The 1986 album Mick Jagger hated making most of all: “The band was very bad”
Mick Jagger didn’t ever want The Rolling Stones to be stagnant for too long.
There were the odd moments where he felt like he could spin his stardom into a solo career, but if the solo work that he put out has taught him anything, it’s that sometimes the frontman doesn’t always make the greatest transition into a superstar on their own. No one wants to hear Jagger unless Keith Richards is by his side, but there are more than a few moments where Jagger would have rather been anywhere else than in the studio with the rest of his mates.
If you think about it, can you really blame Jagger? No one can claim to be best friends with their bandmates all of the time, and after years of doing things that drive you up the wall, there’s a good chance that even some of the biggest names in music would want a break from the action a little bit. But even with a little time apart, Richards never wanted to cower to the poppier sides of what Jagger wanted to do. The guitarist had a good idea of what The Stones should sound like, and while he could play on a track like ‘Miss You’, he wasn’t going to claim that it was the best thing they released.
But around the 1980s, Jagger had started to go a bit too far into pop territory. There were already more than a few bands that were getting a second or third wind at the time, but whereas the Traveling Wilburys were staying true to themselves, hearing The Stones try to blend in with the times was never going to work. Undercover was already a bit strained, but Dirty Work was the first time it felt like the band was officially clocked out before they had even entered the studio.
Richards already had his fair share of issues with substances at the time, but even without everyone’s misbehaviour, no one seemed to be on the same page. The heart of the band was always about coming back to the blues, and even if ‘Harlem Shuffle’ had the faintest traces of blues music laced throughout its runtime, the entire promotion cycle seemed to be centred around all of the “goodwill” Jagger had from performing with David Bowie on ‘Dancing in the Street’.
And while Jagger could be diplomatic when he wanted to be, it only took a couple of years before he was badmouthing this record, saying, “The album wasn’t that good. It was OK. It certainly wasn’t a great Rolling Stones album. The feeling inside the band was very bad, too. The relationships were terrible. The health was diabolical. I wasn’t in particularly good shape. The rest of the band, they couldn’t walk across the Champs Elysées, much less go on the road.”
But it’s more about the way that the band are interacting with each other across the album as well. Jagger can talk all about the drug problems that were happening at the time, but since he was the most resistant one when it came to going back to basics, it’s not like he was the one doing everything. No matter what, songs like ‘Harlem Shuffle’ didn’t really need to be heard, and it’s not like Richards was all that candid about his feelings on the album, either.
Richards was definitely taking a back seat throughout most of the recording, but considering how much he was working on a song like ‘Had It With You’, he may have been throwing a few more shots at his bandmate. He had already been subtly throwing barbs at him in the press, and a song all about how he is done talking to this unnamed person does make it sound like he’s finally had enough of chasing the trends.
The brotherhood between all of them was never going to be broken, but Ronnie Wood said it best when he called the record terrible because he got more than two songs on the final mix. Wood is a fine songwriter in his own right, but if the general consensus is that his songs were better than Jagger and Richards’s, that was as clear a sign as any that something was about to go very wrong.
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