance of Under My Thumb — but the dark overtones of Sympathy For The Devil seem forever linked with that event.

Almost six decades on from its release, Sympathy For The Devil remains a high point of the Stones’ live setlist and is one of their most enduringly popular songs.

In 2007, a poll of the greatest Stones songs in Mojo magazine placed Sympathy For The Devil at No.1.

Not surprisingly, any controversy about the Stones as devil worshippers soon passed as the moral panic subsided.

But in 2002, Keith Richards acknowledged that the core message of this dark and unique masterpiece from the Stones remained a cautionary tale in contemporary times.

“Sympathy is quite an uplifting song,” Richards is quoted as saying on the songfacts website. “It's just a matter of looking the Devil in the face.

“He's there all the time. I've had very close contact with Lucifer – I've met him several times…

“When that song was written, it was a time of turmoil. It was the first sort of international chaos since World War II. And confusion is not the ally of peace and love…

“Sympathy For The Devil is a song that says, ‘Don't forget him. If you confront him, then he's out of a job’.”

They set the template for the classic rock band, but it was the Rolling Stones’ knack for songwriting that really underpinned what became some of the 20th century’s most recognisable music. Though revered by most, some tend to overlook their aptitude in the songwriting domain - stacking them unfavourably against their prolific contemporaries, the Beatles and the Kinks.

But The Stones’ golden streak (debatably) ran longer, with certified classic albums such as Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers constantly ranking high in those greatest ever lists.

The band’s most swaggering and vital rock ‘n’ roll cuts sounded the starting gun for what would follow over ensuing decades. Yet, the likes of Jumpin' Jack Flash, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Start Me Up and their ilk often belie the band’s equal form when it came to crafting some of the most heart-rending ballads of the ‘60s and ‘70.

There’s the bitter despair of Angie, the yearning commitment of Wild Horses and the heartbroken resignation of Ruby Tuesday. Then there’s arguably the band’s finest ever moment - the tornado-like Gimme Shelter. Set amongst a backdrop of civil unrest (and prominently featuring American soul singer Merry Clayton), it’s less a song and more the sound of rock’s then most outrageous band reaching outwards to document something more profound - and soundtracking an era of colossal social change.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, back in 1985, Mick Jagger opened up about his philosophy on songwriting; “I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.”

Jagger pointed to the first song that he and Keith Richards wrote together - the melancholy As Tears Go By (made famous by Mick's former girlfriend, the late Marianne Faithfull), as a prime example of this.

“You can’t just experience something and leave it at that. You’ve got to try and embroider, like, any land of writing. And that’s the fun part of it. You have this one experience looking out of a window, seeing children. Well, you might not have felt anything, but then you just let your mind drift and dream, and you imagine an older person doing that. You put yourself in their point of view, and you start to write other things, and all this is a very subconscious thing. Out of that comes a mature thought, out of a young person.”

Jagger’s perspective here should give any songwriter pause for thought. If we’re attempting to write autobiographically, just how truthful should we be?

It’s not uncommon for many artists, writing ostensibly personal songs to mythologise and romanticise events, emotions, sensations and places to shape a point, or try to say something about themselves. Even if the conscious intention was to be as honest as possible.

It’s a human being thing, we just can’t help but dig out and emphasise meaning in our own personal narratives. As songwriters, it's best to acknowledge this tendency we all share, and try to balance out the more honest, autobiographical elements via some concessions to artistic license.

The young Jagger made a point of ‘embroidering’ real situations he lived through, and emphasising or exaggerating aspects of his personality and memories when songwriting. As Mick states, the very idea of wisdom is built upon lived experience.

But, if Mick hadn’t been through it himself, he’d consciously imagine he had…

“I was reading [Alexander] Pushkin,” Jagger continued, in the same Rolling Stone interview, “…and his stories are autobiographical. But not totally, because he was never in Siberia - but his friends were, so he uses it. You use your own experience, and then you spice it up with your friends’ observations and your imagination.”

Jagger’s instruction then, is to use your real life experience and feelings as the song’s bedrock - after all, it’s important that you have a personal stake in what you’re making - and then try filtering your perspective through the eyes of another observer. It might just enhance the emotional resonance of your song.

Being a bit more literary about songwriting in this way doesn’t just affect how you write lyrics. Making grandiosity out of the mundane can be a rewarding creative endeavour even if you’re working solely in sound.

In the world of music-making, those tracks that are based on your past experiences - memories of people, places and times long gone - can be rendered hugely cinematic, painted in widescreen and using bold emotional colours.

You can choose to view your own experiences through the perspective of another character (real or imagined) and re-locate those events into dream-scapes, other countries or other worlds.

With songwriting, or music-making, the level at which you can embroider is huge. Just as long as you hold on to the truth of that core emotional thread, you can maintain your authenticity, just as Jagger did. Balancing sincerity with artistry.

It’s a point of view that another great songwriter, Paul Simon, espoused when interviewed for the (highly recommended) book Songwriters on Songwriting in 2003. Simon said, “It's very helpful to start with something that's true. If you start with something that's false, you're always covering your tracks. Something simple and true, that has a lot of possibilities, is a nice way to begin.”

You’d think that being part of The Rolling Stones and living the dream as part of one of their legendary world tours would be an unmissable all-time high. Turns out that that wasn’t the case and, come their 1990 Urban Jungle tour, at least one of the band would much rather have been watching Crystal Palace instead.

That’s the remarkably honest truth laid out by Bill Wyman who, in a new interview with FourFourTwo, explained that, by 1990 he’d gone as far as feigning illness in order to skip band commitments and watch the footy instead.

By 1990, Wyman had grown tired of the Stones relentless efforts to maintain and please a crowd and, following a final payday across 1989 and 1990 (and the three stages of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour), quit the band. However, it seems that he’d pretty much checked out before then.

Blame the 1990 FA Cup final.

"I had to find an excuse," Wyman remembers, setting the scene. The band were rehearsing in Amsterdam with their first gig of the tour days away, but with multiple US and Asian gigs under his belt, Wyman felt he could take his foot off the gas and take a well-earned break.

So what excuse did he come up with?

"It was toothache... I did have problems with my wisdom tooth, but I aggravated it so I could drive back to London and go to the match."

The match – which took place on 12 May 1990 – proved to be a blinder, and well worth Wyman’s cheeky attendance with Crystal Palace and Manchester United finishing the game in a 3-3 cliffhanger. Unfortunately, with the first date of the European leg of the tour looming (playing Rotterdam’s De Kuip on 18 May, 1990) he was unable to stretch his fake illness sufficiently far and missed the replay. (Palace would eventually lose one-nil to United.)

"I couldn't make the replay as we were already on the Urban Jungle tour,” Wyman admits. But, he claims, the band did great despite his absence and had "worked it out" by then.

"Mick [Jagger] and Charlie [Watts] were big cricket fans; Mick watches some international football, though he earned a reputation as a jinx,” Wyman reveals. “He was cheering on Brazil when they got humiliated 7-1 by Germany, he's been to England games where they've lost and he was a USA fan when they lost against Ghana."

Important lesson: If Mick Jagger ever comes begging you for a free ticket to the game, you know what to do.

Diamond geezer

Elsewhere Wyman relates some inside info regarding his input on the latest Stones album, Hackney Diamonds.

"They asked me to do a track [Live By The Sword] that was unfinished, with Charlie Watts playing on it. They thought it would be nice to reunite the original rhythm section.

"It was a hard one to play on, and busy – Elton [John] played the piano on it as well. Mick and the producer said my stuff was good and they were happy. I did two tracks and they'll save one for another album."

Famously, following Wyman’s departure at the end of the Urban Jungle tour, the band even went so far as to refuse to acknowledge Wyman’s departure. "When they were doing the plan for the coming year, I said: ‘Well there’s no point me discussing it, because I’m leaving.’ And they went: ‘You’re not leaving.’ I said: 'I am leaving, I’ve left.' And they wouldn’t believe me," Wyman told Classic Rock.

“Two years went by, and they were putting the band together again to make a new record in ’94. They said: ‘Are you still in the band?’ I said: ‘I left two years ago.’”

The Rolling Stones will now NOT be playing surprise, as-yet-unannounced gigs in the UK in 2025.

That’s the official word from Stones insiders (via The Times) as plans for the increasingly clock-watching megastars to enjoy another (last?) payday have ultimately come to naught.

The Stones last (last?) tour – promoting the band’s 2024 Hackey Diamonds album – was purely an American affair and the band last played the UK in 2022 as part of their Sixty tour, celebrating their 60 years in the business.

But with multiple global obligations to meet and the rest of Europe and the US to keep satisfied, the band’s three UK dates (at Liverpool’s Anfield ground and London’s Hyde Park) were a fleeting visit for a band that could have sold out twice as many UK seats.

The hope had been, therefore, to give UK fans a bigger bite of the Stone’s cherry with multiple machinations going on behind the scenes to secure some summer 2025 slots, most specifically an extended residence at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

In addition, multiple European gigs were on the cards with Paris, Barcelona, and Rome (the latter two being passed over on their last Euro jaunt) being proposed, but similarly recently scrapped.

Insiders have cited “complications with venues and travel as well as existing commitments” as the reasons why the 2025 mini Euro tour is off.

The band – now sadly without original drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021 aged 80 – remains one of music’s hottest tickets with last year’s 20-date US-only Hackney Diamonds tour being attended by 880,000 fans, generating $235 million.

With Euro dates out of the picture, attention now turns as to whether the band are sufficiently free for a return to Glastonbury in 2025? It wouldn’t be out of the question given their triumphant first appearance at the festival back in 2013.

Watch this space.

Ex-Rolling Stone Bill Wyman has been shining a light on his life, telling all in a revealing new interview with Classic Rock. In it we get new details regarding his departure, some juicy new tidbits on the band’s finances, and his opinion on what The Stones should be doing.

The notoriously fastidious bassist has already written 14 books, detailing his life before, during and after his tenure with The Stones, and regarding his legendary archiving of memorabilia and facts, Wyman suggests that: “It probably started off with me collecting a few things thinking we were going to be around for maybe a year or two, maybe on television once, have two or three records, and I wanted to leave a few things for my son, who was eight months old when I joined the Stones, so he knew his dad was in a band once, and played a couple of shows [laughs].”

But being in The Stones wasn’t always plain sailing. In one instance the young heartthrob was left fearing for his life: “Once just outside Los Angeles, we left the stadium having played to five thousand kids, the limo driver chose the wrong exit and we couldn’t get out,” Wyman reveals.

“Pretty soon the car was covered in kids, they climbed on the boot, the roof, they were banging on the windows and we had to lay down on the floor with our feet holding the roof up. We couldn’t get any air because we were just engulfed.

“Then the cops came, started swinging their sticks and cleared a way to the helicopter. Keith had a scarf he used to wear and on one occasion some of the girls got hold of one end of it and some the other, then they started to pull and wouldn’t let go. Nearly strangled him.

"So you had those moments: all your clothes ripped and big chunks of hair pulled out. But it wasn’t frightening, terrifying or really dangerous, you just had to laugh it off in the end.”

And despite his frivolous Stones-annoying, solo ode to fame and fortune (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rockstar – a song about Wyman’s capers in the south of France – “Keith liked it” – it seems he wasn’t always living the highlife.

“We were living in big country mansions, but we had no fucking money,” Wyman explains. “[Stones Manager ’68-’70, Allen] Klein had all the money, and when you wanted anything you begged him to send you some money.

“It was a nightmare. And then [Prime Minister Harold] Wilson comes in, and puts tax up to ninety-three percent, it was absurd. So we left. We had to leave, and then we were accused of being multimillionaires, leaving because we didn’t want to pay our way, but we weren’t.

“Mick and Keith were wealthier because they had songwriting and publishing royalties, but me, Brian, Charlie and, eventually, Ronnie only had about a tenth of what they were getting.”

You can't always get what you want

And on the subject of Brian Jones, Wyman highlights Jones’ lifestyle and choices as the reason why he was ousted from the band, while protesting his own and ex-drummer Charlie Watts’ professionalism: “There was no malice, they just got fed up with his drug taking. None of the rest of us took drugs. Well, Keith… They did a bit, but there was no heavy stuff for years.

"I never had any, nor did Charlie, we were always completely clean. We had responsibilities, so we behaved ourselves.”

And speaking of departures, Wyman reveals that The Stones actually refused to let him go: “Well, I should’ve done it a lot earlier… In the eighties. I hung on for a three-tour ending across ’89 and ’90 [three legs of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour], after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of £200,000, because we weren’t earning anything.

“Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie and Ronnie were scraping by. Ronnie started to do art to feed his family. So I was so happy to leave in the end. Which they absolutely didn’t like, and refused to accept. They said: 'You have not left.'

"When they were doing the plan for the coming year, I said: “Well there’s no point me discussing it, because I’m leaving.” And they went: “You’re not leaving.” I said: “I am leaving, I’ve left.” And they wouldn’t believe me.

“Two years went by, and they were putting the band together again to make a new record in ’94. They said: “Are you still in the band?” I said: “I left two years ago.”

And as for The Stones today? Wyman, of course, has his take on what should have happened: “When Charlie left, I thought they would close. I really did. They could replace the bass, but I didn’t think they could replace Charlie, and his charisma, and what a great guy he was, but they went on, which surprised me.

"I wouldn’t say it disappointed me, but it surprised me. I think it would’ve been a good time for them to… But I don’t think they’ve got anything else to do, otherwise they’d do it, wouldn’t they?”

Be sure to check out the full interview here.

One of John Lennon’s closest confidants during the latter part of his life has written a book and in a new interview with Spin magazine has talked about his life and his relationship with Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Elliot Mintz was a radio and TV broadcaster who found himself in Ono’s orbit in 1971 and stayed in close contact with the couple throughout the rest of the decade. He is one of the few people who was in regular contact with Lennon throughout his ‘house husband’ years of the late 70s when he seemed to have disappeared completely.

He paints a portrait of the ex-Beatle as in turns melancholic, competitive and insecure about his standing in music history. His attitudes towards two of his contemporaries – Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan – bear this out.

“He felt the Rolling Stones got the kind of adulation and respect that ‘The Mop Tops’ didn’t, and that the Stones were perceived as the revolutionaries because they came forward with Street Fighting Man as opposed to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,” Mintz says.

“He loved Mick Jagger, and the two of them spent countless nights together in London. But when he would get really angry about it, he’d called them ‘the Rolling Pebbles.’”

“He had that same kind of envy of the way people perceived Bob Dylan,” he continues. “He insisted to me he was a far better writer than Dylan was. It was a love-hate thing. He loved Bob’s earlier work, but he liked the simpler, direct stuff… We would have these conversations where John would insist that I Am the Walrus was superior to anything that Bob had ever penned.”

And of course, he was still competitive with his old partner. “John as a solo artist didn’t sell a lot of albums compared to Paul McCartney. That bothered him. So did the adulation that Paul received when he’d go out on the road, which was all rightfully deserved, in my opinion.

"He believed he was a creative genius. He believed that throughout his entire life. When he was in art school, he thought he was brilliant.”

“That’s a very confining place to find yourself, because you really believe that you’re sitting at a dining room table and you’re alone,” Mintz points out.

“You’re not being celebrated. Especially between 1975 and 1980, he felt like the pieces just didn’t seem to fit, and it caused him great personal anguish.”

Mintz’s book We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me is out now. The author, now 79, explained why, after all this time, he decided to spill the beans: “I had received in recent years some encouragement from Sean Ono Lennon to tell my tale, (but also) I thought to myself, ‘If not now, when?’

"If I didn’t tell my story at this moment, people would have to get a Ouija board to hear me speak.”

You could spend weeks, months and even years building the most astonishing, potentially era-defining tracks, but, if you then treat the release process as an afterthought, all your hard work is going to end up reaching nobody.

You might be thinking of deferring this side of things to external promotion agencies, but that doesn't mean that you can shirk on having a solid vision of just what your artist identity is.

The truth is, if you release music in an unbranded, visually inconsistent or generally clumsy way, then people can quickly lose interest, even if your music is legitimately awesome.

Worse than that, they might judge your (superb) music quite differently if you’ve plumped for a Times New Roman artist name and a badly cropped stock photo as your album art.

As the boom in self-releasing artists has increased exponentially over the last decade, so too has the growing requirement for musicians to think about how they present themselves.

In days gone by, it was typically a record label, photographer or manager who would delicately consider and construct an artist’s branding and image. Today, it’s more common for musicians to handle the building of this themselves. This is borne out by the sad truth that labels don’t give many a second glance unless they’ve already proved they can cultivate their own following.

But, if you get this stage right, then why would you need a major label anyway? As data reported by Catapult My Music underlined, independent artists now make up more than one third of the overall music business, and accounted for 50% of Spotify revenue in 2023.

Then there's stories like that of Lauren Spencer Smith, a self-releasing artist whose song Fingers Crossed landed in the top five of the UK chart following it going viral on TikTok. The reality is, that it's entirely possible to achieve major success as a self-releasing artist, and retain 100% of your IP.

Why your artist name is critical

The first consideration is whether you’re going to put out your music just as yourself (i.e. your own name) or have a tailored name that suits your music. Historically, artist names have resonated with the context of the time they first came to prominence, or infer something about their sound.

For example, if you think about the name ‘Pink Floyd’, based on the original style of the band, it perfectly sums up both the psychedelic, subversive nature of their music (‘Pink’) and the sense of playful whimsy that the early incarnation of the band evoked (‘Floyd’).

Many bands, particularly those on the heritage indie spectrum, might give themselves a ‘The’ as the definite article at the start of their name (The Strokes, The Black Keys etc), which implies a classicism, or attachment to a sense of proud lineage, stemming back to the early pioneers of rock and pop, who operated in a more formal age.

Others invoke a state of being, or sensation (Nirvana, Oasis etc) whereas others venerate technology, and allude to the technologically-driven music they create, in their name (Aphex Twin, 808 State, Modeselektor).

The point we’re making here is that choosing a band or artist name shouldn't be choosing a random assortment of words. A good name can play a significant role in communicating your intention to the listener before they’ve heard any of your music.

So, think carefully about the music you make, and the type of artist you want people to believe you are. If your name suggests a story, or raises a question, then all the better.

Beyond what the words of your band or artist name state, there’s also the visual impact of how the name looks. This one is critical, and is so often under-valued in importance. Your name will appear on your releases, your website, your socials platforms and your posters.

The biggest brands on Earth know that this is actually a more essential consideration than the words’ meaning. It’s why short, often-meaningless-but-memorable names become more a visual short-hand for a company or service than mean anything in of themselves (key examples include Nike, Apple, Kodak, Google.)

A big part of the above is the actual design of the name and how it appears as a logo. Design wise, it might be tempting to go minimal, yet often using unusual, little-used fonts, or colour-variations can really make your name stand apart from the rest. There's a superb run-down of some of the typography and design of some legendary acts over on indieground.net.

