I recently discovered that as a teenager, Keith Richards rescued a monkey destined for vivisection from the science lab at Dartford Technical School, and for a short time raised it as his own baby. This story was mentioned in a feature run by the teen magazine Boyfriend in the early Sixties, intended to puncture the bad-boy image at the heart of the Rolling Stones’ campaign. It is now hard to imagine, but the establishment really did once quake at the prospect of Mick, Keith and friends – at their wildness, and what it meant for civilisation andyour daughters.
Six decades later, the Stones have been digitally de-aged in the video for their new single “In the Stars”, with the aid of AI by Deep Voodoo, a company set up by the creators of South Park. In a large room, amid a cast of extras who look like they’ve stepped off the set of Daisy Jones & the Six, the Stones perform as themselves in the early Seventies, with nine drummers taking the place of Charlie Watts (he passed away in 2021). The song, a soft blues-rock number immediately catchy in a way that is faintly annoying, sounds thoroughly modern, so I don’t really get the point of pulling the band back in time. The video recalls the general blandifiying of rock and roll you feel in the band T-shirts section at Primark: do the Stones need to be seen grooving alongside a heterogenous group of young people and semi-famous models to be interesting? No, they do not.
The sound of the Rolling Stones – Keith’s jerky chords, Mick coming in on a blues note above like a hammer on steel pipes – is so deeply ingrained on us that it feels almost physical, the mannerism of two people grown together like a pair of old trees (they met aged four, and have now known each other 78 years). You’re not exactly listening for new songs when you hear a new Stones album – none of the perfectly serviceable tracks on Foreign Tongues will become classics, largely because of the sheer force of the back catalogue. Rather, you’re listening for that sound, and checking it’s still there. Jagger’s voice is the same pitch it has always been – in fact, on the strange “Jealous Lover” he sings as high as Miss Piggy. I noticed the same phenomenon – of sounding young and looking old – while watching the Cure’s Robert Smith the other day, who turns up doing guitar and backing vocals on a couple of these tracks.
In a recent Guardian interview, Keith Richards admitted he doesn’t know how Smith ended up on the new record – that it was the idea of the producer, Andrew Watt. Watt, an American in his thirties, is getting a name for himself as a kind of “old-rocker whisperer” – he plays in the band rather than sitting behind the mixing desk, likes to keep imperfect takes because they sound more real than perfect ones, and chivvies on his charges with the enthusiasm of a fan.
Although Keith’s insouciance about Foreign Tongues is par for the course – that’s his role in the double act – the lyrical thrust of each new album is pretty much down to Mick. I find this fascinating somehow. To think that Mick, a business mogul and touring machine, who spends three hours a day in the gym and never got round to writing his own autobiography (he had to pay back the advance), could sit down with a pen and paper and formulate lyrics about Trump’s America: “Lady liberty don’t look so good/When she’s wearing a scowl” (“Ringing Hollow”). Does he really care? I like to think he does.
The album’s trumpeted guest stars (Steve Winwood on a Rhodes piano, Bruno Mars on a cowbell) are hidden ingredients only, and Charlie Watts makes an appearance from the afterlife on “Hit Me in the Head”, an analogy of falling in love as physical battery, with a good heavy metal riff. Stones lyrics like to take a pre-tooled rock-friendly phrase and explore it, as in “Side Effects”: “There’s a price to pay for everything you put in your veins.” What is this drug of which they speak? A woman? It doesn’t seem likely. I think it’s a song about the fact that they’re still going. “I got a heart to protect… I can’t stop, I can’t get enough/Got a feeling I’m obsessional…”
There has been a rather negative reaction to the album’s cover of the Amy Winehouse song “You Know I’m No Good”. Is it slightly off-putting, I wonder, hearing Jagger sing a line like, “Lick your lips as I soak my feet”? Or does the song belong too much to Amy? In any case, I think she’d have loved it. “Some of Us” is Keith’s turn on lead vocals, a ballad more reflective in its melody, and more intimate because his voice does sound its age, a great-grandfather on the mic. Though Richards’s pickled body has survived against all odds, his lines hint at mortality: “Some of us are on our knees.”
Foreign Tongues (Polydor Records) is available to stream now
[Further reading: The taming of the Wag]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment