The Rolling Stones: Hackney Diamonds review – if this is the end, they’re going out with a bang

(Polydor)
The Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years crackles with a sense of purpose, with fabulous Keith Richards riffs and Mick Jagger sounding genuinely energised

The eighth song on the 24th studio album by the Rolling Stones is called Live By the Sword, a succession of variations on the titular maxim about dying by the sword. In truth, it’s not one of the strongest lyrics on Hackney Diamonds. You rather get the impression Mick Jagger came up with the song’s central conceit, realised he’d run out of ideas for variations on the aforementioned titular maxim around the end of the first verse, but boldly decided to press on regardless. “If you’re deep in the crime, you’re deep in the slime,” he avers. “If you live like a whore, you better be hardcore”: well, if you say so, mate.

Then again, you could make a convincing case that the lyrics scarcely matter. Live By the Sword is a raging blast that reunites the version of the Rolling Stones extant from the mid-70s to the early 90s – the drums were recorded by Charlie Watts at his final sessions before his death in 2021; Bill Wyman is on bass – with the addition of Elton John hammering away in the sideman role once occupied by the late Ian Stewart. Not for the last time on Hackney Diamonds, it recalls the moment in the late 70s when the Rolling Stones were briefly galvanised by the arrival of punk, whether they would have admitted it or not: it’s of a piece with Some Girls’ Respectable, Emotional Rescue’s Where the Boys Go and Neighbours, a refugee from the Emotional Rescue sessions that wound up on 1981’s Tattoo You. Jagger, meanwhile, sings the whole thing with yowling conviction, even when you haven’t got a clue what he actually means, as per the business about living like a whore. He sounds energised and engaged, a far cry from the Jagger you occasionally heard on Stones albums in the 80s and 90s, who didn’t seem to be singing so much as dutifully rearranging a collection of well-worn mannerisms and vocal tics to fit the songs.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/kirgmZD