If you’re not great at graphic design, then it's well worth finding someone who can take your idea and craft some interesting spins. After all, this isn’t just a ‘name’ - it’s your business, and is worth taking the time to get right.

Some of the most recognisable band names in history have managed to become a visual short-hand for their respective genres. Just ask Kiss, Nirvana, The Ramones and, the originators of capitalising on band-branding, The Rolling Stones. All of which have spawned branding that has elevated their names into the world of general street fashion, worn by people who might not even be fans of their music.

But, if you’re just getting your feet off the ground as an artist, the core take-home here is not to just plump for the first thing that comes to mind. Test out some mock cover ideas or mock poster/social media advert ideas with different potential artist names, and see how the visual impact lands. If you’ve got close, honest friends to run it by, then definitely do so.

Getting your artist identity out there

After settling on your artist name, the next stage is to launch your artist presence on social media, and begin the process of building your audience. We'd consider this as a more vital step than even getting your streaming distribution locked down.

After all, if you’re planning on releasing music on the big platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal, you’re going to want an initial bedrock of listeners (even if they’re just friends and family) which you can gradually build upon.

While the platforms you choose might vary depending on your own personal preferences, we massively recommend you set-up an Instagram business account in the first instance.

According to stats amassed by New Artist Model, 35% of all adult social network users are on Instagram, but 72% of teenagers and 71% of 18-24 year-olds have accounts.This younger demographic is an essential one for music listening exposure and engagement.

You can upload videos in the form of reels, as well as art with audio either embedded into the asset or (once you’ve eventually got streaming platform distribution in-hand) directly attached your stories and posts. Take it from us, it's the easiest way to get immediate reaction to your music.

You're going to want to get set-up for tracking your engagement and directly contact your fans, which an Instagram Business account will provide. Instructions on how to set this up can be found here

Your profile image should be - at least initially - a scaled image of your logo within a 320 x 320 frame. This will be cropped into a circle, so your logo should sit centrally, design-wise. Your bio should be fairly brief, and you should reserve some space to include some critical call to actions, such as links to other pages or videos (when you get to making them, that is).

If you have pre-selected pics of yourself that you want to use for your artist identity socials, then use one of these as the cornerstone of your first post, detailing who you are and the kind of music you make.

If you don’t have any press pics, or want to remain somewhat ambiguous, then think of some more creative ways to visually represent, and tease, your music.

Though it might sound like a slog, spending a few hours with an image editor and your music can be quite an enjoyable process, and synthesising the perfect combination of visuals and music can go a long way to instantly grabbing those passive scrollers.

Turn your early followers into fans

We’re going to take the setting up of alternative social accounts, like Facebook or X, as read. Preferences will vary, but in our own experience of establishing a solo artist social media presence, Instagram tends to deliver the best results, and is a far quicker, compelling and often more creatively stimulating ecosystem to maintain.

A big driver to your posts, external links and videos can be through Instagram Stories. Where you can upload short-form videos, links to your posts/pictures or simply a link to your track (when you’ve got them out there). Having a story each day (containing a call-to-action) will, over-time, accumulate more views, streams and awareness of your output.

If you’re basing your launch as an artist around a specific release (in our case, this was an album) then you can begin promoting yourself with a tease campaign: Fragments of your tracks, intercut with creative imagery (which can be pretty subtle), which give the listener a feel of your sound.

Further ideas to bolster your Instagram feed could consist of:

• Posts about specific gear or tech you use. Why and how you use them.
• Posts about the writing of specific tracks and songs - including clips of bits you’re currently working on.
• Track-by-track descriptions of each track on your album/EP, explaining the background and story behind their making.
• Posts about inspirations, and/or experiences with notable other artists.
• Behind-the-scenes clips of recording certain tracks, or generally at work in your studio.
• And, more broadly, ANY nice or potentially engaging images you take can be co-opted into your artist Instagram page.

While these are all solid content generation ideas for your artist feed, you’re likely to be trumpeting this information into something of a howling void at this stage. But, as your tracks start to gain traction, and your videos start to clock higher views, linking back to your Instagram as the primary source of daily content, will keep engaging and reminding your audience that you exist!

Gaining momentum and teasing tracks

While we’ll delve deeper into the more complicated mechanics of distribution across streaming platforms in an upcoming article, we recommend that the first place you should upload your music is an artist-first platform like SoundCloud, Mixcloud, hearthis.at or Audius.

Unlike the major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, these types of platforms allow immediate account creation and the direct uploading of your tracks. You can then share them with anybody you choose.

You can personalise your account with your own branding and, most importantly, engage with other artists in your niche, and beyond. This is a great environment to get direct feedback from other artists and creators, and is the perfect space for making some initial connections that might become vital down the line.

Once you’ve got your SoundCloud (or alternative listening platform) account established, you can start directing your burgeoning Instagram audience to listen to full tracks by posting direct links to individual tracks in your bio, and in stories.

While it might be tempting to upload everything you’re wanting to get out there in one fell swoop, it can be a sure-fire attention-grabber if you try and tease your upcoming track drops over a period of time. Creating a sense of ongoing momentum that will eventually lead to you releasing your work on streaming platforms.

In the next part of this ongoing series, we’ll explore some further ways you can develop your artist identity, and grow your initial audience into a thriving community of fans!

Mick Jagger was at a birthday party for Eric Clapton when Mick Taylor leaned over and told him he was leaving the Rolling Stones. It was 12 December 1974 and Jagger, Taylor and assembled guests were watching a fireworks display. “Do you think he was serious?” a bereft Jagger asked Ronnie Wood who was standing nearby.  

Taylor was deadly serious and this was a decision that had been a long time in the making. In the 2012 documentary Crossfire Hurricane, Taylor said he was addicted to heroin and left to try and protect himself and his family from the maelstrom of being a member of the Rolling Stones. 

The issue of songwriting credits was also mentioned by Taylor in an interview with Mojo in 1997. "We used to fight and argue all the time. And one of the things I got angry about was that Mick had promised to give me some credit for some of the songs – and he didn't. I believed I'd contributed enough. Let's put it this way – without my contribution those songs would not have existed. There's not many but enough, things like Sway and Moonlight Mile on Sticky Fingers and a couple of others."

In his 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said he felt that friction between Taylor and Keith Richards was also a contributing factor: “I think he found it difficult to get on with Keith." 

Whatever the reason, the reality was that the Stones were losing a mercurially talented player. For all their combined talents, Taylor was a virtuoso, whose stunningly fluid and emotive playing elevated the Stones to new heights. Just as the band was transformed when he joined its ranks, it was equally transformed when he left – a testament to his peerless and prodigious talent.

For Taylor, who joined the band following the death of Brian Jones in 1969, stepping into a band of the scale of the Stones was a shock. He was just 20 and much younger than the rest of the Stones when he made his baptism-of-fire live debut at their free concert in Hyde Park, on  5 July 1969, in front of 250,000 people. This was just two days after Brian Jones had been found dead in his swimming pool, after being fired from the band almost a month earlier.

It was revered British blues purist John Mayall who recommended Mick Taylor to Jagger. In April 1966, Mayall had asked Taylor to join his band the Bluesbreakers, replacing the departing Peter Green, who in turn had replaced Eric Clapton. 

When Jagger and Richards invited Taylor along to Olympic Studios he was reportedly shocked by how under-rehearsed the Stones were. At that point, he thought he was simply there to play a session. 

He was invited back the next day to continue rehearsing with the band, who were recording their eighth studio album, Let It Bleed. Taylor ended up overdubbing guitar on the tracks Country Honk and Live With Me, as well as the single Honky Tonk Women.

Jagger and Richards were blown away by the youngster’s playing and invited him to join the band. Mick Taylor would go on to play on five Rolling Stones studio albums: Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile On Main Street (1972), Goat's Head Soup (1973), and It's Only Rock And Roll (1974). His stellar playing is also captured on the live 1969 album Get Yer Ya Yas out, recorded over four nights at New York’s Madison Square Gardens.

Mick Taylor’s playing would bring fluidity, spontaneity and excitement to the Stones. He was able to contribute a level of virtuosity that the Stones had not had before. Taylor re-energised the Stones and his tenure with the band would be defined by many as the golden era of the Stones’ recorded output. It was a view reinforced by Jagger.

“I think he had a big contribution,” Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995. “He made it very musical. He was a very fluent melodic player, which we never had and we don’t have now. Neither Keith nor Ronnie Wood plays that sort of style. It was very good for me working with him. I could sit down with Mick Taylor and he would play very fluid lines beneath my vocals. He was exciting, and he was very pretty, and it gave me something to follow, to bang off. Some people think that's the best version of the band that existed."

Live With Me was the first track Taylor played on as they put the finishing touches to Let It Bleed. His influence is immediate on this pacey song with its Stax-style 4/4 attack. On Honky Tonk Women, he reels off sultry and slinky blues lines that fit seamlessly within Richard’s groove-laden chops. 

But it was on the Stones 1969 US tour, from 7 November to 6 December, where Taylor really started to make his mark and his playing can be heard on the band’s live album Get Yer Ya Yas Out (1969). Like Peter Green, there is a real melodicism to Taylor’s playing, with memorable motifs woven within expressive freeform playing. Taylor is also a mean slide player, as is evident on Love In Vain. 

On the pacey, infectious shuffle of Midnight Rambler, Taylor reels off searing lines on his ‘58 Sunburst Les Paul. On the outro of Sympathy For The Devil, he injects real groove and attack, powering the song forward with searing lead.

Listening to this album now, it’s striking how powerful and unbridled the Stones sound, and the calibre of Taylor’s guitar work is a key element of that renewed energy. As Keith Richards notes in his book Life, “Mick Taylor being in the band on that ‘69 tour certainly sealed the Stones together again”.

By 1969, the Rolling Stones had morphed into a rock band, but their mid-60s pop sensibilities still exerted a hold in terms of arrangement and structure. Mick Taylor helped change all that, bringing jazz sensibilities and a much looser, more adventurous feel.

Creatively, Taylor’s first real studio contribution was Sticky Fingers (1971). Keith Richards recalled Taylor’s contribution to that album in his 2010 autobiography Life. “So we did Sticky Fingers with him. And the music changed – almost unconsciously… You write with Mick Taylor in mind, maybe without realising it, knowing he can come up with something different. You’ve got to give him something he’ll really enjoy. Not just the same old grind.” 

It’s an album that blends blues, country and Southern soul, and is brimming with Taylor highlights. There’s a real swagger to his lead playing on the track Sway while his country licks on Dead Flowers are impeccable. But it’s the song Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, that is arguably the album’s centrepiece and the perfect showcase for Mick Taylor’s supple talents. 

“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking came out flying,” recalled Keith Richards in his 2010 autobiography Life. “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, this is some groove’.”

The real highlight is the track’s extended jam, which takes the song from its original length of 2:43 to 7:14. This was a happy accident. After the supposed conclusion, the band kept playing and the tape kept rolling, capturing masterful playing from Taylor, who starts picking out a repetitive Latin-flavoured motif on his walnut brown Gibson ES-345 through a Ampeg VT-22 amp.  

“Towards the end of the song, I just felt like carrying on playing,” says Taylor on the UDiscoverMusic website. “It sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened.”

It’s a majestic, improvised solo with a Santana-like feel, that dips and dives between strident phrasing and beautifully judged melodicism. At 6:02 he veers into a raunchy repetitive pattern, which Charlie Watts and the horn section spontaneously accentuate with pushes.

“Generally, I tried to bring my own distinctive sound and style to Sticky Fingers and I like to think I added some extra spice,” said Taylor. “I don’t want to say ‘sophistication’ – I think that sounds pretentious. Charlie said I brought ‘finesse’. That’s a better word. I’ll go with what Charlie said.”

Taylor’s skills are slightly more diminished on the stunning follow-up album Exile On Main Street, recorded at Nellcôte, the villa leased by Keith Richards during the band’s self-imposed tax exile on the French Riviera. It was during the recording of this album that he became hooked on heroin. But he continued to deliver some stellar performances, most noticeably on his stunning solo on Shine A Light. 

Nellcôte rapidly became an epicentre for 24-hour hedonism. Chaos prevailed. Jagger then took the finished tapes to engineer and producer Glyn Johns to mix at Basing Street studios in London. In a 2015 interview in Mojo magazine, Johns recalled working on a track on which Mick Taylor had recorded backing vocals, drums and bass. When Taylor asked Johns why he had removed them Johns replied “The Rolling Stones have a f**king great drummer and a really great bass player. You, sunshine, play the guitar and you’ll hear it rather nicely when I’ve finished this.” 

The Stones received some criticism for next album Goat’s Head Soup, which was recorded in Jamaica, although Billboard magazine praised Taylor for his “superb guitar work” on the album. 

He continued to excel on his final album with the band, It’s Only Rock And Roll. Taylor’s favourite personal moment in the Stones occurred during the recording of the track Time Waits For Noone. “I love that solo,” Taylor told Damien Fanelli of Guitar World in May, 2012. “I think it’s probably the best thing I did with the Stones. It’s not one of their hits; it was an album track. But it’s quite lyrical and it’s a bit different from a lot of other Stones songs. I’d done something that I’d never done. Because of the structure of the song, it pushed my guitar playing in a slightly different direction.”

In his autobiography Life, Keith Richards confesses to having sometimes been in awe of Taylor’s playing, citing his “the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song” but he also says Taylor was “very distant”. 

For the Riolling Stones, Mick Taylor’s departure in 1974 left a significant void as they mulled over an array of possible contenders, such as Ry Cooder, Rory Gallagher, to replace his blues-infused virtuosity. In the end they didn’t try to replicate what Taylor had but opted instead for a whole different style and personality with Ronnie Wood. 

Twenty-four years on, in the 1998 book The Rolling Stones: A Life On The Road, Charlie Watts shared his thoughts on Mick Taylor’s contribution to the Stones. "I think we chose the right man for the job at that time just as Ronnie was the right man for the job later on,” he observed. “I still think Mick is great. I haven't heard or seen him play in a few years. But certainly what came out of playing with him are musically some of the best things we've ever done."

• The story of Rory Gallagher's Rolling Stones audition

If a show sounds good, it's not just down to the musicians onstage – there's an army of people making sure things go to plan. And the front-of-house sound engineer is a key figure in mixing what we hear, and making sure the myriad components and miles of cables behind delivering an artist's sound live don't fail and leave the audience angry. Dave Natale is one of the very best of that breed with 45 years proving it.

He's worked with the best; Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner and Prince amongst just some of the artists on his resume – many of who he's worked with for multiple years. Natale's new chat with Rick Beato is essential viewing for not just a musician who plays live, but listeners who want to understand more about what it takes to deliver great sound night after night on the road. But when Beato brought up the sometimes prickly subject of digital Vs analogue gear, Natale had no hesitations on sharing his clear perspective.

"Analogue sounds better to you whether you know it does or you don't – your brain is smarter than you are," begins Natale. "Six million years of evolution is not gonna be fooled by 30 years of chip design.  Now that's what I think, but [points to ears] these are analogue and they always will be. If you wanna argue that I'm available all day long and that's the way it is. Analogue is better, it is."

Natale has a story to illustrate his point too – and it throws up the issues of generational experience and perspective. "We did a thing once where we had a CD of the piece of music and the turntable of a piece of music, synced up with a blind tester. 

"We'd switch them back and forwards, we'd sync up the playback so it was in sync and you'd switch and you'd listen to A or B, or they would switch it and I said, 'Analogue or digital'; when I heard it. And I was right 9/10 times. They couldn't believe that and the reason [the tester] couldn't believe it was that he was young. So he never heard vinyl, or he never heard enough vinyl to know what it was I was hearing because I heard mountains of vinyl. Because there are little things – there are artifacts… but I picked it 9/10 times. Did I get lucky? Probably."

Perspectives and variables aside, Natale's reputation for delivering the goods night after night means he has a good handle on reliable setups and gear for guitarists and drummers onstage. And yes, when it comes to the best microphones to use his choices have been consistent.

"Beyerdynamic M88 – that's the only one I've ever used," says Natale of his kickdrum mic choice, adding that he prefers the drum hole to be off the side for placement. "There's a little too much attack, dead centre. If you have the holes off to the side you can angle the mic toward the centre of the drum."

"It just sounds good," is Natale's simple reasoning for sticking with the M88, but he has to be prepared before a tour. "The problem is the 88 gets beat up by the concussion," he adds. "So I take about ten to twelve out to rehearsals and I go through them with the drum tech and monitor guy. I sit on the front of the drum riser and I don't listen to them. I let the monitor guy and the drum tech decide. 

"The drum tech is listening to the monitors – he knows what his guy wants to hear, so he knows from a relative viewpoint what we're going for. And the monitor guy has the difficult job of making it sound like that. I can do whatever I want to the EQ and it's not going to affect anyone except the audience, so I just switch back and forth between these mics – I hold it in the correct position."

Natale then describes the process of testing each M88 to find the optimum performer, eventually filtering down to around three. "A main, where the two of them agree which one sounds the best, the next one that sounds the best is the spare and then there's a third one just in case."

For the toms it's the industry standard Sennheiser MD421 and on the snare the tried and true Shure SM57, with the old-school approach of top snare mic at the top only for the FOH mix. "I don't use the bottom mic but monitor guys like the bottom mic or some performers want to hear the sizzle so I put the bottom mic on but don't plug it into the console [for the front of house mix]."

For drum overhead mics Natale has opted for Austrian Audio OC18 large diaphragm condensers, and it's Shure dynamics elsewhere:"I have 57s on all the guitars and 58s on the vocals. "It's all old guy standard stuff," adds Natale. 

And he doesn't use noise gates or compression on the drums he mixes. "I don't use anything because when you insert something there's another point of failure, if the return on the insert fails that's it – your channel goes down. And I don't want anything interrupting the show because that's not a good scene. That's number one. Number two is I'm kind of lazy. Number three is nobody is there because I'm mixing the show – they don't give two shits who I am, they don't care who I am and I like it that way. They came to see the band on the stage, so I try to present the band like the band, only really loud. I don't tend to mess around with their sound. It’s the band loud, that's it. Goodnight, then I leave."

He doesn't rule out the use of a limiter on vocals though. "I'll use a Manley [ELOP Stereo Electro-Optical Limiter] on a vocal because vocalists, when they get excited they give it a little extra sometimes. And this goes to the way I mix – the loudest thing on the planet has got to be the vocal. At all times. When a vocal is going on, you better be able to hear it. Not almost – perfectly. Every word. Because when people are driving around in their cars and a song comes on the radio, they're singing along with the song – they want to hear that vocal. So to get it up loud, compress it a little bit. That's the only thing I would ever use."   

Natale chooses Electro Voice RE20 big diaphragm condenser mics for bass amps. "I don't use a lot of the microphone," he reveals. "If the bassist has a lot of effects there's a pre-DI  and a Post-DI. The microphone is there, and you can use it for things, but I find because of the gigantic spaces I'm in, you need as much definition as humanly possible if I want to stand a chance of reaching the guy [in the audience] who's sitting up in the next zip code." Instead the mic is more of a backup if Natale loses the DI signals for any reason.  

