The Rolling Stones - Hackney Diamonds Review

Hackney Diamonds is not to be approached by chin-stroking music fans who want a late career classic.

It’s been over half a century since the Rolling Stones first released a studio album. Since then, they’ve spent six decades recording canonical works - Exile on Main St., Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers are in regular rotation on classic rock playlists – and they continue to abide by a touring schedule that would cause fatigue in even the most studious of musicians. As the band themselves enjoy their seventh decade, they show little sign of decelerating. The death of drummer Charlie Watts resulted in an undeniable aperture in the fabric of the band, but they march on with Hackney Diamonds, their first album of original songs in 18 years.

The album’s existence isn’t necessarily unsurprising. While their voracious appetite for performing may not itself be indicative of a band who are studio bound, the past decade has not been without new music. Granted, those new releases have been sparse, but time was still found for the occasional single release and an album of blues covers released in 2016.

Still, Hackney Diamonds does mark a new chapter, and a strange one too. Some may argue that to expect another album that matches the quality of the band’s most celebrated releases would be farcical. Others would point to Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, all of whom recorded some of their most significant albums towards the end of their careers.

With Hackney Diamonds, The Rolling Stones are not as successful as those artists. It’s in no way the band at their most creative or exciting, but it’s not terrible. The songs here could have been far less successful, and the occasional spark of the band’s former selves is enough to carry a nostalgic fan through the record – just.

‘Angry’ kicks the album off with an 80-year-old Mick Jagger warning us – ‘don’t get angry with me’. He sounds bullish, brazen and still every bit a rock star. It’s faintly ridiculous too, what with how oddly confrontational the lyrics are, and the thickness of the guitars trying to swamp the song, but it’s a strong start nonetheless.      

That’s mostly because the band sound at their best when they don’t try to make us think. Jagger’s officious vocals on ‘Angry’ are much easier to stomach than his self-portrait of a troubadour stumbling through town on ‘Get Close’. ‘I walk the city at midnight, with the past strapped to my back’, he sings like a shmaltzy cliché. ‘Depending on You’ is similarly lacking, even if there are shades of Keith Richards’ former self, curtesy of his sporadic guitar licks.

The real angst arrives with ‘Bite my Head Off’, a song that sounds so preposterously furious that it’s difficult not to enjoy its unfettered maximalism. Jagger’s penchant for metaphors – ‘if I were a dog, you would kick me down’ – is truly inspirational.

Paul McCartney turns up with his bass too, which may explains why Jagger spends large portions of the song sounding oddly like he’s trying to impersonate the Beatle. It’s not the only song to feature a guest musician. Elton John hammers away on the keys during ‘Live by the Sword’, a camp pop-rock stomper that sounds like it was written by Marc Bolan in the ‘70s. Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder even appear on the 7-minute ‘Sweet Sounds of Heaven’.

And it's with these guest slots that the collective outpouring of appreciation heaped upon the band begins to contextualise Hackney Diamonds. It isn’t the group’s best work and it’s far from it, but along with some friends old and new, it becomes less of an album and more of a celebration. It’s rough and ragged all over but so are The Rolling Stones. Keith Richards’ vocals on ‘Tell me Straight’ are unsteady, but it was the correct decision to have Richards handle the lead. It’s quintessential. His very presence as a one-song vocalist precedes the quality of the vocal itself.   

Then there are genuine highlights. ‘Dreamy Skies’ harnesses the rockers’ inner Hank Marvin. They do the style effectively and respectively, and by bringing the band back to the roots of the music that made them become a band in the first place, everything becomes that bit more organic.

Hackney Diamonds is not to be approached by chin-stroking music fans who want a late career classic. But there are great moments, even if they’re scattered amongst bizarre ones, daft ones, head-scratching ones and downright funny ones. But what were we to expect, it’s The Rolling Stones for heaven’s sake!