“Let the old still believe that they’re young,” Mick Jagger cries in a definitive Rolling Stones ethos that is delivered towards the end of Hackney Diamonds, the rock’n’roll legends’ first album of new material since the back-to-basics A Bigger Bang 18 years ago. And with that attitude, there’s no reason to believe it’ll be their last. The band reportedly have three-quarters of a follow-up album left over from the sessions, and with AI advancements promising drive-thru nanobot blood changes and Keith Richards clearly mainlining the elixir of life these days, in another couple of decades the Stones might still be too busy rocking to download their celebratory centenarian Moonpig from the king.
Yet there’s a certain scent of career closure to Hackney Diamonds. They round off this 24th UK release with a faithfully grainy cover of Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone Blues”, the 1950 track from which they took their name and a cut from one of the albums that Jagger had under his arm when he and old schoolmate Richards ran into one other at Dartford Station in 1961 and decided to chance their arms at becoming one of the greatest and most successful acts in rock history.