Check out the full interview video above. 

• Best microphones for recording 2024: top studio mics for instruments, vocals and more

Arguably the world’s biggest and greatest rock band, The Rolling Stones continue to swagger across the world's biggest stages, more than 60 years after their inception.

Behind the Jagger swagger and the unquestioned status of Keef as guitar god, many considered drummer Charlie Watts, who sadly passed away aged 80 in 2021, to be the coolest member of the band. And with good reason.

Understated but impeccably laying down the grooves behind the r’n’b influenced rock tunes, Charlie’s swing was what made the Stones so essential and influential. Yet many fans who have enjoyed his key contribution to Stones classics like ‘Paint It Black’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Tumbling Dice’, ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ might not be aware that Watts is a schooled jazzer, whose boyhood hero was Charlie Parker. To the end, Watts continued to indulge his passion for jazz with the Charlie Watts Quintet and Tentet and put out a number of recordings paying tribute to Bird, as well as covering jazz and swing classics.

Growing up in Wembley, London, Charlie discovered drums through the playing of Chico Hamilton, and it wasn’t long before he was playing first in a swing band and then with British blues pioneer Alexis Korner, whose Blues Incorporated were regulars at the G Club in Ealing. The G Club was patronised by Mick, Keith and Brian Jones, who inducted Charlie into their band, even as he continued his labours as a commercial artist.

Here we present a classic interview from our archive, in which the coolest Stone discusses his early years with the band, his enduring love of jazz and the players who inspired him.

You continued with the day job even once you’d joined the Stones. Did you enjoy your work?

“Yes. I’m very easy like that. I was a designer, mostly advertising. I did three years as a lettering artist. I went from there to a design studio, an agency. I was doing it all the time I was with Alexis, and I was doing it when I was with The Stones, but I was ‘between engagements’ when I officially joined the Stones.

"I’d played with them before, but I was asked to come along to rehearsals by Brian [Jones] I used to hang out with them, go to job interviews, come back and we’d play the 100 Club. I’d get up in the morning and Brian and Keith would be snoring away, and I’d think, ‘I’m not going to an interview today – we’re playing tonight anyway.

“We had a lot of work in London and Richmond, four or five nights a week. We didn’t actually go around England in the early days. It’s terribly glamorous being on the stage, and suddenly I was in a band where everybody was clapping. Alexis was a big band to be in, but The Stones had such a mad following and it got bigger every week.

"And then The Beatles happened, and it became the thing to be in a beat group. And it was a great spawning ground for some strange players, some good. The Animals were a very good band live. The Stones were the best though, I think.”

What made you the best?

“Dunno. I think we swung, a lot. The Animals used to swing as well. They used to do a great version of ‘Almost Grown’. What made us the best? Being my band [laughs]. We had the best frontman in Mick, and he was, even in those days. And Keith was such a good rhythm guitar player, which is what he used to play in those days.

"He used to lead in but it was mostly rhythm. And Brian was good at what he did, so it was a great sound to have in the band. He’s like Ronnie [Wood], who’s a great guy to do anything. Ronnie’s a great adapter.”

Did you ever feel any regret that you came from this jazz background and suddenly you were playing rhythm and blues?

“No. I got introduced to this music. I was never a rock’n’roll fan when I was a kid. I used to love Fats Domino and Little Richard, but I was never an Elvis fan, I never followed the charts, and I liked Duke Ellington and Bird. I never had any trouble listening to jazz; it’s very easy for me.

"Some of it I think, ‘Oh God, I wish this would end,’ but not all jazz or improvised music is good. Most of it is just trying to be good. But when it does peak, it’s of a standard that is unbelievably high.

“But I got into this world with Alexis and The Stones. I’d never heard of Muddy Waters, and Keith and Brian used to play endless Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed. And Jimmy Reed’s Earl Phillips is one of the great jazz drummers in a way.

"He’s got such a quirky way of playing, and Chicago shuffles are technically very difficult to do. And when you see them do it properly, the old guys, it’s fantastic, because they come down on the backbeat so loud. They get this shuffle-like thing in between – it’s fantastic – without the feet going. And usually they play very quiet, the old guys. So to me it was not really any different, to be honest.

“I was young and we were off, playing around England with The Everly Brothers, who then had a fabulous drummer. He was young, 19 at the time. He’s on ‘Layla’ – he wrote ‘Layla’ with Eric. Jim Gordon, he was a fantastic player. We’d never seen a band as slick as that. That tour we had Bo Diddley.

"I think Little Richard was on it, a fantastic crowd of people to be stuck up in Leeds with, that lot. Jerome Green was the most incredible maraca player, and Mick learnt how to play the maracas properly, he can play waltz time and all that. The hard thing is stopping them, and he learnt that from Jerome.”

Did you feel competition with the other drummers around at the time?

“No. Yeah… well, you’re young, you know, so you get that. But I always gave up. Alexis’ band got so bloody big and good, with Jack Bruce and Graham Bond, that I just stepped out of it and let in Ginger, who at the time was probably the best player around. He still plays great, Ginger. He’s the nearest thing to an African we’ve got. But you used to see a lot of guys playing – Bobby Elliott is a really good player. Originally, I think, they had another guy, who played with them when we first went up the M1 and played away from home. The Stones, that is – I’d been up there once with Alexis.”

What was it like when you went into a recording studio for the very first time? When you heard yourself playing on record were pleased or was it a somewhat weird experience for you?

“I was thrilled. Glyn Johns took us in there, we did eight tracks in about 10 minutes and went off and played a club. I was sitting in the same booth where Phil Seamen used to do jingles, so I was happy to pretend I was there. It was IBC, opposite the BBC. Glyn did it when they stopped work at 5.30; he had some spare time. I personally have been very lucky with engineers, because they’ve all been good with drum sounds. Then when we did ‘Satisfaction’ in LA, the RCA guy was great as well. I can see him now with his Tinterello cigar.”

It all seems like such an incredibly exciting time, some of the musical changes you saw between 1960 and 1970…

“I think now that you’re not given time to learn what you do. One of the greatest things about jazz drummers is that you have to learn to play with a piano player acoustically, with a saxophone, a trumpet, at those volumes without losing intensity.

"And to watch an artist like Art Blakey do it was incredible, because he would go from deafening noise to one of his tricks, this press roll he’d do on the cymbal, and then he’d come down and your breathing would be louder than his playing, but there’d be no let up in the intensity. So there isn’t this, and there isn’t the playing going on.

"Now the whole thing is set out. The kid learns to dance, do a video… the backing track’s already done. I like loops and all that and I like rap rhythms. It’s great to hear, but it’s such a produced thing. If you’re learning to play you never play a bass drum like they do on a rap record, because the tracks are altered, the sounds are altered.”

You seem to be as passionate about music now as you were at the beginning.

“I love playing, I always wish I was better. One of the faults of listening to great players is that you know you could never be that. I knew that when I was 20 I could never accomplish that. I’m not rounded enough or dedicated enough. But I’ve never lost the passion of wanting to play the drums.”

The guitar world is full of information that may seem obvious to one player, but could be revelatory to another. Assumed knowledge is dangerous because it can alienate us – and the more we can all share, the better. This Tom Bukovac tip on power chords is a case in point. 

The acclaimed Nashville session ace's YouTube Homeskoolin' series is probably the greatest source of guitar advice you'll find for free online – it's not just about playing, but the whole approach of being a successful musician.  Uncle Larry (Bukovac's nickname) is an endless well of advice and inspiration. And the subject of power chords is no exception.

After illustrating the popular Chuck Berry technique of alternating the fifth and sixth with your pinkie finger during a power chord, he introduces another way to spice up your chords that's overlooked by many. And it takes a leaf out of the Rolling Stones playbook.

"It's the oldest trick in the rock 'n' roll book but it's amazing how many people don't know that," notes Tom. It involves playing the root chord and then hammering on part of another chord – playing a G and then hammering on part of a C chord, as he illustrates in the video above. 

And there's more…

"If you want to get really cool you can do this kind of thing," says Tom as he hammers on an A and an F# and keeps the B root note. "It's another way of doing that sort of rock that you would do on the piano where you've got the four chord basically over the one."

So plenty for us to explore here – check it out in the video above to learn more, and dig into other ways to power up your power chords in our own lesson. 

Subscribe to Tom Bukovac's YouTube channel for more great insights. 

Songwriting inspiration can come from anywhere – but the realms of sleep are perhaps the most mysterious. It it the subconscious or something more? The not knowing is part of the magic, and dream-inspired songwriting has given birth to some absolute classics. 

Whether it's a line, hook, riff or a whole song the writer wakes up to capture before it slips away again, we're here to look at the top 40 songs that owe their existence to 40 winks. 

1. Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me) – Train (Pat Monahan)

The US band's 2001 hit and Grammy-winner Drops Of Jupiter took a deeper dimension for listeners when its genesis was revealed by vocalist Pat Monahan. It was the band's breakthrough hit, but its inspiration came at a bittersweet price. 

"I would give it back," Pat Monahan candidly told the Daily Blast in 2022. "I lost my mother that year so that's why the song was written. So I'd give the song back if I could still call my mom but it was a great gift that she gave me."

A gift because Monahan felt that his late mum Patricia was reaching out to him one night. "She came to me in a dream and she said she can do all these things now, including swimming through the planets and coming back with drops of Jupiter in my hair. But I'd rather be there with you – heaven is overrated and you should really pay attention to your life, because this is important."

It wasn't just inspiration for a great song then, it was life advice for Monahan to carry forward with the band. But there was one thing the singer wanted to set straight with any guitarists coming after him after mishearing the 'Man heaven is overrated' line in the chorus.

"When the song came out people thought I was singing 'Van Halen is overrated' so I was getting hate mail like crazy," he told the Daily Blast. 

2. Yesterday – The Beatles (Paul McCartney)

The ultimate dream song? It's certainly the most covered one. Paul McCartney stayed with former flame Jane Asher's family in London for three years in the mid-'60s. They allowed him to stay in the upstairs attic room. "Perfect for an artist," the Beatle recalled to Paul Muldoon in the excellent podcast series McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. "And I managed to get a piano in there – a small swan-off piano. I went to sleep one night and dreamed this tune.

"Somewhere in this dream I heard this tune, and when I woke up I thought, 'It's great – I love that tune'. It was so vivid that the songwriter couldn't pinpoint whether it was an existing song he was recalling from childhood. 

"Is it a Fred Astaire – Cole Porter thing? What is it?" he wondered. "So I fell out of bed and the piano was right there to the left of my bed. So I just thought, well I'll try and work out how this song goes. I wonder what it is? It's got to be some old standard that I've just heard years ago and forgotten it.

"So I worked out chords, and the two opening chords are kind of nice," continued McCartney. "I got pretty lucky there because I didn't have to go to those chords."

Luck? This is Paul McCartney talking. "It was very clear," he says, humming the melody that starts the song. But with no portable recording device invented / at hand, what if he forgot it?

"In order to solidify it in my memory, I just blocked it out with some words which were 'Scrambled egg / oh my baby how I love your legs…'  It turns out these kinds of placeholder lyics were not common for McCartney in the Beatles. "We did that sometimes but not often," he explained. "Mainly we would sit there writing it so you'd get your only lyrics. We never really revised our stuff". But McCartney was still convinced the melody he had came from someone else's song. 

"So I had this tune, and I think the first person I saw was John. I said, 'What's this that's been bugging me – what's this song?' I was thinking he'd know it." He'd never heard it before. Then McCartney tried George Martin's encyclopedic musical mind. 

"After a couple of weeks of this it became clear no one knew it and it didn't exist, except in my heard," added McCartney. "And so I claimed it. It was like finding it on the street."

3. La Villa Strangiato – Rush (Alex Lifeson) 

Who dreams up a nine-and-a-half-minute instrumental? Alex Lifeson of course! In truth, rather than a specific melody or lyrics surfacing from a recurring nightmare the guitarist would have, it's more an attempt to recreate his experience of it musically with Geddy Lee and Neil Peart on the trio's 1978 opus Hemispheres.

"Alex has some of the most bizarre bad dreams, especially when we're away touring on the road," Peart explained to Geoff Barton for Sounds magazine in 1978. "Sometimes, when we're all supposed to be fast asleep in our hotel rooms, he'll wake up either Geddy (Lee, the band's vocalist and bass player) or me with a phone call in the middle of the night and start telling us all about these terrible dreams he's been having. When you're barely conscious, some of the stories he comes up with can be quite mind-blowing."

So too was the way Rush recorded it. "That was all recorded in one take," Lifeson told Guitar World in 1996. "Because we were writing on the road, we used our soundchecks to run through songs that we were going to record. We would come off the road, have a few days off and start recording. It was all recorded at the same time with all of us in the same room. 

"We had baffles up around the guitar, bass and drums and we would look at each other for the cues," the guitarist remembered. "My solo in the middle section was overdubbed after we recorded the basic tracks. I played a solo while we did the first take and re-recorded it later. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the other solo ghosted in the background."

4. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones (Keith Richards)

Who really knows the mysteries that have been swirling in the subconscious of Keef for decades. They did the Rolling Stones legend proud here though; presenting him with one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time in his sleep, which was put to use within a month to not only be recorded, but make the then three-year-old innovation of the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal famous.  The only initial stumbling was, Richards had forgotten he'd written it. Luckily he'd put it on tape. 

"I wish all the songs could come this way, you know, where you just dream them, and then the next morning, there they are, presented to you," Richards told Fresh Air in 2010. "But Satisfaction was that sort of miracle that took place. I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco, Philips, same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player that you could actually just lay ideas down and, you know, wherever you were.

"I set the machine up, and I put in a fresh tape," he continued. "I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape is run to the very end. And I think, well, I didn't do anything, you know? I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [singing] da, da, da, da, da – I can't get no satisfaction.

"And so there was a whole verse of it. I won't bore you with it all. But – and after that, there's, you know, 40 minutes of me snoring."

5. All You Had To Do Was Stay – Taylor Swift 

This cut from Taylor Swift's 1989 album has a chorus hook directly lifted from a vivid dream Swift had about an ex – an unnamed individual that's mooted to be Harry Styles. 

"There's this really high-pitched 'stay!' and I had a dream that my ex showed up at my door, knocked on my door, I opened it up and was just about ready to launch into the perfect thing to say," she revealed to Ryan Adams – who would also cover the song, and indeed the whole 1989 album in 2015. "Instead all that would come out of my mouth was that high-pitched chorus of people singing 'stay!'. 

6. River Of Dreams – Billy Joel

"I had this idea for a song, I woke up one day [sings], 'In the middle of the night / I go walking in my sleep'", Billy Joel recalls in the video below about a song he wrote, almost against his will. "It was kind of like a gospel song, [I thought] I can't write this. I'm not a gospel artist. I tried to shake it off, then I got in the shower that morning [carries of singing the song] and it would not go away.

"That's it – if you go in the shower and it becomes an earworm, forget it – you're not gonna shake it off," he adds. "It's not gonna go away. It's got all these biblical references – I still don't know what it means. But it was very strong visual images; 'Through the valley of fear', 'The desert of truth'… baptised by whoever it was. I'm not a biblical person, I'm not a religious guy but these images were very strong and the reason I wrote it, I haven't figured it out but it became a hit record."

The late blues scholar, musician and writer Julian Piper interviewed Howlin' Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin back in 2006 for Guitarist magazine. Hubert reflected on his career with Wolf, his friendship with the Rolling Stones and the direct influence of Robert Johnson and Wolf's mentor Charlie Patton. Hubert passed away on 4 December 2011. 

"Maaan, Keith's okay, he's just sitting around playing some blues - I been around his house and we been recuperating together!'' Hubert Sumlin's infectious laugh ripples down the transatlantic phone line from his home in Milwaukee. He's a man who laughs a lot – you rarely see a photo of Hubert not smiling – and, all things considered, it's probably just as well he's got a sense of humour.

During the last few years he's lost a lung, had heart surgery, his house has been flooded - losing him his prized collection of vintage photographs - and his wife passed away. All in all it makes Keith Richard's unfortunate incident with a coconut tree seem rather trivial in comparison.

"Keith's a wonderful person, they all are," Hubert continues. "Came to my rescue when I was sick, the band paid all my bills. I was in bad shape at the time and I can't say enough good about them."

The blues world has seen many great partnerships in its time - Buddy Guy and Jr Wells, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters and Little Walter – but the legendary status afforded Hubert Sumlin and his old boss Chester Burnett, better known as Howlin' Wolf, is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

No-one has ever sounded like the Wolf and no-one ever will. Gifted with a huge rasping feral voice so powerful that it could allegedly blow valves in a mixing desk, Wolf was the indelible link between the primal cottonfield blues of his mentor Charlie Patton - who taught him to play guitar - and Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix.

A consummate performer, Wolf would think nothing of entering a club on all fours snarling, a handkerchief tied to his belt to imitate a tail, or rolling on the ground bellowing. His songs like Smokestack Lightning, Killing Floor, The Red Rooster, Back Door Man and Evil, became anthems for a whole generation of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic; Hendrix's anarchic live version of Killing Floor at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was a highlight of his early career.

But as much as the Wolf was revered, so too was his guitarist Hubert Sumlin. A slight, unassuming man who usually stood quietly picking on a never-ending variety of guitars – everything from a Goldtop Les Paul to a quirky Italian Bartolini which looked like a prop from the Starship Enterprise – it was Hubert's spiky, icy cool lead lines that nailed the songs time and time again.

Uniquely, and unlike anything recorded up to that time, Sumlin's solos and intricately crafted riffs owed little to the influences of either Mississippi, or the increasingly popular 'City Blues' of guitarists like BB King and Freddie King.

"On just about all the numbers we recorded Wolf always turned me loose, let me do what I wanted,'' Sumlin recalls. "One time the Chess brothers hollered at me in the studio when we recording Shake It For Me… Leonard Chess said; Hubert, turn it down, turn that thing DOWN! Wolf just stopped the music and pointed across the room at where they were in the Control Booth. Wolf goes: When there's something to be said, let me tell him, not you! You fools operate the studio and leave the music to me. C'mon man, let it rip!"

"I wasn't really loud,'' Hubert says indignantly. "I can hear and I can hear good - I was just playing with the guys. The guitar sounds upfront on the records we made but it wasn't like that when we recorded it, we needed to hear one another. The way we did it everyone would be heard - the piano player, bass player, drummer - but when I played my solo, maaan you better get out my way!''

Scowlin' Wolf

But if the Wolf was generally supportive of Hubert's musicianship – he invariably referred to the younger man as his 'son' – he could also be a hard taskmaster. Stories abound of the fights he and Hubert had on and off stage – on one occasion he allegedly knocked out his guitarist's front teeth – and as Hubert admits, it was Wolf who was responsible for inadvertently forging the fluttering style that has become his trademark.

