Music Appreciation

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First, the good news. It may be too simplistic and overfamiliar to rank amongst the Stones’ all-time classics, but it’s a stomping, raucous, frayed and tattered blues belter that sounds like the surviving trio are still having more fun than any of the million noisy rock bands who have trailed in their wake. It features Ronnie Wood’s wailing slide guitar, Keith Richards’s riff that moves with a glam-rock stomp, and Mick Jagger’s rasping, hooting harmonica that sucks the breath out of all the spaces between. It would be hard to deny that it was the Stones from the instrumental opening bars, and any lingering doubts are blown away as soon as Jagger starts honking and howling over the top.

The lyrics improbably cast the 82-year-old rock superstar as a wide-eyed innocent led astray by a devilish tempter, who promised him he would “dance like Nijinsky” in “Sicily and Rome” but traps him in “a club called Conspiracy” in a “fly-blown town” in the “back of nowhere”. Snarling that all his audience wants is “tyranny / And all that crazy, crazy f---ed up stuff”, Jagger hints at a political dimension, but he makes the whole thing sound more like a raunchy sexual misadventure because, well, that’s what he does.

The sound is thick and dense, featuring Richards at his most simplistically grungy, topped off with the interplay of Woods’s nimble slide (with shades of George Thorogood, who was once considered a candidate for the Stones’ second guitar role) and Jagger’s wheezy blues harp. It’s reminiscent of Black Limousine from the Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You, but with more power and crunch.

Rough and Twisted is not likely to be celebrated as a Stones classic. Indeed, it is barely a song at all, just a pile-driving shift through blues phrases. But it is exciting, full of energy and joy. If it popped up in the middle of their unbeatable 1972 album Exile on Main Street, you wouldn’t kick it out of the château.

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