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SCMP Reporter

It's been a generation or more since the headline: 'Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?' ran in the British music paper Melody Maker. Since then, the wild boys of music have become grandfathers with attitude. Theirs is 'granddad rock' to Paul Weller's 'dad rock', as the press called it.

 Making their name with outlaw anthems of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, the Stones were punks before the word became trendy - and before they grew up to become, some said, caricatures of the worst of music's excesses.

 Accused of losing the plot in the 1980s and early 90s, the Stones' son et lumiere spectaculars became bandwagons for corporate sponsors, and there were few suggestions that Bridges To Babylon , the Stones' latest cut, would be much of a departure from any of its recent predecessors.

 But the proof of the digital pudding is in the listening. And, lauded as 'Stones' finest album in decades', the listening reveals a record built on new foundations.

 'The last studio album [Voodoo Lounge ] was very much a solid . . . kind of band-working-in-the-studio record,' says Mick Jagger.

 'We all sat in the studio more or less all the time, and it was an old-fashioned, straight-made record.

 'I thought if we were going to do this one differently we had to take a slightly different approach to it.

 'But you're not going to change completely: you're going to play, you're going to sing . . . but the songs don't all have to be approached that way,' he says.

 'Some songs lend themselves to different treatments; they can be taken out of that live environment, then brought back and rebuilt. We've made records like that before - very early on. We'd record the drum track, and build up from that. You get a different feel than you do when you play live. You have more control.'  And the results?  'I think those songs were a success because I don't think they took away from the spirit of the band, and there are enough other things on the album to balance that out,' Jagger says.

 Some of those 'other things' come in the form of gritty rockers, laments, country twangs and an outstanding reggae track, delivered by Jagger's partner in villainy, grizzled guitar hero Keith Richards.

 'When I can, I've been living there for 25 years, so it rubs off - try taking the Jamaica out of me,' Richards laughs.

 Traditionally the Stones' totem and keeper of the flame in the 'difficult years', when it looked like Jagger had been forever seduced by the attractions of a solo career, and the Stones were finally gathering moss, Richards was thought unlikely to be content with the new regime.

 But as so often in the Stones' career, myth had become mixed up with truth.

 'While we were making this record we were working in three different rooms in the studio at once. At one end you'd pass Charlie in the corridor and say, 'I can't stop now, I have to do an overdub in studio two', and Charlie would be going, 'well, I'm off to put some percussion on in studio one', and it would be nuts.

 'It was high pressure, but it was fun to make.'  Drummer Charlie Watts concurs.

 'It was a lot of fun for me too - it was a peculiar way of recording, plus the conventional; so it was a great mixture, playing to different demands.'  'I eventually set up my own room in studio four,' grins guitarist Ron Wood, 'with Charlie and [percussionist] Jim Keltner. We did an alternative record at the same time the album was being made.'  Of the hectic schedule, Richards adds: 'The Stones make better records under pressure, under deadlines.

 'We used to take a luxurious two years to make an album; sometimes half of the tracks had been so overdubbed there was nothing left. There is a certain immediacy about this one that I like - a certain feeling of going ahead, moving on.

 'I've never lost weight making a record before,' he laughs. 'This one cost me 10 pounds [22 kilograms] I could ill afford. Getting it back on though.'  Bridges was put together this year in Los Angeles: another change.

 'For years we've been recording on beautiful tropical islands,' says Richards. But after four months you're bouncing off each other and you don't get any outside influence.

 'To record in LA - where, after all, we did most of the 60s stuff, and where there are loads of friends of ours - well, it was a joy not to work in a vacuum.'  Never slow to embrace the technology of the time, the Stones have found a role for the Internet in their movable Babylonian feast.

 On each stop of the tour the band is performing one song voted for by visitors to their web site, with voters choosing from a selection of numbers not included on the set-list. The 'people's choice' each night will also be cybercast live on the Net - even if unrehearsed.

 'We want to make the Internet part of the live show, and the show part of the Net,' says Jagger. 'And I want to break in more new numbers as we go along,' he adds, when asked how the play list is devised - from a mammoth back-catalogue.

 'It breaks down into sections, like a play. It's got acts that you arrange into smaller parts, and I just choose the numbers that fit into the idea of the show as a whole. They are interchangeable, but when you've got the shape of the show, then you're pretty much set.'  Sociologists have noted recently that, according to a particular method of reckoning, the Rolling Stones are older than the US as a nation: the average age of the American citizen is 34; the Stones have been around for 35 years.

 What is their continuing motivation?  'Nobody in the band ever talks about it much, or puts their finger on it,' Richards says. 'This is what you do, and if you don't do it you go nuts. The other thing is: how far can it go? We ain't the Beach Boys, we ain't some nostalgia band.

 'Our main joy is to make new songs, and nobody wants to get off the bus because it's still going. You can hurt yourself getting off buses when they're still moving, 'do not alight while moving',' howls Richards.

Internet address: http://www.the-rolling-stones.com 



Stones roll on from Babylon