"He was so powerful at times I wouldn't even dare speak to him! One time, Wolf told me to put the pick down because I was playing too loud,'' Hubert says. "He told me; Put it down, use your fingers like everyone else. I told him that's what I started out playing with and that's what I was going to go on using. Wolf turned to me and shouted: No you ain't, you fired!'' Sumlin laughs out loud.

"So I went home and started practicing but couldn't believe it - I'd been playing with this guy eight years and now I'm fired! Wolf's time was always split time, 12 bars, six, 11 - anything.'' Hubert explains. ''I'm set in my ways and when he told me to put the pick down I just felt like hitting him, but I went home and practised playing without it.'' He chuckles.

"My fingers got so sore but I went back to work and that evening I was the last guy to get up on the bandstand. Wolf says; Ladies and gentlemen, this is my son - let's see if he's got it now! We played Smokestack Lightning and he said; Why didn't you play like that before?"

Right now, Hubert's on a bit of a roll. His last album, About Them Shoes, boasted heavyweight contributions from Eric Clapton and the aforementioned Mr Richards, and he's also stepped onstage in the UK for a couple of dates with the Rolling Stones.

It's a friendship and mutual admiration society that goes back to 1964 when the Rolling Stones recorded Little Red Rooster, and later had Howlin' Wolf support them on their 1965 Shindig television appearance in Los Angeles. Although the Wolf was suitably restrained, one can only speculate how the mothers of America reacted to their daughters watching the Wolf rip the place apart.

"That's right!" Hubert exclaims. "They didn't want him on the show but the Stones insisted; I used to see them guys all the time, and when I first heard the Stones version of Little Red Rooster I couldn't believe it! Then when Wolf and Mick Jagger first met, Mick walked up to Wolf and said; I hope you didn't mind that we cut Little Red Rooster? Wolf just smiled and said: No, man… you guys have put me on the map!

"They opened my path because they were well known before they ever first got to the States, and they tore up things here. I fell in love with them, Muddy and all of us felt the same way. Did we mind?" he laughs. "No, I just thought, Amen, hallelujah, at last!"

Rooster booster

If the Top 20 success of Little Red Rooster was a phenomenon, even more bizarre was the success that Howlin' Wolf and Hubert enjoyed a few months later with Smokestack Lightning. In the wake of The Rolling Stones' increasing notoriety, the UK was in the grip of R&B fervour.

Pye Records had been releasing Chess recordings for a couple of years, and with their distinctive red and yellow label and imposing R&B logo the Chess songs by artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Sugar Pie Desanto and Tommy Tucker were just about the hippest thing on Mod dance floors from Brighton to Wardour Street.

Smokestack Lightning's menacing loping riff, picked by Hubert over a hypnotic bass line, instantly became an obligatory number in the setlist of any self-respecting R&B band throughout the land. Incredibly, the song even reached number 42 in the pop charts and a few more sales might have seen the leering Howlin' Wolf on Top Of The Pops alongside Engelbert Humperdinck and Cilla Black. Now that would have certainly been a sight to see…

But as Hubert readily admits, the tune owed its origins to something Charlie Patton taught Wolf back in his Mississippi plantation days. "Smokestack Lightning was a lick he got off Patton. Wolf had learnt them so well that he fell in love with the music. Robert Johnson and Patton were around when I was still a kid, so I'd never heard that stuff, but Wolf learnt me a lot. He showed me some things that Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson had taught him - he knew those people, showed me old stuff that they were doing."

Sumlin chuckles as he recalls how Wolf and Charlie Patton originally met up. "He went to see Patton playing at this joint out in the country but he was too darned young to get in. He went up and crawled underneath the floor - the house was on cinder blocks - but people were stompin' around so much that the floor fell in on his head. Patton reached down and sat him up saying; Look here young man, this is what we gonna play, you watch me. I see you gonna be alright!"

In 1970, Sumlin and Wolf flew in to London to record an album that became known as the London Howlin' Wolf Sessions. A bizarre attempt by all involved to recreate the Wolf's finest hours using a bevy of British 'name' musicians including Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and Bill Wyman, it remains an intriguing piece of musical history.

Clapton had been reluctant to play, preferring that Hubert play lead guitar, but it was not to be. As a result, a tired-sounding Wolf is to be heard patiently trying to explain the changes on Little Red Rooster to an obviously over-awed Eric Clapton.

It's a day that Hubert remembers well. "On Little Red Rooster, Wolf is playing the guitar and I'm right in the background," he recalls. "Wolf ended up playing the slide with a milk bottle but he was in a mess! Because he didn't have a slide he'd broken the end off and he'd cut his fingers bad, there was blood everywhere!

"But I never will forget us cutting Shake For Me and Going Down Slow, every time I hear those tracks it feels like the Wolf is still around. Even now, I can't believe he's gone…"

• John Lee Hooker: "Eric Clapton, John Mayall and all those other people over in England made the blues a big thing. In the States, people didn't want to know"

A 1972 Fender Telecaster Custom that was played onstage by Keith Richards is going up for auction, alongside a guitar strap and assorted Rolling Stones tour ephemera.

The auction, which is being hosted by Gotta Have Rock and Roll, will also see a Vox wah pedal that was once used in anger by Jimi Hendrix go under the hammer.Starting bids for Hendrix’s wah are set at a cool $15,000, while Keef’s black Tele Custom – one of a number that have been at his disposal over the years – starts at $20,000.

The ’72 Telecaster Custom is instantly recognisable as a Keef guitar. It comes from the collection of Jim Callaghan, who was a veteran of the Rolling Stones security team. The story goes that Richards gifted Callaghan the Telecaster in 1990, when the band were clocking up the road miles on the Urban Jungle Tour in support of Steel Wheels, which was fresh in record stores across the world.

Sadly, there is no guitar capo included with the lot, but then if the budget stretches to a stage-played Keith Richards Telecaster then you can always pick one up at your local music store. Unlike the black Telecaster Custom on Richards’ regular rotation, this one has all six strings, so you might have to remove the lower E string and tune it to open G yourself for maximum Stones effect.

There is, however, plenty of case candy here to sweeten the deal. There is a Fender guitar strap, reportedly the one used by Richards himself, a crew jacket, a pair of crew T-shirts, tour itinerary and a number of passes. A certificate of authenticity and letter of provenance is also included. 

The guitar itself is early ‘70s Fender, complete with the F-stamped neck plate. The knobs are black skirted Strat style, with the dual volume, dual tone controls serving a Wide Range humbucker at the neck and a single-coil pickup at the bridge. 

This electric guitar is not too dissimilar to the American Vintage II 1977 Telecaster Custom, which would make a more than acceptable alternative. It is estimated to fetch between $50,000 and $100,000 but these things tend to get a little out of hand once the action heats up.

As for the Hendrix Vox wah, this is an Italian made, Clyde McCoy holy grail wah pedal, serial number 02683. The listing says it was used on the stage and studio, and judging by the pictures it has seen a lot of action. 

The pedal was owned by The Ghetto Fighers, aka Arthur and Albert Allen, the twins who performed backing vocals on tracks such as Dolly Dagger and Izabella, and has previously been auctioned via Julien’s Auctions in 2008 and 2011. 

Both lots will be auctioned on 12 April. For more details, head on over to Gotta Have Rock and Roll.

You don't see that many interviews with a Rolling Stone discussing studio technology, so imagine our surprise when we unearthed this gem from 1986 with the legend that is Keith Richards, waxing lyrical on all things studio related. And he even managed to predict how we'd all end up using it… 

Because of the Rolling Stones' staunch allegiance to the flag that is rock n roll, and using, by their own admission, pretty much the same formula to make music for nigh on 200 years, it is perhaps understandable that we don't give them much credence for being studio whizz kids. But this is wrong.

Think about it. The Rolling Stones have been bothering recording studios since said facilities pumped music out of one speaker. The band has seen it all. They've witnessed that single speaker double in number, then quadruple, then multiply exponentially; they've seen tape go from a single track to unlimited computer tracks; they've watched while computers replace musicians and instruments; and they've seen AI take over the world. They've seen things you would not believe…

Out of all bands that exist, then, The Rolling Stones have been there at every massive leap in studio technology that has got us to the point that we're at today. They are the experts. They are the all-seeing eyes of the recording world. We should hang on their every word. 

It's just a shame, then, that they don't speak that many words about recording technology. However, we've dug into the archives and discovered an absolute peach of an interview with the one and only Keith Richards, during which he discussed studio technology, how the band embraced it, or not, and what he thought would happen in the future.

And remember what we just said about hanging on their every word? You'd better believe it, because Richards' predictions were pretty much bang on…

The interview, published in the November 1986 issue of International Musician and Recording World, is notable in many incredible ways, not least because the Rolling Stones already seemed to be regarded by the press as ancient at this point. 

A mere 25 years into their career, Richards was described at the start of the piece as "looking more battered than a vintage Telecaster. But many a good riff is played on an old guitar...", and later, the article stated: "at 43, Richards is no oil painting". You have to remember that looks and age were ultra important back in the '80s, we guess.

Anyway, what the interview did do was waste no time in asking Richards about technology – a novel approach in comparison to so many before and since that would merely ask him about playing guitar. And on the subject of studio innovation, Richards didn't hold back. As we said above, these guys have seen it all, and he opened with the band's first experiences with recording technology. 

"I remember when we started, we used to record on two track," he said. "The first album was all done on two track. Their idea of soundproofing the studio was to stick thousands of egg cartons on the walls and to make it look professional they used to hang the two track on the wall instead of just leaving it on the table. That was supposedly hi-tech!"

The Stones might have used two tracks, but the majority of the records in those early days were put out as mono recordings – as they were meant to be. But then this thing called 'stereo' came along, and Richards was adamant that if it was recorded in mono, that was the way it was meant to be listened to – and there's a good argument for that philosophy to this day.

"I don't want to listen to a 1952 Muddy Waters record in stereo," he said. "It's not what was intended when the record was made. Just because it now has stereo stamped on it, it doesn't make it alright. I mean I remember with the Stones when this new big deal called 'stereo' came along half way through the '60s and all we did was put mono out of both speakers! There was no way you could make stereo out of our records!"

By the time of the interview, of course, music technology was booming. In 1986, digital technology was starting to find its way into the recording studio – although not of the the greatest quality, it has to be said – computers were starting to find their feet, and all sorts of processors were being deployed on every track of every song. 

Of this latest technology Richards certainly had an opinion but insisted that "we haven't changed a great deal in the way we actually make records. We're probably making them the same way but for different reasons".

And of the latest (1986) technology, he said: "I'm not knocking anyone who wants to go into a studio and use every bit of technology available. We use quite a bit, obviously, but we like to think that we are using it 'responsibly' and 'intelligently'. 

"It's very easy right now for the technology or gadgetry to overcome a record. We like to use it, but use it sparingly, because once the machine has become the record you've missed the whole point."

We particularly like that last point – a massive one – but it gets better. 

"Making records is a race with technology. Technology is supposed to be a tool that widens the spectrum to make more possibilities available, but at the moment it is working negatively. I think people are getting frightened by the number of possibilities and are sticking with formulae they know to be safe."

There's the prediction, and that line could have been said in 2024, let alone 1986, but there's even more…

"As more and more possibilities present themselves, the more records sound alike, and I think that's wrong. But music is in a period where there is so much technology – and everyone is playing with it trying to find out what is really useful and what is just a toy.

"There are now a ludicrous number of toys available in the studio to a musician. And you play with them and discard them when a better one comes along just as a kid does with a toy."

Nearly 40 year on and the Stones are still going strong, of course, and probably with that same studio philosophy. And just in case you don't get the point, Richards rams it home with this last quote, one that might make us all think a little about our studio gear obsessions. 

"Technology is racing way in front of making music. We don't need all the toys. That's what the Rolling Stones are really good at... just playing together in the studio and recording."

So there you have it. Keith Richards: Rolling Stone, living legend, guitar god and, who'd have thought it, studio technology guru.

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year. 

Best of 2023: When you're very good at what you do, you can get headhunted. And that's especially true in rock n' roll where the departure of key band members (or dissatisfaction with them) can lead to hard questions and unexpected propositions.

 Just how close did we come to hearing Rory Gallagher's maverick blues in the Stones, Michael Schenker's cocked wah in Aerosmith or Michael Bolton's soaring soul vocals fronting Black Sabbath?

Let's find out… 

Shuggie Otis – The Rolling Stones 

The first of a few Stones propositions, the psychedelic soul singer-songwriter got a call from the band's touring pianist Billy Preston (more on him later) in the mid-seventies to see if would be interested in joining the lineup for a tour. 

Otis had recently got to the end of a long creative tunnel to release his own album Inspiration Information, and the decision was easy for him. “I was so excited about my own music coming out that nothing really appealed to me about wanting to be in anybody’s group,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013.

“I didn’t want to be a sideman,” he explained to the Guardian in 2016 about his mindset at the time. “I wanted to do my own music. ”I could have been an instant millionaire, a few times, probably, but that wasn’t on my mind at all.”

Myles Kennedy – Led Zeppelin

This one got far enough down the line for Myles Kennedy, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham to have jammed together more than once, following a call to the Alter Bridge vocalist from the drummer. Fresh from the high of Zeppelin's 02 Arena reunion in 2007, but knowing Robert Plant did not want to take it further, the trio set about moving forward the following year with another singer.

Kennedy's vocal ability was obvious, and combined with his deep knowledge of Zeppelin's back catalogue it put him firmly in the frame. But he wasn't the only one; Steven Tyler also jammed with them. Kennedy made enough of an impression after his first session with the band to be invited back for four days a few months later.

"I should say that it was never supposed to be 'Led Zeppelin' per se, because how could it be Led Zeppelin?" Kennedy told us in 2010. "I think they were just itching to play again. Still, they weren't really sure of what they wanted to do exactly. What happened was, I got together with them one day in June of 2008 and we just jammed on some ideas. Everything went really well, and as you can imagine, I was just flattered beyond all belief to be in the same room with those guys. I mean, everything I ever learned about rock, I learned from Led Zeppelin. Just being near Jimmy Page was unbelievable. All the guys! Hearing their stories, the whole experience…it was something I'll always treasure."

So why didn't it go any further?

"Well, I'm not really sure," Kennedy admitted to us. "Again, I just don't think they really could decide on what they wanted to do. I did get together with them again a few months later, and this time we spent about a week jamming on some ideas. I didn't do any actual writing with them – it was all very informal. There was just so much going on around them, and once all the talk got out about 'Led Zeppelin is going to tour'…I'm not really sure why things didn't happen, but that's OK."

Michael Bolton – Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Journey

Now this is a strange one – and not for the obviously surreal proposition of the Soul Provider singing War Pigs in 1982. No, it's because one party denies it was ever even a remote possibility. Spoiler: it's not Tony Iommi. 

"Me and [bassist Geezer Butler] had to rethink the whole thing," Iommi wrote in his 2012 autobiography Iron Man. "We had a million tapes sent in from different singers and most of them were horrible. One of them was from Michael Bolton. I didn't know him at the time. We had Michael come in and we had him sing Heaven and Hell, War Pigs and Neon Knights. He was quite good, but he wasn't exactly what we were looking for then. We dropped a bollock there, didn't we? Michael Bolton! A little bit of a mistake."

That all sounds too specific to be a misunderstanding, and Iommi returned to the subject again in 2020.

"I found David Coverdale, and he said, 'Oh, I just got this band together, Whitesnake. Why didn't you find me before?'" Iommi told Gibson TV . "I said, '[Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio] hadn't left before; it's happening now.'

"So, there was a lot of looking for another singer, and we would audition various singers — including Michael Bolton, believe it or not," Iommi added. "He was one of them, which was an odd one. It just went on a bit, and we couldn't decide."  

And what say Bolton in all of this? He says it never happened. "That's a rumour," he told Malaysia's Lite in the clip above. "I think people mix it up because my rock group was Blackjack...we did two albums for Polygram in the late '70s, those were part of my rock years."

Bolton does add that he discussed joining Ted Nugent's band as a vocalist though, instead deciding to focus on his solo career. But that's not all; he was also briefly in the running to replace Steve Perry in Journey following the singer's 1987 departure.

"We thought about it for a second," Journey guitarist Neal Schon told Louder in a reader Q&A in 2012. Michael definitely had pipes – he was pretty bionic when I worked with him. But even then there was a lot of personality clashing. I didn’t feel that we would get too far, that’s all I can tell you."

In the same interview Schon alluded to some of that 'clashing' in a separate experience he had with Bolton.

"Michael Bolton was a little eccentric," he opined. "I played the blues guitar solo on his version of (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, and Bolton made me re-do my solo about 200 times." Ouch. 

Marc Ford – Guns N' Roses 

Former Black Crowe Marc Ford recently detailed the time he was approached, and declined, the chance to play alongside Slash as Izzy Stradlin's replacement in the early '90s.

“The music of the Crowes spoke to me a bit more,” Ford reflected recently with Guitar World about choosing the Robinson brothers over Axl and Co. “But also – and even Slash agreed with me on this – the Crowes were a better fit for me over Guns N’ Roses because, with the Crowes, I could have more of a voice.”

“If I had joined Guns N’ Roses that would have basically been me filling the role of someone having to back up Slash,” he added. “I don’t think it would have been all that fulfilling or satisfying to do that. I would have gotten bored, and that would have been dangerous…”

Zakk Wylde - Guns N' Roses 

Zakk got much closer to becoming a hired Gun than Ford; he jammed with the band for a week in the mid '90s when Slash and Duff McKagan were still part of the lineup, and that period even sewed the creative seeds of a song.

“[Zakk] brought energy and enthusiasm that was lacking within Guns at the time, wrote McKagan in his 2011 autobiography. "‘We can build on the legacy,’ he said excitedly. ‘We can make something great. Listen to this.’ He saw a piano against the wall and sat down and elegantly played it. I had no idea he could play piano at all, much less like this.

"We recorded a few demos with him, but nothing panned out," Duff added. One of those demos would become Rose-Petalled Garden, a song on the first Black Label Society album, 1998's Sonic Brew.

Paul Rodgers – The Doors, Deep Purple 

When you're one of the greatest blues-rock vocalists of all time, people will call, and sometimes those people are the members of The Doors and Deep Purple.

Paul Rodgers' illustrious career has seen him collaborate with guitar greats including Paul Kossoff, Jimmy Page and Brian May, but if it wasn't for his commitments to his own projects at the time we could have seen him in at least one other classic band. 

Following the death of Jim Morrison in 1971 the surviving members of The Doors were serious enough about approaching Rodgers to take on the lead singer role that they flew to London to find him.  "[The] thing is, at that time, I had buried myself in the country, working on things, and they couldn't get a hold of me," Rodgers told The Pulse Of Radio in 2011.  "My jaw actually dropped like in a cartoon when Robby [Krieger, guitarist] told me this," the singer added. "Would I have joined them? I dunno. It's hard to say, looking back. But I think not. I tend to form bands, that's what I do. Although it's always flattering to be asked!"

A similar situation arose in 1973 when Rodgers got the call to replace the departing Ian Gillan in Deep Purple. "Free had played with Deep Purple in Australia and it was our very last show," Rodgers told Hoston Press in 2007, confirming the DP rumour. "I got along really well with [Purple] keyboardist Jon Lord and we exchanged numbers. Later, I got a call to [join], but I was forming Bad Company at the time, so it wasn’t possible." 

Michael Schenker – Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, Motörhead

The Flying V firebrand was certainly in demand in the seventies and early eighties. Starting with Ozzy Osbourne's search for Randy Rhoad's replacement…

"I was kind of tempted," Schenker told Full In Bloom in 2022. "I had only just left UFO and the Scorpions, and I had already auditioned for Aerosmith. When I was approached by Ozzy, he told me, “You were Randy Rhoads’s favorite guitarist. I want you to join.” It was kind of strange to deal with that situation because Ozzy called me in the middle of the night, and he was obviously very confused and disturbed and begged me to join. I considered it heavily, but something was pulling me away. I had to analyze what was going on. I didn’t quite understand myself."

The guitarist's instincts told him to focus on his own music, rather than playing the parts of another player. Nevertheless, following advice from his management Schenker actively auditioned for Aerosmith to replace Joe Perry following his own walkout from The Scorpions on their 1979 tour for the Lovedrive album. But Aerosmith claimed Schenker made a terrible first impression before he even played a note.

In the official Aerosmith book Walk This Way, Schenker is described as walking into a rehearsal room and greeting vocalist Stephen Tyler, guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer with the following announcement: “Hello, I’m taking over. Before I join your band, I want it clear I’m taking over right now. Here – my jacket – take and hang up.”

Schenker denies this. “What happened was that [manager] Peter [Mensch] flew me to New York," the guitarist told Classic Rock. "Steven wasn’t doing so good at the time, and I wasn’t in the best shape either. I ended up sat in my hotel room for five days waiting for something to happen. And when it did… it was worthless. Nobody was in a fit state to make it work.

“But later, when I started the Michael Schenker Group [in 1980], Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton wanted to be my rhythm section,” he added. “We did some rehearsals but then just as we were getting somewhere Steven got better, so they went back to Aerosmith.” All's well that ends well, but then there was the Stones…

Schenker allegedly ignored the call to audition for the legendary band in 1973 when he arrived in the UK as a teenager to join UFO.  As he explains in the clip above, he received a phone call at the lodgings he was staying at, asking if he'd like to audition for the Stones. A flustered Schenker told them he'd call back. He never did. Then there was Motörhead…

When he first put Motörhead together, Lemmy asked me to be the guitarist," Schenker told Metal Talk in 2016. "It was many years ago, but we toured together when he was in Hawkwind and I was with UFO. We toured the States together, and I saw Lemmy every day, but later when he started to put Motörhead together, he approached me to be his lead guitarist but I wasn't interested… I couldn't see that it would be something for me. I declined. I just couldn't see how it would work."

Billy Preston – The Beatles 

Preston would have been an asset to any band he played in – which is why both the Stones and Beatles called on the keyboardist and vocalist's session services. He'd befriended the Fab Four as far back as 1962 and, along with Tony Sheridan, is the only non-Beatle to be given a credit on one of their recordings at the band's request. In Preston's case it was for the 1969 single Get Back, credited at The Beatles with Billy Preston. 

It was during this time that Preston's role in the band became ever more integral, as captured in the Get Back film. John Lennon suggested to the band that Preston could join, while McCartney argued it was hard enough to reach compromises between the four of them as it was.

It was during Harrison's time out from the band after temporarily quiting in the midst of the sessions that Clapton was considered as a replacement. But it wasn't needed in the end; during his time away, Harrison saw Preston performing with Ray Charles in London and asked him if he'd like to return to work with the Beatles alongside him. Relations between the band members very quickly improved as a result of Preston's presence.

“It’s interesting to see how nicely people behave when you bring a guest in, because they don’t want everybody to know they’re so bitchy,” Harrison wrote in the Beatles book Anthology. “Suddenly everybody’s on their best behaviour.”

“He got on the electric piano, and straight away there was 100 per cent improvement in the vibe in the room,” he added. “Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we’d created among ourselves."

Corey Taylor - Anthrax, Velvet Revolver 

Even though he was in one of the biggest metal bands in the world with Slipknot, and in a second band with Stone Sour, Taylor clearly couldn't resist trying some alternative shoes on for size when two bands were looking to recruit new vocalists. And he went surprisingly far down the line with one of them.

Taylor recorded around 10 songs with Velvet Revolver in 2010 as he was reportedly lined up as Scott Weiland's replacement, even going as far as to "neither confirming or denying" he was the new vocalist. Duff McKagan certainly sounded keen in the clip above from 12 years ago, but it seems Slash was less so.

"I love Corey to death but something about it was just a little too… what’s the word for it, you know how Corey sings, it’s very macho kind of thing." Slash revealed to Rolling Stone Australia in the clip below. "But it didn’t have certain elements I thought it needed so we just didn’t go down that path. That was the closest [to finding Scott's replacement] so far.” 

Those nine or ten songs remain unheard outside of the inner circle.  "The world will probably never hear them, which is fine, because I would want another crack at kind of working on some of that stuff anyway, Taylor told Loudwire. "But that will never happen, so it's all good."

A few years before that Taylor nearly became the frontman for New York thrash icons Anthrax, but that time it wasn't a band member that put the kibosh on it.

 “That actually started as an idea because of an acoustic gig that I did with Scott [Ian] and Frankie Bello at a place in New York," Taylor told Eddie Trunk in the 2020 clip shown below. "Afterward, we were all kind of just hanging out, and the half-joking line got thrown out, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you joined Anthrax?’” Corey recalled on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation Virtual Invasion. “And we all laughed, and then we all stopped. And we all just went, ‘Hmmm. That could [be] interesting.’

Anthrax were without a singer at the time. “It was between Joey [Belladonna] and John [Bush], so everything was kind of up in the air," added Taylor. "We talked about it more and more, and it was something that I was really, really into.”

Slipknot's label Roadrunner had other ideas; the Iowa band's next album – that became 2008's All Hope is Gone – took priority. “It was the first time I had ever felt like I was kind of backed into a corner," said Taylor. "Not that I didn’t wanna do a Slipknot album, but I was so into the idea of doing an Anthrax album. And I remember having to call and tell the [Anthrax] guys that I wasn’t gonna be able to make it. It broke my heart so hard. But, obviously, things worked out for the better for them.”

It took a little while. The band ended up recording their next album [that became Worship Music] with vocalist Dan Nelson before he parted ways with the band in 2009 before it could be released. John Bush would return to help them for a live commitment before vocalist Belladonna officially came back to re-record Nelson's parts on a reworked Worship Music that finally saw a 2011 release. Metal sure is complicated sometimes. 

Dave Grohl – Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

Dave Grohl was in an understandably dark place following Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994. He hadn't played drums publicly since his last show with Nirvana in Germany on 1 March that year, then Tom Petty came calling.

“Someone from my management calls and says ‘Hey, Tom Petty just called and wants to know if you’ll play drums with them on Saturday Night Live?’” recalled Grohl in the Petty documentary Runnin' Down A Dream. The Heartbreakers were between drummers follower the departure of Stan Lynch and Grohl was shocked to be asked.

"What the f*** is he calling me for? He couldn’t find a good drummer?” wondered Grohl. His hard-hitting performance on the show for the two songs the band played reminded everyone exactly why he was asked; muscular on Honey Bee's intro (a favourite Petty song of Grohl's) before sensitively syncopating with the guitar dynamics in the verses. "It’s like the kind of thing a bunch of 16-year-olds would play in the garage to get off," said Grohl. "It’s killer. It’s a barn burner.”

If SNL was a stealth audition, Grohl aced it. Later, Petty called to offer him the drum job. "I just felt weird about just going right back to the drums because it would have just reminded me of being in Nirvana,” Grohl admitted to Howard Stern in 2021. 

“It would have been sad for me personally. It would’ve been an emotional thing to be behind the drumset every night and not have Kurt there.”  Instead, Grohl took the unexpected path of becoming a frontman himself with the Foo Fighters. And that turned out pretty well didn't it. 

Adrian Smith, Phil Collen – Def Leppard, Iron Maiden 

A very unusual vice-versa prospect here. Phil Collen may well have got the job as Iron Maiden's replacement for Dennis Stratton… but there was a clear snag. "They asked me to come down and I wasn't really interested," Collen admitted to Inside Out in 2008. "I have known them guys for years. I used to go to school with the original singer Paul DiAnno, who I have known since I was six. All the guys grew up in the same area as me, they're lovely guys, I love 'em, but it's a different type of music. I was in a glam rock band [Girl] and now I'm in Def Leppard… which is more up my street."

Collen ended up joining Leppard to replace Pete Willis and tracked the solos on 1983's Pyromania, which did pretty well as we recall with 10 million sales in the US alone. Adrian Smith ended up getting the Maiden job and it all worked out very well indeed, until Smith quit the British metallers in 1990. When Leppard was looking for a new guitarist after the tragic death of Steve Clark in 1991, Smith applied to audition. And he was in illustrious company.

Collen confirmed in a press conference earlier this year that the band invited five people they knew to audition – including Smith, former Whitesnake man John Sykes and a young musician from Birmingham called Huey Lucas. "Vivian [Campbell] just fit in straight away; it was just like [it was] meant to be," said Collen. [But] Adrian is great — he's a great singer. That was one of the other things [we looked for], if you can sing."

“John could sing his ass off,” Leppard frontman Joe Elliot told Classic Rock. “And he wrote Still Of The Night for Whitesnake. Adrian I adore, and in the end it worked out well for him because he’s back in Maiden where he belongs. We also tried out a young unknown kid from Birmingham, Huey Lucas. Great player, but his voice wasn’t that strong. Vivian was always the number-one candidate. For us it wasn’t about how well you could play, it was more about how well you can sing. And more importantly, we’ve got to get on with this person.”

For his part, Smith has suggested he might talk about his perspective on it all in his next book, but as Joe Elliot noted, he ended up rejoining Maiden in 1999 anyway, alongside returning vocalist Bruce Dickinson. And everyone rocked happily ever after. 

Patty Smyth – Van Halen 

Van Halen with a female vocalist is a very interesting prospect – and it really could have happened. The former Scandal singer, who later enjoyed a hit duetting with The Eagles's Don Henley on Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough, found fans in Eddie Van Halen and his wife. The guitarist even guested with Scandal onstage for two songs in 1984 – and you can hear it below. Then with David Lee Roth's departure the following year, Smyth suddenly found herself in the frame to replace him.  

"They were heavy drinkers. I don’t drink,"she reflected in an interview with Stereogum in 2020 on her decision to turn the band down. "I never saw myself living in LA. I was like, “I’m from New York, we don’t move to LA.”

"It’s all semantics because if [Eddie] had said to me, 'Let’s make a record', then I would have said yes to that. But joining the band — to me then, 'Oh god, they fight all the time, him and his brother [Alex Van Halen], and I don’t want to get into a volatile situation.' And I was probably heavily hormoned out because I was eight months pregnant, so there was a state of mind that I was in of how I need to take care of myself. But I regretted turning him down. For a long time I regretted it. When you start to have regrets, I was like, 'Oh man I would’ve made so much money.'

Smyth had the pipes for the job and Van Hagar detractors would obviously have been spared that whole era. But the band did very, very well with Sammy and, for her part, Smyth isn't bitter about how things turned out now. 

"I wish I had the right kind of luck," she told Stereogum. "I feel it’s just like I’m in this stream or this river and sometimes it’s just taking you where you need to go. Sometimes you’ve got to paddle and go in certain directions and other times you’re just letting it take you. And for me, like I said, my life has turned out unbelievable. That I’ve been married and with the same man for 25 years is insane."

Dimebag Darrell, Slash – Megadeth 

If you thought Anthrax's singer maneuvers were complicated, they've got nothing on the revolving door in Megadeth. Dave Mustaine has remained the band's only constant since 1983, but that revolving door nearly stopped the world hearing Pantera's classic albums.

“I actually called him up and asked him to play in Megadeth,” Mustaine told the Tampa Bay Times in 2019 of Dimebag Darrell Abbott in a recent interview. “Fate would have completely changed if I would have called him before I called [drummer] Nick Menza. I said, ‘Hey, Darrell, I’m looking for a guitar player.’ And he goes, ‘Can I bring my brother?’ And I went, ‘Who’s your brother?’ He goes, ‘Vinnie Paul! Don’t you know Vinnie Paul?"

“He wanted to bring his brother and have him play with us," Mustaine continued. "And I go, ‘Oh, man, I just hired Nick Menza.’ Can you imagine what Vinnie and Darrell would have been with me and Junior [bassist Dave Ellefson]? Would’ve been pretty cool.”

We can hear that in our minds but surely the rumor Mustaine asked Slash to join the band is nonsense? No, actually. Around the mid '80s before Guns started taking off, Slash found himself living near Mustaine in LA. 

"I crashed wherever I could, and did whatever came to mind, and there was a point in there when I hooked up with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth," Slash wrote in his 2007 autobiography.  "We became friends; he was strung out on smack and crack and he lived in the same neighborhood, so we hung out and wrote songs. He was a true, complete fucking maniac and a genius riff writer.

"We'd hang out, smoke crack, and come up with major heavy metal riffs, just f****** dark and heavy as hell. Sometimes Dave Ellefson would join us; we got along great, we wrote some great s***. It got to the point, in our drug-fueled creative zone, that we started seriously entertaining the idea of me joining Megadeth.

"Guns was in a holding pattern, after all, and I was high enough to consider all kinds of bad decisions," Slash added. "Dave Mustaine is still one of the most genius musicians I have ever jammed with, but still, in my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn't leave Guns."

Rory Gallagher – The Rolling Stones

Michael Schenker was certainly not the only number The Stones called when Mick Taylor quit the band in 1974. He left a huge guitar hole to fill, but Rory Gallagher certainly had the potential to fill it.

Rory had already found success with Taste and as a solo bluesman by that point, documented by the Irish Tour film that same year, but he couldn't resist the chance to find out more when he received a surprising phone call from the Stones' road manager and pianist at the family home in Ireland.

"It was about one o’clock the morning," Rory's brother and manager Dónal recalled to The Telegraph in 2020.  "Back then, if the call was overseas, you had to go through the operator. She told my mother she was connecting. I took the call. I was a bit defensive because, in those days, there were a lot of kidnappings [by the Provisional IRA]. The guy says, ‘My name is Ian Stewart… I’m looking for Rory Gallagher.

“Rory had gone to bed on one of his rare early nights," Dónal added. "When I woke him, he thought I was winding him up. But he agreed to go to Rotterdam to jam with them.” Jagger even collected Rory from the airport. 

"Rory did three or four nights," Dónal told Eon Music in 2020, "and I remember him telling me the first night Keith didn’t come down, so Mick said to Rory; “Can you start me up with a riff? I’ve got this song, but can you help me with a riff?”, and Rory said OK, and Jagger was just filling up with a coffee from a vending machine, and it burned him, and he said; 'Oh jeez, that’s hot stuff!' and Rory said; “Oh, is the title ‘Hot Stuff’?” and he said; “Oh yeah, that’s a great title!” So yeah, there was a lot of Rory riffs on that album that was used later on."

Despite the creative sparks, and the positive noises from Jagger, the whole thing fell apart.   

“On the final night, Keith had come down, and they had done sessions over the days, but Mick and Keith weren’t talking to each other," Dónal explained. "So Rory said, ‘Please let me know what’s going on because I’ve got to be on a plane to Tokyo tomorrow‘ [he was leaving for a Japanese tour he'd already arranged]. And Mick said, ‘Keith wants to have a good long chat with you. Please go up. He’s waiting in his suite upstairs.’ And Rory went up, and Keith was comatose in the bed”.

“Rory stayed up all night, went back every half hour, and tried talking, but [Keith] wasn’t," continued Dónal. "So Rory made up his own mind, for whatever reason, and just packed up his guitar and amp, and I met him at Heathrow with a fresh suitcase.”

Rory left a note with the band that day with details of how to contact him but the communication breakdown was never repaired. He would never play with the Stones again. Ronnie Wood would eventually get the job, and nearly 40 years on he's still there and we still can't picture the gifted Rory playing a sideman role in the Stones. "I think there was an issue that Rory should have been the man," reflected  Dónal, "but Ronnie Wood probably fits in better with the style and with the image."     

• 10 of the best songs for beginner guitar players to learn

You might have heard, The Rolling Stones are back with new album, Hackney Diamonds. Last week, the veteran rockers put on a surprise gig at Manhattan’s Racket club which saw the band run through a short, seven-song set including three songs from their new album, and a guest slot from Lady Gaga.

However, while the thought of watching one of the biggest bands of all-time play in an intimate club setting at short notice is the stuff of serendipitous, ‘right place, right time’ dreams for most fans, esteemed producer Tony Visconti walked out of the gig before the Stones even played a note, and it’s partly down to The Roots’ drummer, Questlove.

Taking to Facebook, Visconti shared his account of the evening with a fairly sizeable list of gripes ranging from the late opening of the doors (forty minutes on a “cold windy night”), having his phone placed in a secure bag that was “impossible to open”, and having people screaming in his ears due to the “deafening” DJ set performed by Questlove. “One guy said he listens to my productions all the time” Visconti writes, “I was so testy by then I snapped back, ‘You should!’"

Things didn’t get any better, though. As Visconti’s patience dwindled by 21:30 (and Questlove’s wheels of steel got louder), Visconti asked “someone in charge” when the Stones would be starting. With no light able to be shed, Visconti and his date for the evening opted to go home. 

“I thought, f**k it, I saw the Stones so many times back in the day with a better line up, even one gig with Brian Jones and Bill Wyman.  We walked out. A security guard said we won't be able to reenter and I said, thank God.”

The producer goes on to say that he ended his night by watching 1948 horror-comedy movie, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein on Roku, adding “Now that was good!”    

Of course, it wasn’t long before Questlove saw Visconti’s post and added his own reaction. Sharing screenshots of Visconti’s Facebook page to his own Instagram account, Questlove said “Dog, the fact that I offended Tony Visconti in such a rock & roll fashion is prolly one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received in my 40 years as a professional musician.”

He added that late Roots manager Rich Nichols — who passed away in 2014 after battling leukaemia — would have “LOVED & laughed at this so hard…this would have been music to Rich’s ears.

Hackney Diamonds is The Rolling Stones' first album since the passing of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021. Watts features on Mess It Up and Live By The Sword. 

Longtime Keith Richards collaborator and influential session drummer/producer, Steve Jordan recorded the remaining 10 songs, and has played drums for The Rolling Stones since Watts’ passing. Watts reportedly telling his bandmates, "Steve Jordan's your man" should anything ever happen to him.

Hackney Diamonds by The Rolling Stones is out now.   

