The Rolling Stones return with a new album called “Hackney Diamonds”

Jagger mocked the idea of ​​the Rolling Stones as an institution. “It’s just a band,” he said.

But Ronnie Wood, the guitarist who joined in 1975, cherishes the band’s six-decade continuity. “This has been my thing all these years, keeping my foundation going,” he said in a video interview from his apartment in Barcelona. “When Mick and Keith have a falling out, I’ll do everything I can to get them back together – at least get them talking and get the engines going again.”

The album’s title comes from London slang. Hackney is an area in East London that has long had a bad reputation, although it has become more upscale recently. “Hackney diamonds” exist, Wood explained Pieces of broken glass From the broken windshields of cars, leave them with one word, It crashed.

“A lot of the songs on the album have that explosion to them,” Wood said. “This is a really in-your-face album.”

With the production of the new LP, the band has regained “a sense of urgency,” Jagger said via video from Paris, with paintings of elegant French nobility on the wall behind him. Of course, the longtime members of the Rolling Stones — Jagger, 80, Richards, 79, and Wood, 76 — aren’t getting any younger.

“I told Keith, ‘If we didn’t have a deadline, we’d never be able to finish this record,'” Jagger said. “So I said, ‘The deadline is Valentine’s Day 2023. Then we’ll go out and tour it.’ This is what we used to do. You know, you have to finish Exile on Main Street because you have a tour booked.

Even without new albums, the Stones continued to tour in the 2000s and 2000s. The band would go into the studios occasionally to start on songs, but were never able to finish them. Meanwhile, Jagger and Richards had amassed a backlog of new material at various stages, written separately but awaiting the band’s collaborative touches.