Can a rock star be a hero simply because he lived through sex, drugs and rock and roll and survived, despite everything, growing old? Not an easy question to answer. Mick Jagger, singer of the Rolling Stones, also thinks so.
Whether the rock star was a hero, he became in a recent interview asked. The 80-year-old answered the very simply formulated but not necessarily profound question: “The rock star is just a footnote to the classic hero. “Rock star heroism” is fake, that’s not how you live. “It’s just a role you play. The real heroes don’t have a break, in literature or in real life, like someone who has to fight in a war.”
He then refers to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. “The real hero has to be on duty 24 hours a day. This is something else”. He is not like a hero in Homer – or like Zelensky. “Every decision Zelenskyj makes is a decision about life and death.” He wondered all week whether the front was still holding. “These are decisions that we are not faced with. Jagger concluded: “No. We are not heroes.”
Roundup News Rolling Stones:
Sometimes there has to be a deadline – that’s what Mick Jagger said he thought when working on the new Rolling Stones album “Hackney Diamonds”. Keith Richards, however, was less convinced.
It’s been eighteen years since the Rolling Stones last released a studio album with their own songs, “A Bigger Bang”. The fact that we will finally be able to enjoy a new album on October 20, 2023 is thanks, among other things, to a conversation between Jagger and Richards, in which the singer insisted on deadline pressure – and named Valentine’s Day as the deadline.
Richards: “That will never happen”
“It was just a day that I pulled out of a hat – but everyone can remember it. And then we’ll go on tour with it, like we used to,” Jagger told The Wall Street Journal. Richards then replied that it would never happen. Jagger remained unwavering. “I said, ‘It may never happen, Keith, but it’s a goal. We’re going to have a damn deadline. Otherwise we just go into the studio for two weeks and come back out and six weeks later we go back in. So no. Let’s set a deadline for ourselves.”
Jagger was inspired by the way he worked on the 1978 album “Some Girls”. “Not to rush into anything,” says Jagger. “But you don’t do Take 117 either. You don’t get bogged down in discussions about whether this song is good or whether it’s worth it.”
Fast, enthusiastic way of working
Some of the pieces, including “Mess It Up,” were written a few years ago. “The rest was done very quickly,” said Jagger. They wanted to give the recordings urgency, he says. “Even if it’s a nice song, if it’s not done with enthusiasm, it doesn’t really affect you, does it?” says the frontman.
We previously reported:
First there hasn’t been a new Rolling Stones album with their own material for eighteen years, and then this! If Mick Jagger has his way, it’s not over yet after the long player “Hackney Diamonds”, which will be released on October 20, 2023. Quite the opposite, as the legendary frontman revealed in an interview.
The band has already finished a large part of the material for another record, the 80-year-old told the New York Times. The key sentence in the interview: “I don’t think it’s the last Rolling Stones album. We’re almost three quarters of the way through the next one.”
Fast studio work
Why did it end up happening so quickly once the band was finally in the studio? Jagger explains it this way: “I said to Keith, ‘If we don’t have a deadline, we’re never going to finish this record.’ So I was like, ‘The deadline is Valentine’s Day 2023. And then we’ll go on tour with it. That’s what we’ve always had to do. You know, you have to finish ‘Exile on Main Street’ because you have a tour booked.”
In conversation, Richards calls the recording process a “blitzkrieg”: “We worked quickly, but that was the idea,” says the guitarist, who adds with a laugh: “I’m still recovering.”