There are lots of musical element that make the Rolling Stones… roll, but in a new cover story interview with Guitar Player, Keith Richards strikes at the very heart of what makes their guitar-playing dynamic tick.

 "That's the sound of a Stones record; a five-string with a six-string on top, and Ronnie [Wood]," says Richards. "It always creates a beautiful blend."

 Keef's five-string layer is a Tele tuned to open G (GDGBD) with the lowest string removed) and it's served him endless inspiration over the years.

You always have to play around with the amps a bit," he says of his Fender Twins and Champs, "but guitars are amazing things. You can make an orchestra out of them with just a simple blend. 

Removing the low sixth string has advantages for the other instruments in the Stones mix too. "It's always been the mystery to me why so much space opens up for other instruments by taking off the bottom string… I can't really out my finger on a reason why, but somehow that one extra note disappearing allows for all kinds of other instruments to come through. It's just one of those things, I guess."  

If the idea of opening up the door to open G tuning inspiration interests you, try our  Keith Richards open G tuning guitar lesson. 

• Find out more about the new issue of Guitar Player

Keith Richards recently sat down for his debut appearance on The Howard Stern Show and he was in fine form, looking back with the host on his first memories of the guitar, and how it still holds so much fascination for him. Like Stern's interview with Paul Simon, it reiterates that guitar playing is a lifelong journey.

We have Keef's Grandad Gus to thank for the Rolling Stones in many ways. In the clip below it's clear to see the affection that the legend remembers the man who got him playing as a 12-year-old boy.

"My grandfather introduced me – because he had one, which helped," laughed Keef. "It was just something that fascinated me… Grandpa lent it to me and said, 'Put your fingers here, try this out', and it went from there. I thought, 'I really like this' but I had absolutely no preconceived notions about playing music or anything. Grandad, Gus was his name, he turned me on to it – but without pushing.

"He used to keep it on a shelf in his living room, and one say I was visiting – I used to visit every now and again – and he said, 'You keep looking at that thing, you want [a go]?'"

Gus was a violinist but had other instruments around the house. His advice on how the young guitar hero in the making should start on his musical path proved vital.

"He pulled it off the shelf and put it in my hands and said, 'If you can learn this little Spanish thing – this flamenco thing called Malagueña – it's quite simple to start with then you can elaborate, but if you can learn that you'll be able to play guitar.' So I went to work."

A few months later Keef knew he was hooked. "But the thing is, there was no way I was going to be a musician musician," he reflected. "Going to the college to the college of music. But it just started to come to me. Then I realised what I really wanted to do was play with another cat."

Via Mick Jagger and the guitarists he knew, the future Rolling Stone would find what he was looking for.  "It wasn't seriously until Mick and I [hooked up] that I really though about this thing being [a future]. It was just a hobby."

There was no plan B for him. And he still plays guitar "just about every day".

"It's a work in progress, Howard," he told Stern. Every time you pick the thing up there's the potential of finding something totally new. It's the one note against the other, and the rhythm at the same time. This is why music is so beautiful and why it's kind of weird to talk about music. Because if you could put music into words there would be no need for it." 

Find out more at The Howard Stern Show

• 5 Rolling Stones songs guitarists need to hear

With the release of new album Hackney Diamonds just a few weeks away, the Rolling Stones PR machine is gathering no moss.

The latest piece of promo sees frontman Mick Jagger being interviewed by CBC News and pondering a variety of subjects, including his creative partnership with Keith Richards, what it was like to have Paul McCartney playing bass on the new record, and finishing songs that feature the drumming of the late Charlie Watts.

The Jagger/Richards songwriting axis is the one that the Stones legacy has been built on, of course, and it feels somewhat remarkable that, after all these years, it still actually exists. However, as Jagger explains, the dynamic has certainly changed.

“It’s so different now because we used to live in the same apartment when we started off writing songs together,” he confirms. “I wouldn’t even play guitar half the time - I’d just be writing the toplines for Keith’s chord sequences. And he would sometimes suggest melodies and I would come up with all the words… but that’s a long time ago and things evolve and change.”

Discussing how the partnership works now, Jagger says: “I like to write songs on my own. I don’t live on the same continent as Keith; he doesn’t do Zoom so I can’t write on Zoom with him. But still when we got together in Jamaica and started jamming these things around, it’s the same as we always have been.”

One of the most eagerly-awaited songs on Hackney Diamonds is Bite My Head Off, a song that features none other than Paul McCartney on bass. As interviewer Tom Power says, this collaboration will be laced with meaning for many fans, but although Jagger understands this, he also suggests that the recording session itself was pretty chilled.

“It was all in the room together,” he reveals. “I’m playing guitar, Keith’s playing guitar, Paul’s playing bass, Ronnie [Wood]’s playing guitar. It seemed so natural. Paul was so natural and relaxed and he enjoyed it, and we knocked it out really quick.”

Has Jagger always been pals with Paul, though? When Power suggests that John Lennon was the Beatle that Mick was tightest with the star is happy to acknowledge this, but also suggests that this didn’t come at the expense of friendship with McCartney.

“John was a great close friend of mine,” Jagger recalls, “and he was very acerbic and funny and witty and intelligent and everything, but I also knew Paul who was a different kind of personality. I’ve always been friends with him, and we don’t see each other that much but we do sort of text each other… so we do sort of keep in touch.”

Another Hackney Diamonds highlight for Stones fans will be hearing the drumming of Charlie Watts, who features on two of the 12 songs. Explaining how these were selected, Jagger says: “Over the last five years we’d done quite a bit of recording, but it had been a bit sporadic and there was a lot of unfinished material. So when we were putting this together we said ‘which ones do we think would fit on this record that Charlie’s on?’ and we finished those. And so there are these two tracks we picked with Charlie on.”

Whether Watts will also feature on the next Stones album - “we’re two thirds through the next one,” claims Jagger - remains to be seen, but he’s clear on how the Stones have managed to keep going for so many years.

“By staying abreast of what’s going on,” he believes. “You have to understand how things work in the current world. The record business being a business of technology, it never stays the same, ever.”

Hackney Diamonds will be released on 20 October. Angry, the first single from the album, is out now.

Few bands of the early '70s created such a defiantly idiosyncratic sound as Jethro Tull. Formed in Luton in 1967 and named after an 18th century farmer/inventor, the band emerged from the late 60s British blues boom and forged a dense sonic mix which incorporated heavy rock, flute-led folk melodies, blues infused licks and surreal lyrical imagery. 

Led by enigmatic frontman Ian Anderson, the band attained massive critical and commercial success in the early 1970s with albums such as Aqualung (1971) Thick As A Brick (1972) and A Passion Play (1973).

The band started life as the Blades, an outfit formed in Blackpool, where the family of Edinburgh-born Anderson had moved in 1960. By 1967 they had moved south to Bedfordshire and in December that year Jethro Tull were formed. 

In 1968, they released debut album This Was, opened for Pink Floyd at the first free rock festival in Hyde Park and appeared on the Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus, with Tony Iommi on guitar.  He had replaced guitarist Mick Abrahams but the Black Sabbath founder lasted only a week before leaving and being replaced by Martin Barre. 

In May 1969, after touring with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, they scored a No. 3 hit with the song Living In The Past. What set Tull apart was Anderson’s flute playing, a unique yet divisive instrument among the late '60s blues purists. 

Their folk-tinged second album Stand Up topped the UK charts and reached No. 20 in the US, catapulting them from the margins to the mainstream and opening up touring opportunities in the UK and US. By then Anderson had developed a charismatic and eccentric onstage presence, with his wild hair, frock coat and tights, enhanced by an expression of mad-eyed delirium.

But it was their fourth album Aqualung that would become their magnum opus. Released in March 1971, the album heralded a whole new sonic template for the band, introducing progressive rock themes while fusing strident hard rock passages with more ethereal folk. By then, the line-up behind Anderson was Martin Barre (guitar), John Evan (keyboards), Jeffrey Hammond (bass) and Clive Bunker (drums). 

On Aqualung chief songwriter Anderson found his lyrical voice, introducing themes that were more serious and intellectual. The album was inspired by old photos of homeless people on the Thames Embankment. The core lyrical themes of religion and alienation chimed with listeners in the UK and in the US. The album went on to sell seven million units worldwide.

The band’s fifth Thick As A Brick followed in 1972, a ‘parody’ concept album featuring just one 43-minute track, and in 1973, A Passion Play was another creative high watermark. 

On Songs From The Wood (1977) the band shifted towards folk-prog, inspired by Anderson’s move to rural Buckinghamshire. Over the following decades they continued to stretch themselves creatively – the hard rock of 1987’s Crest Of A Knave being one of the high points, but it is arguably their 70s output, most noticeably Aqualung, Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play, that yielded their most enduring sonic riches.

 1. Aqualung – Aqualung (1971)

If one song defines everything that made Jethro Tull unique, this is it. It’s a song regarded by many as their masterpiece, the title track of an album inspired by old photos of homeless people on London’s Thames Embankment. Imagined stories of these transient characters from society’s margins inspired a rich vein of songwriting in Anderson. 

Lyrically, it’s both literal and melodramatic. ‘Snot's running down his nose / Greasy fingers, smearing shabby clothes…  Feeling like a dead duck / Spitting out pieces of his broken luck.”

The track meanders between hard and soft passages but is anchored by a staggered, overdriven guitar riff, written by Anderson on an acoustic and then shown to guitarist Martin Barre.  

"I wrote the main riff in a hotel room in New York City,” Anderson told Guitar World magazine in 2013. “At the time I was trying to write songs that had [single-note] lines that would translate on the electric.”

Barre’s choice of gear on this album was heavily influenced by Leslie West of Mountain, who Tull had toured with in the US. “I thought his tone was tremendous, so I bought a Les Paul Junior,” Barre told Vintage Guitar magazine in October 1997. “That was the only guitar I used on the Aqualung album. I didn’t use any effects; I plugged straight into the Hiwatt. The reverb or any other sounds were studio rack effects.”

In a 2015 interview with Classic Rock, Barre recalled recording the solo to this song, when Jimmy Page walked into the studio. 

“He walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to Aqualung. Now, in those days, if you didn't get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, 'Go in there and do it or else'. And here was Jimmy waving like mad – 'Hey, Martin!' – and I'm thinking, 'I can't wave back, or I'm going to blow the solo'.

2. Thick As A Brick (Side 1) – Thick As A Brick (1971)

Ian Anderson was not happy with critics hailing Aqualung as a concept album and so allegedly conceived Thick As A Brick as a parody of a concept album. The original packaging was designed as a 12-page newspaper, with Anderson using surreal Monty Python-style humour to poke fun at the band, the fans and the music critics. As he described it, the plan was to "come up with something that really is the mother of all concept albums".

The album has just one long track, split over two sides. In some ways, the plan backfired, because what Anderson came up with, certainly across the hugely engaging 22 minutes 39 seconds of side one, is a flawless slice of progressive rock. Or as Classic Rock put it “such a brilliant piece of music that it stands almost in a category all by itself”.

Apart from drummer Clive Bunker, who left and was replaced by Barriemore Barlow, this is the same line-up as Aqualung, and the playing is exemplary – adventurous, assured and nimble. 

English folk influences pervade across this piece, interspersed with full-on breakneck prog – complex stabs, time signatures, arpeggios and phrasings with organ, bass and flute in particular providing soaring, virtuoso performances. Lyrically, the whole work hinges on the notion that an eight-year-old boy, the fictitious Gerald Bostock, had written all the lyrics for the album.  

“I have to admit that I really imposed the whole idea on the other guys,” Anderson told Classic Rock. “But, for whatever reason they went along with it, and actually warmed to the task once we got stuck into the music.”

 3. Locomotive Breath – Aqualung (1971)

Another masterpiece from the Aqualung album and a track which has served as the band’s encore since 1972. “Despite the title, it’s actually about the problems of population explosion and the demands society puts on us as a consequence,” recalled Anderson in 2020. "We’re on a train heading in the future, whatever that might lead, and we cannot get off. The song is meant to be a bit scary and threatening.

“I keep being drawn back to the subject [of trains], because public transport is part of my life. I don’t drive, so rely on buses, trains and the like. But here it is about a serious social issue.”

The track intros with John Evans’ bluesy piano, before lurching into bombastic hard rock. “In the shuffling madness,” begins Anderson, “Of the locomotive breath / Runs the all-time loser / Headlong to his death”.

Unusually for the time, the song was pieced together from overdubs, because as Anderson put it “Locomotive Breath was actually an utter failure when we tried to play it all together. It didn't gel. We didn't get the groove.”

4. Songs From The Wood  – Songs From The Wood  (1977)

Jethro Tull fans were dealt a stylistic curveball on their tenth album, Songs From The Wood, which veered away from the dense prog leanings and immersed itself in pastoral folk-rock with tinges of classical. This title track opens with close vocal harmonies and Anderson’s vocal timbre fits seamlessly within the folkier style.

The prog time signatures and complex stops and starts are still there but the hard rock is absent and there’s a warm grandeur. By 1977, Anderson had bought a farm estate in rural Buckinghamshire, which prompted his pursuit of a folkier, more organic sound.

Lyrically, the album was filled with medieval imagery and there’s a poetic feel throughout. “Let me bring you all things refined / Galliards and lute songs served in chilling ale / Greeting well-met fellow, hail / I am the wind to fill your sail.”

5.  A New Day Yesterday – Stand Up (1969)

Guitarist Martin Barre replaced founding member Mick Abrahams on Tull’s second album and it’s the former’s explosive riffing that dominates this opening track. It’s a stunning piece of music, blending classical, blues, jazz, and psychedelia into a strident, new ‘progressive’ rock sound. 

The production is spacious, with fluid bass and big ambient drums. Raunchy harmonica reflects the band’s blues roots and Barre’s powerful stabs and squalls weave within the whole. At its core, this is heavy blues, primitive and compelling. At 1:47, Barre lurches into a growling solo before Anderson picks it up on Hammond organ and flute at 2:10. 

Opinions differ on what guitar Barre used on the Stand Up album. As he explained to Guitarist magazine, he used a Gibson 330 for his first audition, and due to feedback issues with the hollow body he bought  Gibson SG Special for the next year before he bought the Les Paul Junior.

He complimented his sound with one particular effect. “In the very early days, I used Hiwatt and they didn’t drive very readily and so I had this horrible treble booster," Barre told Guitarist in 2015. "It pushed things at the front end but unfortunately, it was very, very prone to picking up radio stations, particularly in America. It was a nightmare. Sometimes the radio signal was louder than the guitar! 

“When I started using Marshall amps, I found that I could ditch the treble boosters but I think it put me off for life, really. I thought all those things are more trouble than they’re worth."

It takes a lot of hard work, just as much determination, and perhaps a little bit of good fortune to become a session drummer on a high profile gig. So, imagine what it takes to become recognised as one of the first-call drummers for not one, but multiple household name legends. 

Steve Jordan is one such drummer, with a unique feel behind the kit, a dynamic sense of touch, and a deep understanding of the drummers’ place in a song have earned him stage and studio slots with the likes of Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, The Pretenders, Bruce Springsteen, Donald Fagen (to name a few). He was even a weekly fixture on TV via his role in the Late Night with David Letterman house band.

Now, in the wake of Charlie Watts’ passing, he’s taking care of groove for one of the biggest bands rock ’n’ roll has ever seen with The Rolling Stones, a position personally signed-off by Watts himself years prior to his death, telling his bandmates, “Steve Jordan’s your man” if anything should ever happen to him.  

Steve’s success isn’t just owing to his standout drumming style, though. He’s also a dab hand behind the glass as a Grammy award-winning producer. Perhaps it’s this which helps inform his approach to the drums sonically as well as the notes he’s playing, with many ‘Jordanisms’ spurring new trends in the types of gear we play. 

Large hi-hats, stone-dead snare drums, wood hoops? It’d be a stretch to say he invented them, but they’re all often-imitated, close associations. Yamaha even enlisted him to help co-design its short-lived, and now sought-after modern Club Custom range.

Distilling a prolific discography of songs and performances which spans decades into five choices is no easy task, and this isn’t a case of ‘Five best’. Instead, we’ve gone for five songs that hopefully show the diversity and gravity of Jordan’s career. Dip your toe, then dive deep into the career of a modern groove master.

John Mayer - Vultures

We could have filled this article many times over with Jordan’s output with Mayer alone, and we’d say that his performance with the John Mayer Trio from live album Where The Light Is (as well as the studio albums) is not only essential listening, but also provides a pretty comprehensive cross-section of what makes Steve Jordan’s playing so addictive. 

There’s blues, soul, funk and rock, all instilled with his bouncing groove and impeccable drum sounds. That last point is largely why we’ve chosen Vultures (originally recorded for 2006’s Continuum) to kick off. 

On paper, the simple kick-snare pattern is straight out of Drum Beats 101, but the execution and sonics are what elevate the groove that we’ve heard a thousand times to a new level of interest. 

This is quintessential Jordan - oversized, sloshy hi-hats, an intentionally dead snare that’s so fat it’s risking a coronary, but the only pacemaker here is Jordan himself. Together with partner-in-time, Pino Palladino, it’s a masterclass in laying a groovy foundation for a guitar hero to build their house on.

The Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The Blues Brothers released Briefcase Full of Blues before the film came out, and therefore this live album pre-dates the studio-recorded soundtrack. However, it still netted Jordan a Billboard Number One, thanks in part to singles Rubber Biscuit, Hey Bartender and the BB’s version of Sam & Dave’s classic, Soul Man. 

“I was in a gas station, and I heard the original version again and I almost passed out. Because it was so incredible, and Al Jackson was so unbelievable. Our version just paled in comparison…I’m talking about Al Jackson’s groove, his pocket on that is so bullet-proof, iron-clad, compared to what I did which was the contemporary version. It’s almost embarrassing, it was such a lesson in humility.” 

Despite this —which Jordan claims was the catalyst for a more 'humble' change of approach in his playing — we’d argue that Jordan’s version holds up brilliantly.  and is well worth a listen for any covers band player looking to learn the song. 

Elsewhere, the album is a study in soul, blues and R’n’B drumming with Jordan moving effortlessly between straight grooves, gospel beats and shuffles. A must-listen for anyone playing with blues-obsessed six-stringers.

James Brown - Late Night with David Letterman

Ok, so this is a TV performance rather than one of the hundreds of studio recordings Jordan has appeared on, but it’s certainly a career standout. When James Brown came to Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, he performed three songs with ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Band’ — Paul Schaffer (keys), Will Lee (bass) Hiram Bullock (guitar) Sinaclair Pinkney (sax) and Hollie Ferris (trumpet) — and of course, Steve Jordan on drums. 

Ironically, due to the camera work and stage setup, we barely catch a glimpse of Jordan, but that’s made up for by the incredibly tight (and clearly audible) playing. Brown, notoriously tough on his band, specifically drummers, dished out a set of performances for the books, propelled by Jordan and co.’s funky backing. 

