“All I drank was muddy water,” Mick Jagger hollers on “Rough and Twisted”, the stonking opener to the Rolling Stones’ 25th album, Foreign Tongues. And it does seem like there’s something in the water. Hot on the heels of Paul McCartney and Madonna, the Stones’ new record seals this as the summer of vintage comebacks from musical legends, with the veteran rockers sounding astonishingly good, not just for their age, but for a band 60 years younger.
McCartney and the Stones share producer wunderkind Andrew Watt, 35, whose wide-eyed enthusiasm for good old-fashioned rock’n’roll is clearly catching, but where Macca and Madge are using new material to reflect on their younger years, the Stones have their gaze fixed firmly on the now. So while the drink that Jagger howls about is evidently a play on the foot-stomping blues legend Muddy Waters, whom he idolised as a kid, he has a bad taste in his mouth as he finds himself in a “flyblown town/ In the back of nowhere”, having been lured there on false pretences. “Why don’t you take me,” he snarls, “to where I wanna go?” He’s sick of being dragged down a bad road by the people in charge – and so he snaps against “Mad Mogul Mr Musk” on “Mr Charm” with a punkish bite.