Jordan reflected on playing with the Godfather of Soul in an interview with Guitar Center, and it seems that it wasn’t just the audience who were impressed. “The first time James Brown appeared on the Letterman show in 1982, it was incredible. We blew his mind because he didn’t think our band was gonna be like that. 

"We had been waiting to play with James Brown our whole lives…so when we got the opportunity to do it, we were so freaking on it. He couldn’t believe it…it was really an amazing thing.

“After the show, I went back to meet him [to get his autograph]. He was sitting under a hairdryer…Al Sharpton was standing right behind him, because Al Sharpton used to do his hair!

"Anyway, he gets up, he grabs me and he says ‘Brother, you’re high!’ I’m saying to myself ‘I’m not high!’. He goes, ‘You’re high, your energy is high! This is the best show I’ve done in front of cameras since the TAMI Show!”. For him to say that was the greatest compliment that I think you could ever receive.” 

John Scofield - Busted

Blues doesn’t often scream ‘Drums!’, mainly due to the fact that the appreciation lies with the subtleties of the genre. But, it’s a style that we’re all likely to find ourselves playing at some point. 

Steve Jordan has been a consistent ambassador for great blues drumming, accompanying notable blue legends including Buddy Guy, BB King, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Robben Ford and more, so if you’re trufflin’ for a shufflin’, Steve Jordan’s swingier output is a great place to look. 

This choice steps slightly outside of the standard blues shuffle style, as Jordan sits in with fusion/jazz/funk/blues shapeshifting guitar virtuoso, John Scofield for an album’s worth of Ray Charles appreciation (That’s What I Say).

Jordan takes the straightforward shuffle of the original and gives it a jazzy makeover with a swinging ride pattern, but it’s mixed with stomped hi-hats, a busy, weaving bass drum and that unmistakeable ‘crack’ and ghost notes from a tight snare. 

The Rolling Stones - Angry

Steve Jordan’s association with The Rolling Stones began in the ’80s after he joined Keith Richards’ project, The X-Pensive Winos - originally devised to pay tribute to Chuck Berry for the Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll documentary and concerts. Jordan produced and co-wrote three albums with Keef, and when Charlie Watts sadly passed in 2021, there was no question within the band as to who could fill the role.

Here, we’re treated to the first single from Hackney Diamonds - the Stones’ first new album of material in 18 years (unreleased at the time of writing). Jordan plays drums on all but two of the album’s songs which are of course, played by Charlie Watts (Mess It Up and Live By The Sword).

It’s a straight-ahead Rolling Stones tune that, like a familiar pair of shoes neither amazes nor disappoints. Instead, it delivers exactly what we’d hope to hear from a band whose career is now into its seventh decade. 

Jordan plays it straight, with a Watts-inspired beat and an incredibly appropriate drum sound, complete with a crystal clear ringing snare. We imagine that playing for The Rolling Stones is likely to keep Jordan busy, but the good news is that there’s plenty more to come.  

The Rolling Stones will follow up last month’s newspaper tease with a full-on web blitz, livestreaming an interview with TV host Jimmy Fallon at lunchtime UK time tomorrow (Wednesday 6 September). 

Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood, still rocking in their 70s and 80s, will give the first official details of their first album of original material since 2005 in a livestream from Hackney, East London.

The album will be the first Stones release since the death of Charlie Watts last year, and feature recordings made by their much-missed drummer before he passed away. "Let me put it this way, you haven't heard the last of Charlie Watts," Keith Richards told the LA times earlier this year.

Their previous release, 2006’s Blue & Lonesome, was a suite of blues covers.

Details are, obviously, thin on the ground this morning, but we do know that the album will also feature Paul McCartney on bass on at least one track, while touring drummer Steve Jordan will also provide the backbeat elsewhere on the LP.

A statement from the band ahead of the livestream says, “Hackney may be at the heart of Hackney Diamonds, but this is a truly global moment we want to share with fans around the world via YouTube.”

The release was teased in a clue-laden local newspaper ad for a fictitious glass repair company last month, which read "Our friendly team promises you satisfaction. When you say gimme shelter we'll fix your shattered windows."

The interview, "talking new album, new music, new era" will Livestream from the Rolling Stones' YouTube channel tomorrow at - ahem - 2.30PM BST / 6.30AM PST / 9.30AM EST / 10.30AM BR / 3.30PM CET / 10.30PM JST / 11.30PM AEST.

When you're arguably the biggest rock band on the planet, apparently announcing your latest album, you could command time and space on pretty much any media platform you choose - A TikTok takeover? Good Morning America? Front and centre of the New York Times? Or how about an ad in a local newspaper in a borough of London?

That's what the Rolling Stones appear to have opted for, in the form of an ad for a made-up glass repair business, Hackney Diamonds. The firm drops several none-too-subtle clues in its short mission statement, which reads "Our friendly team promises you satisfaction. When you say gimme shelter we'll fix your shattered windows."

The dot above the i in diamonds is the band's legendary lips logo and as a clincher the firm was established in 1962, the year the Stones formed.

Hackney Diamonds is, fans have deduced, the name of the band's as-yet-unconfirmed new studio album, their 31st. The phrase is London tahn slang for broken glass shattered during a robbery.

The ad, first spotted and posted on X/Twitter by Simon Harper, Clash magazine founder, appears to herald the arrival of the band's first album since the death of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021. It's likely that the LP will feature drum tracks laid down by the debonair drummer before his death. "Let me put it this way, you haven't heard the last of Charlie Watts," Keith Richards said, speaking to the LA times recently.

The internet consensus is that the album will be officially announced in September, ahead of an October release.

The Rolling Stones were, in many respects, the yang to The Beatles' yin. While the Liverpool lads seemed bright and breezy, smiling and funny, the band whose two main characters hailed from Dartford in Kent, were dark, broody, and deliberately menacing. And while The Beatles played their fair share of American influenced R&B music, The Rolling Stones made it their musical raison d’etre.

The Stones, as they’ve universally come to be known, got together after Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had met and jammed in the blues clubs of south west London. 

Although initially led by Jones, a multi-instrumentalist and blues aficionado from Cheltenham who also named the band (after a Muddy Waters song), his position was soon usurped by frontman Jagger with songwriting partner and guitarist Richards.

Across their almost 60-year history the Stones has remained a two-guitar band. Keith Richards, always the musical glue that held it all together, has an amazing ability to gel with his opposite number, no matter how different that have been as players. When the aforementioned Jones quit and died in 1969 his place was taken by ex-John Mayall’s Bluesbreaker Mick Taylor, and in 1974 when the band’s excesses had become too much for him, Mick gave way to the group’s old friend and Faces’ guitarist Ronnie Wood. Ronnie was perhaps the guitarist the Stones always needed. Like Jones and Taylor, he was a fine slide player and could match Keith all day with rock riffs and bluesy solos.

While Stones’ records still receive regular radio play and even non-fans know the pop standards like Brown Sugar, Honky Honky Tonk Women, Jumping Jack Flash and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, the following five tracks are less obvious gems that reveal how Richards and each of his six-string partners have left their mark.

1. Carol – The Rolling Stones/England’s Newest Hitmakers (1964)

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been to the same junior school but parted company when they moved to different secondary establishments. They met again when a 17-year-old Richards spotted Jagger, a year his senior, on Dartford’s train station platform brandishing Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry albums. Keith, carrying his guitar under his arm, reintroduced himself to his former school chum and the rest - to which the blue plaque marking the spot where they met attests - is history.

The Berry album is important to our story, since Chuck was undoubtedly Keith’s biggest guitar influence. On their 1964 debut album they covered his composition, Carol, and several other songs by American R&B and blues artists (including Bobby Troup’s Route 66, which many believed was a Berry song due to Chuck’s hit version).

Richards has clearly done his rock ‘n’ roll homework, as he copies the Berry guitar style to a tee on his Epiphone Casino, while Brian Jones pumps out the boogie beat on a Gretsch. It’s a performance brimming with excitement and vigor, and it helped lay down the template of two guitars woven inextricably together, which the band exploits so brilliantly to this day.

2. Little Red Rooster – Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass)/The Rolling Stones Now (1966 and 1965)

The only blues song to top the UK singles chart until Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child in 1970, this Willie Dixon composition was Brian Jones’s masterpiece and, according to Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman, “one of his finest hours”. Featuring authentic blues slide guitar played by Jones, and a superb blues harp outro also performed by him, it was Jagger’s fantastically soulful delivery that undoubtedly shot it to the top slot. 

All but impossible to dance to – the band had even aped the uneven bar lengths common in classic blues numbers – The Stones and manager Andrew Loog Oldham realised this was not a commercially viable route for the band, and they never displayed their blues roots again quite so overtly until 2016’s Blue & Lonesome.

On TV performances Keith Richards played acoustic guitar and Jones used his Vox Mark IV ‘Teardrop’ for his superb slide interjections, while Jagger mimed to Brian’s harp outro solo. Jones was a musical magpie, and could apparently play almost any instrument he touched. His totally believable bottleneck on Little Red Rooster is testament to the 22-year-old’s prodigious but ultimately wasted talent.

3. Sway – Sticky Fingers (1971)

The Rolling Stones have never been a ‘guitar solo’ band, Keith’s vicious Les Paul Custom outbursts on Sympathy For The Devil being a rare exception. But in 1969, when Brian Jones left the Stones and died just days later, ex-John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ guitarist Mick Taylor took his place. Having followed guitar legends Peter Green and Eric Clapton in Mayall’s group, Taylor took his first Stones gig, playing to 250,000 in London’s Hyde Park, in his stride. Mick’s style was fluent and musical, “way beyond his years” according to Richards.

While he too rarely took a lead guitar break, his tenure with the band marked a turning point in their sound and signaled a four-year run of chart-topping albums. These, which many cite as the group’s best work, included Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile On Main St, Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (sic). Taylor’s tight rhythm guitar and riff playing brilliantly melded with Richards’ less disciplined style, and can be heard on many of the band’s finest singles, including Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, Tumbling Dice and Gimme Shelter.

This track from the 1971 album is well loved among Stones fans but little known outside of the inner sanctum. Jagger plays the almost Bonehead Arthurs-like rhythm guitar while all other six-string duties are left to Mick Taylor. Taylor is in his element here, weaving slinky slide fills around Nicky Hopkins’ piano licks and unleashing a fine slide solo in the middle. But Mick leaves his real moment until the song’s long play-out. He’s on fire here; his Les Paul screams out licks that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Cream’s better numbers. In fact many of the lines come straight out of the Clapton playbook, including repetitive pentanonic trills, big string bends and a beautifully controlled vibrato, leaving no one in doubt that Mick Taylor had earned his stripes and paid his blues dues.

4. Time Waits For No One – It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (1974)

This track is something of a departure for the Stones. There’s little of the earlier R&B influence to be heard; instead, its modern, Latin feel is rather more redolent of Santana, with Ray Cooper’s added percussion, Nicky Hopkins again providing distinctive piano lines, and Mick Taylor’s lengthy outro solo definitely tipping its hat in Carlos’s direction. 

While Keith takes care of rhythm duties, Taylor answers Jagger’s vocal lines with heavily phased lead fills and motifs. But when it comes to his improvised single-string extravaganza that takes the song to its conclusion, instead of his usual lyrical blues style (as heard in Sway), he opted for a more scale-oriented approach, running up and down the natural minor on an almost clean neck pickup tone.

Taylor has cited Time Waits... as his favourite Stones moment. “I love that solo,” he told Guitar World. “I think it’s probably the best thing I did with the Stones. It’s not one of their hits; it was an album track. But it’s quite lyrical and it’s a bit different from a lot of other Stones songs. Because of the structure of the song, it pushed my guitar playing in a slightly different direction. It’s more – I don’t like to use the term Carlos Santana-esque because it sounds too pretentious, but I kind of played in a different mode. I was playing over a Cmaj7 to an Fmaj7, which aren’t chords the Stones used that much.”

It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll is Taylor’s final Stones album before quitting the group in 1974, but on Time Waits For No One he leaves his mark in style. Perhaps in deference to Mick, the Stones never played the song live.

5. Everybody Knows About My Good Thing – Blue & Lonesome (2016)

While the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton might not at first seem like obvious bed fellows, they are in fact the perfect fit. While the various Stones members were finding their feet at the Crawdaddy and Eel Pie Island clubs in Richmond On Thames, London, up and coming players like Clapton, Ray Davies (The Kinks), Rod Stewart, Elton John and many others either went to watch, or joined in the jams. 

So when Eric, who was recording at the same studio where the Stones were making their 2016 album of blues covers, walked in to find them jamming full blast, according to producer Don Was his jaw dropped and he picked up one of Keith’s guitars and joined in.

Clapton played on two tracks on the album – Everybody Knows About My Good Thing, and the Otis Rush classic I Can’t Quit You Baby. On the former, his smooth and sophisticated slide sits in stark contrast to the more organic playing of Wood and Richards. 

Indeed, while Keith sits back and provides beautifully subtle rhythm fills, once Eric had set the song up with 12 bars of lyrical slide, Ronnie takes over with a spiky, gnarly but clearly heartfelt solo. Unusually Jagger didn’t play any guitar on the album, but his vocals are stunning throughout and his blues harp solos are good enough to evoke the legendary Little Walter.

Learn 4 key Keith Richards chords from classic Rolling Stones songs

Legendary rock avengers assemble: that whole Beatles Vs Stones thing was just a distraction, because there's a potentially huge collaboration coming with McCartney, Jagger, Richards and Starr in the mix.

Reports have surfaced that Paul McCartney has tracked bass for a new Rolling Stones project. Variety has cited "multiple sources" suggesting ubiquitous Grammy Award-winning producer Andrew Watt (Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Eddie Vedder, Post Malone, Dua Lipa) is helming the Stones recordings that McCartney has recorded for, and Ringo Starr is also set to play on it.

The report further suggests that the sessions took place in LA and the project is heading towards the mixing stage. 

Watt is the former guitarist of Glenn Hughes and Jason Bonham project California Breed, and has carved out a reputation as a producer and collaborator equally at home with contemporary pop stars as rock legends. He's certainly impressed McCartney.

“I’ve been recording with a couple of people, so I’m looking forward to doing even more," McCartney said in a Q&A on his website looking ahead to 2023. "I’ve started working with this producer called Andrew Watt, and he’s very interesting — we’ve had some fun.” 

The project would be the first album of original material featuring the Stones since 2005's A Bigger Bang, though the band did put out new track Living In A Ghost Town in April 2020. 

It's likely that whatever role Starr plays on the project, it will also feature late Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 80. Guitarist Keith Richards confirmed to the Los Angeles Times in the same year that Watts had tracked his parts for a number of new songs with the Stones before his passing.  “Let me put it this way,” Richards said. “You haven’t heard the last of Charlie Watts.”

Whatever form the Stones and Beatles collaboration side of things takes, it's not actually the first time the two legendary bands have been connected musically – despite their reported rivalry over years. 

Back in 1963, the Beatles had a hit with I Wanna Be Your Man, but actually gave it to the Rolling Stones to record first as a one-off non-album single.  

Other crossovers include late Stones guitarist Brian Jones tracking the sound of glasses clinking together on the Beatles' Yellow Submarine (Jones would return on sax duties for the Fab Four's You Know My Name), Lennon and McCartney adding harmonies to 1967 Stones track We Love You, and Lennon joining a bass playing Richards to perform Yer Blues as part of supergroup The Dirty Mac during 1968's Rock And Roll Circus.  

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by The Rolling Stones

Although the Rolling Stones have always been a twin guitar band, perhaps the most iconic selection of chords and riffs come from the one constant in their guitar player line up, Keith Richards, the man affectionately known as 'The Human Riff'.

A large part of the Stones catalogue has been recorded in Keith’s favoured Open G tuning, so the chords in this lesson will all be in Open G.

Low to high, that is D/G/D/G/B/D, however if you want the full Keith Richards experience, you can lose the Low D altogether. He tends to remove this from his favourite Telecasters and just play with the five strings.

C Major

You might be thinking, a C Major isn’t a particularly interesting chord, but in Open G tuning, you can play C Major, and any other major chord, with a single finger barred across 5 strings. 

This, as simple as it seems, is the foundation for Keef's Rolling Stones guitar style. On top of this single finger major chord you will add different extensions and variations to create those Richards style guitar lines.

This is the first chord you hear in Start Me Up

C6sus4

This chord might have a name that sounds complex, but once you’ve gotten the hang over the one finger major chord, this is just adding two extra fingers. 

As a shape this will look like a regular tuned 5 string min7 chords, but in Open G, the tuning shift makes this a 6sus4 chord. It’s a major chord with an added 6th note and a suspended 4.

Go between this and the major for instant Stones vibes. You can hear this chord all over tracks like Honky Tonk Women and Start Me Up.

D#add2

This add2 chord makes an appearance the track Brown Sugar. It’s a regular major chord played with a single finger, but on the G you’re adding a note two frets higher, this creates the Add2 sound. 

This is slightly different to a sus2, as it still contains a major 3rd. When strummed it creates a spacey, mysterious sound, but mix the add2 in and our with the major chord with a cranked guitar amp and it takes on a bluesy grit.

G5

This chord is the opening chord from Jumpin’ Jack Flash. On the record it’s played with a capo on the 4th fret. What we have here is essentially a stacked power chord. It’s a combination of root notes (G notes) and 5th notes (D Notes).

It’s a very simple chord to play, but it has a lot of impact.

You could also transpose this chord by replacing the open strings with a bar and playing the note on the B string with a higher finger, though you may need to drop the note on the High D if barring this one.

Keith Richards guitar lesson: The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed

Can't we all just get along? Isn't it enough we all live in a world where the music of the Beatles and Stones music exists? Well, the world doesn't like good news as much as legends beefing so here we are. Fresh from revealing revelations about the Beatles split, Paul McCartney has now set the cat amongst the pigeons again in the Beatles Vs Rolling Stones debate.

“I’m not sure I should say it, but they’re a blues cover band, that’s sort of what the Stones are,” he has told The New Yorker in a new interview for a wide-ranging feature. “I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”

The first part sounds like a broadside, even if the second part is a fair point. But McCartney is a Stones fan and enjoys going to see them live, despite previously suggesting the Beatles were the better band. 

“You know you’re going to persuade me to agree with that one,” McCartney said when Stern began stirring the Beatles Vs Stones pot in a 2020 interview. “They are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences. … There’s a lot of differences, and I love the Stones, but I’m with you. The Beatles were better."

So, two of the greatest bands, one still touring and both very different. Settled? 

They say a rolling stone gathers no moss but a Rolling Stone's gear gathers much value, and so it was to no great surprise that the Property From Bill Wyman and His Rolling Stones Archive auction held by Julien's, saw some serious records tumble.

The biggest news out of some thousand-plus items under hammer was the record price fetched by the former Stones bassist's 1969 Fender Mustang bass, which sold for $384,000 – almost twice the $204,800 paid for a Paul McCartney Hofner – also auctioned through Julien's.

Finished in Competition Orange (and underrated Fender finish though reprised in kind by the Capri Orange of Fender's Player Series) and seeing action onstage and in the studio between 1969 and 1970, it had previously been exhibited in 2010 at the O2 Arena Rock Exhibition.

Mavens of vintage British chime will have a glow in their EL84s at the big money fetched by Wyman's 1962 Vox AC30 Normal combo. At $106,250, it set a new world record for the most expensive amp sold at auction, beating a record previously held by two of David Gilmour's amplifiers.

Though, if the buyer of Gilmour's amps stopped at $77,000 it could have been because they spent $3.975 million on the Pink Floyd guitarist's famous – nay, iconic – black Strat – at the same 2019 auction. We'd probably settle for a more affordable amplifier after such a crazy act of G.A.S.

Speaking of expensive guitars, sold at auction, the late Brian Jones' 1968 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top went for $704,000, the biggest transaction at Wyman's grand sale. The Gold Top was used on  The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, from December 1968. 

Last but not least, there was another world record, and perhaps the item that best articulates the passing of time, from one era to the next. Out of style in bathroom furnishings of 2020, but not in the heated climate of the internet auction, a Rolling Stones toilet seat cover – acrylic, shaggy, all lips and tongue – was sold for $1,152.

That's one lucky toilet. By Wyman's records, the toilet seat cover dates back to the 1975, a US tour, and well, that's enough information, thanks. 

What do you get for the Stones fan with everything? You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need...

• Play blues guitar like The Rolling Stones' Mick Taylor

The organisers of last year's London BluesFest have announced the first names for the 2012 event (among them Ronnie Wood and Van Morrison) and an expansion to Manchester venues.

Chief among concern to guitarists is probably Ronnie Wood, who will be playing a set of Chess Records classics (think Chuck Berry, Little Walter etc).

Among the other names announced are Mick Taylor (also of The Rolling Stones-fame), blues guitar maestro Robert Cray, Eric Bibb, George Benson, plus Matt Schofield and Warren Haynes (with Gov't Mule), who have both featured in TG's video guest lessons.

Other, less guitar-centric, but probably still quite important names include Van Morrison, Tom Jones and Hugh Lawrie.

The shows all take place between 26 June and 6 July, but not all acts will be appearing in both cities. You can check out the full dates below.

Tickets for the above dual city, blues extravaganza are on sale now from www.bluesfest.co.uk. Expect to hear from a LOT of people who's babies have left them.

BluesFest 2012 UK dates

26 June - The Robert Cray Band - Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
26 June - John Hiatt - Hmv Ritz, Manchester

27 June - John Hiatt - Under The Bridge, London
27 June - Eric Bibb - Shepherd's Bush Empire, London

28 June - Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes - Hmv Ritz, Manchester
28 June - George Benson - Royal Albert Hall, London

29 June - Van Morrison: Sings The Blues - Hmv Hammersmith Apollo, London
29 June - Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes - O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
29 June - JJ Grey & Mofro - 100 Club, London

30 June - Ronnie Wood & Friends: The Chess Records Story - Hmv Hammersmith Apollo, London
30 June - Brand New Heavies - Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
30 June - Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires - Under The Bridge, London
30 June - George Benson - Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

1 July - Tom Jones - Hmv Hammersmith Apollo, London
1 July - Hugh Laurie - The Lowry, Manchester

2 July - Hugh Laurie - Hmv Hammersmith Apollo, London
3 July - Gov't Mule - Hmv Ritz, Manchester
4 July - Gov't Mule - Under The Bridge, London
6 July - Mick Taylor & Very Special Guest - Under The Bridge, London

Steve Lillywhite told Guns N’ Roses, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

Of course, saying you walked away from Chinese Democracy is no biggie - dozens of music makers came and went during that album‘s 13-year gestation period - but Lillywhite turned down the chance to produce Appetite For Destruction, a record with global sales approaching 29 million. It's the kind of disc most people in his line of work would gladly give their eyeteeth to list on their CVs. Lillywhite doesn’t regret his decision for one second - for him, it all came down to Axl Rose’s voice.

“If I don’t like a singer, I’ll say no to a band,” says the genial, British-born Lillywhite. “Guns N’ Roses are a perfect example. I realize that half the world considers Axl Rose rock royalty, but to me, he’s just a bad pub singer. They made the record they wanted to make without me, so it was all for the best. You can‘t dwell on what you didn‘t do. It’s what you did do that matters.”

The results speak for themselves: over the course of a three-decade-plus career, Lillywhite’s efforts - debuts by U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, plus groundbreaking releases from XTC, Morrissey, Peter Gabriel and dozens more - have defined an era. “I’m thrilled to know that so many people have connected to this music,“ he says. “But to me, making albums is ultimately a very personal experience.”

According to Lillywhite, the art of record production functions best when it mirrors a marriage. “Bands are like families,“ he says. “Sometimes you like your family, sometimes you don’t. But at the end of the day, you have to deal with it. Basically, I’m a ‘people person,‘ so I’m very fortunate to have chosen a profession that was a good fit for me, because you have to be a ‘people person’ to do this kind of thing well. One day I’m a friend and honorary bandmate, the next day I’m a therapist and kind of a den father - no two days are the same.“

Even so, since making his first recordings, Lillywhite says that his goal has remained constant: “I want to capture greatness,” he states. “There’s never one way you achieve that, but that’s what makes this a fascinating and challenging job. Every album is a new chance to do something different and exciting.”

He thinks for a second, then adds with a laugh, “Of course, it always helps if I can tolerate your singing. If the voice is there, then we‘re halfway home!”

Read on as Steve Lillywhite talks us through 16 of the most important and memorable albums of his career. First up: Ultravox

“I was a young tape operator at a studio. Basically, a tape op is the guy who presses the buttons and things like that. In those days, you could get promoted from tape op to engineer, and one way to do that was to bring in bands on weekends to engineer on your own. If the studio boss saw you could handle things, chances were good you’d get promoted.

“So I brought in this band called Tiger Lily - they would change their name to Ultravox - and we did some demos which landed them a deal with Island Records. As luck would have it, they told the label they wanted me to produce their album.

"It wound up being a three-way production between me, the band and Brian Eno. The label said the band needed a name guy, and because they loved Roxy Music, they chose Brian. This would be my first time working with him.

“The great thing about Brian is, he comes in, does his thing and leaves - whereas I’m there all the time and micro-manage. It was a good learning experience. The album was critically acclaimed, but it didn’t have that all-important hit single. This was during the early days of punk, when attitude was everything. Ultravox came from punk, but they were more art-rock.”

“I had a fantastic time with XTC. With some artists, I have to help work on arrangements and put a lot of things together in order to create an album. This was hardly the case with XTC.

“Andy Partridge came in with songs that were fully formed - there was no fat on them whatsoever - which made things fairly easy for me, really. More than anything, I just conceptualized the sound of the album.

“It’s a really good record, in my opinion. The song Making Plans For Nigel still sounds wonderful to me. By this point, I guess you could say I was off and running as a producer.”

“Peter phoned me up, and I thought it was somebody pulling a prank on me. I didn’t believe it was Peter Gabriel on the other end of the line. But we had a meeting and got on famously.

"This was a new experience for me in that it was first time I was producing somebody who was ’before my time,’ if you will, somebody older than me and, quite frankly, an artist I was kind rebelling against. Remember, I was still coming from punk, and Genesis certainly weren’t punk at all.

“Peter surprised me in all the ideas he had. When he said, ‘I don’t want to use cymbals on the record,’ I went, ‘Ahhh! I love that.’ Because I was playing around with a lot of ambience on the drums, and cymbals were always very annoying. So we recorded without cymbals, and the result was an album with a beautifully unique sound.

“The record is very dark, but the mood in the studio was fun and joyful. Peter had loads of ideas, but he was very open to try anything. Whenever he suggested something, I’d go, ’That’s great! Now, can we go one step further?’ Which he loved. I think we both learned a lot from each other.”

“One of a few times I’ve worked with brothers. With the exception of this Christian band called Switchfoot, any time I work with brothers, they always fight. Richard and Tim Butler would go to the pub, then they’d come back and be arguing about something. Other than that, they were great.

“The catchphrase in the band was ‘beautiful chaos,’ and I think we captured that on this album. There were six members in the group, and they created this big noise. My job was to take that chaos and noise and make sense of it all.

“We did the whole thing in 10 days, between Peter Gabriel sessions. Quite an adventure.”

“I was their second choice for a producer. Originally, they wanted Martin Hannett, who had worked with Joy Division. But when that band’s singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, Martin decided he wasn’t in the right headspace to produce U2.

"So they came to me, I saw them play, and we worked on a single called Stories For Boys. They liked it a lot, so we set about recording the album.

“It’s funny to think about it now, but back then, they weren’t the band you would expect to make it - not when you stacked them against Echo & The Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes. They just weren’t that hip at the time.

“I did like their sound, though. More than anything, I liked their spirit: U2 didn’t think about winning, they thought about not losing. They were keenly aware of their limitations, but they wouldn’t be stopped.

“Bono’s voice struck me right away. I never thought of him as a rock singer, but rather as a crooner. To me, the band is like Frank Sinatra - if Frank Sinatra had electric guitars behind him. It’s incredible to see how The Edge has become such a guitar icon, because on that first album, he only had one guitar. [laughs] But he did quite a lot with it.”

“This was the beginning of the next phase. With punk, the musicianship wasn’t so good. The attitude was great, but the playing wasn’t there.

"Big Country were different: They were fantastic musicians, and a couple of the members, Mark Brzezcki and Tony Butler, knew how to play their instruments really well. Mark and Tony were already session guys - they had played with people like Pete Townshend.

“One of the reasons why I love this album, and I love my contribution to it, is that they had worked with another well-known producer, and things didn't turn out right. So they came to me and said, ’Steve, we know we’re a good band, but the sound we’re getting is boring. We’re not happy.’ So I went in and took everything apart and put it all back together. And in doing so, I helped them get that big sound they became famous for.

“The guitars sounding like bagpipes? We were totally aware of it. But it wasn’t so much because of their guitars or their gear or anything technical; it had more to do with the parts they were playing. They were very simple, striking, anthem-like lines that just rang out. I have a very special place in my heart for this album.”

“Up to this point, I’d pretty much recorded UK-based bands, and I wanted to have success with an American act.

"Funnily enough, Marshall came to England and was your typical Anglophile musician. He went to Liverpool, did all those things. ‘Why are you going to Liverpool, of all places?’ I asked him. And he said, ’Well, that’s what you do, right? The Beatles…’ Anyway, when we decided to work together, we did it in the States, at that great studio The Power Station, which is now called Avatar.

“The Power Station had that enormous live room where Bowie did Let’s Dance and Springsteen did Born In The USA. The huge drums you got in that room sounded fantastic on those records, but they might have been too much for a Marshall Crenshaw album.

“Marshall took a lot of heat from his fans and critics for Field Day. Based on his first album, he was sort of this Great White Hope for stripped-down pop-rock. But Marshall always defended Field Day. He said it was the record he wanted to make and the sound he was looking for.”

“I had this stupid idea at the time that I could only do one album with any band. I thought, Well, if I can produce other artists, shouldn’t bands work with other producers?

"After Boy, I told U2 they should use somebody else, which they did do - they had tried doing some stuff with Sandy Pearlman. But one day in 1982 I got a call from Bono asking me what I was doing in September. I still get those calls, in fact!

“With October, they didn’t know what kind of record they needed to make. With War, however, they knew exactly what they were aiming for, lyrically and sonically. They were going for art, but in a very primal way. XTC were art from the head, whereas U2 were more art from the heart.

“One of the biggest things the band wanted to accomplish on War was to have an album that captured the power of their stage show. I remember Bono saying to The Edge over and over again, ’No, no, don’t play like The Edge! Play like Mick Jones from The Clash.’”

“A real man would never turn down The Rolling Stones - that’s how I looked at it. But I did realise very early on that this would not be a classic Stones album. This was going to be a strange and difficult record.

“Mick had just released his first solo album, She’s The Boss, which became affectionately known to Keith and his gang as ’that fucking disco album.’ Keith was very annoyed at Mick for making that record. To him, loyalty is everything, and he saw Mick going outside the band as no different from seeing your wife cheating on you.

“Mick and Keith were hardly in the same room together - the tension was pretty thick. So I kind of saw my role as being the Henry Kissinger for the guys, keeping the peace. The album had some OK tracks on it: Harlem Shuffle is cool… One Hit To The Body is half-cool. Still, it was the worst Stones record they had made up till then. On the other hand, every subsequent record has been worse, so I don’t feel that bad.” [laughs]

“This is the album that just keeps on going. The other day, I saw a Subaru commercial on American television that used the title track. Couple that with the fact that Fairytale Of New York is now the biggest Christmas song in the history of the UK. Plus, my wife at the time, Kirsty MacColl, sang the duet on Fairytale, and she was killed at Christmas… So the record is very significant in my life.

“Making the album was another exercise in chaos, but as it was with the Furs, it was an enjoyable chaos. We had something like seven or eight people playing together, this incredible cacophony. My job was to keep my eye on the ball at all times. At the end, I remember Spider [Stacy] coming up to me and saying, ’I don’t know how you did it, but this is a great record!’

“They were a crazy band, but once I got used to their craziness I was fine. For example, I learned not to get Shane MacGowan to do a vocal at the end of the day; I got him to do a vocal at the beginning of the day. The only thing was, his day didn’t begin until nine o’clock at night!” [laughs]

“You’d listen to this record and think that we all had a giant party in the studio. Strangely enough, it wasn’t such an enjoyable album to make.

“I knew the songs were absolute diamonds, but getting them on tape wasn’t so easy. Lee Mavers [the group’s singer-songwriter] had this blueprint in his head for the record, but it was like an acid trip that kept coming back to him, and it would mess him up.

“We’d record six songs that were fantastic, but if there was one thing wrong on the seventh song, he’d become convinced that everything else was terrible, and we’d have to start everything all over again. There’s nothing wrong with seeing as an album as an artistic whole rather than a collection of songs, but when that view is to the detriment of getting things done…well, it can be a problem.

“That said, I would put Lee right up there with any of the singer-songwriters I’ve ever worked with. He‘s an amazing talent, and the album we made is sort of timeless.”

“The band got a record deal and spoke to a lot of my contemporaries about producing their debut. I talked to a few of the guys who were being considered, and they said things like, ‘They’ll never be successful. There’s a jazz drummer, a violin player, they play drum solos and there’s an acoustic guitar - who wants to hear that?’

“I never saw any of those elements as negatives. I went to see the band play live, and I was very impressed by the buzz they were generating. I thought they had very strong material, a great singer - Dave can sing in a lot of registers; he‘s sort of like Peter Gabriel in that way. My attitude was, There’s nothing here for me to change. All I really have to do is take what they’ve got and accentuate it.

“The band made the record they wanted to make, and in my opinion, that’s usually when you come up with something really special. The bottom line is, there’s incredible songs on the album, things like Satellite - I mean, c’mon, that’s a great fucking song!

“This was my first time recording up in Woodstock, New York, and I fell in love with the non-corporate environment of music that exists there. A really fabulous place.”

“Morrissey! God bless him. I’ve did three albums with him, but this one was definitely the best.

"I think one of the reasons why Morrissey and I worked together on a number of records was because he really liked my production of his voice. I took a lot of time recording his vocals, which was very important to him because he loves listening to himself!

“I don’t know what I did differently from other producers. To me, I was simply focusing on what one should - a unique singer.

“Morrissey is one of those guys who says very little, but when he does it means something. I remember one day we were working on a track, and he was out of the room for a while, down the hall or whatever. He came back in, listened to the song and simply said, ’Steve…The Who, Shepherd’s Bush, 1964.’ And he walked out. All at once, I went, ‘Ahh! Now I know what to do!’ [laughs] He’s that kind of fellow. You have to know how to read him.”

“All of a sudden, this punk rocker is deemed the man who does prog-rock - or jam bands, if you will. What a U-turn! But you know, I love all art forms, the exception being opera. Opera I probably wouldn’t be very good at.

“Phish, for me, are the musical equivalent of watching a flock of birds fly across the sky: They don’t scatter every which way, but rather, they move with each other; they dip and dive, they go up and down; but at all times, they seem to have this radar, this instinct, for where the bird in front or in back of them is going. Musically, each member of Phish knows what the other is doing, which then carries over to the whole.

“The band can play anything, which then raises the question: Well, what should they play? With Billy Breathes, it’s the closest they got to making what I would say is a good stoner album.

"You know what I mean: you put on the CD, you fire up a big one and you just go down that road. There hadn’t been a good stoner record since Dark Side Of The Moon. Billy Breathes got close. I keep telling Trey Anastasio we can make a better one.”

“I’ve had different jobs with U2 since the first three albums. I remember on The Joshua Tree, they were 18 months into making that record when Paul McGuinness, their manager, finally said to them, ’When you recorded with Steve, you’d do a record in six weeks. Let’s get him in here and finish this thing.’

“My role with U2 gradually became being something akin to the closing pitcher - the guy who comes in at the end and helps win the ball game. I think a lot that has to do with the fact that when the band sees me, it reminds them of their early work and they know they have to get down to in. On Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, All That You Can’t Leave Behind - they would always call me to wrap things up, and sometimes to work on the hits.

“During much of this time they were working with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, but on Atomic Bomb they started the sessions with another producer. Eighteen months into it, they decided they had to fire the producer and start all over. The band was feeling pretty down about things.

“I came in and listened to what they had done. They played me a song called Native Son. I liked it, but I said it wasn’t right, it hadn’t been recorded correctly. So I set the band up in a whole different way, they started playing, and halfway into it Bono said, ’I can’t sing this song. The words aren’t good enough.’ And I said, ’Well, the music’s pretty good.’ So he went off, wrote different lyrics, and the song became Vertigo. At that point, after we had Vertigo, we took our feet off the brakes and the album progressed at a nice pace.

“Musically, the band still struggles, but they’re overachievers - if they can’t do something, they’ll hammer away at it until they can. They want to do their best work, even today. Complacency never took root in U2. They want to make great albums, and they want to have hits. More than anything, they want their music to mean something to people. I can’t say enough good things about them.”

“The fabulous Leto brothers, Jared and Shannon. I really enjoyed this project. What happened was, Flood started the album, but things were going kind of slowly, so Flood had to leave and I came in.

“We were recording at the Leto brothers‘ house, which certainly had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side of things, it’s a cheap way to make a record; on the negative side, there’s not much of a clock.

“The album is pretty gargantuan. It’s funny, though: The whole idea of getting the fans to sing on it and be the choir, well, that’s great and all, but the only problem is that most of the fans are women. We’d record them, listen back, and it sounded like a load of kids! [laughs] So we had to bolster it up with some guys’ voices, all of us singing, just to put some weight on top of the choir.

“They’re a great band. I think Jared is really talented, and I’d love to get some more stuff going on with him. You sit him down with an acoustic guitar and listen to him…he’s spectacular.”

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