Inside the songwriting partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that The Rolling Stones remains one of the most influential bands of all time, still going strong today after beginning their career in the early 1960s. As major players in the ‘British Invasion’ during the swinging sixties, the Stones found legions of fans alongside their contemporaries, most notably The Beatles and The Kinks.
However, the band began their musical career covering rhythm and blues tracks, with their self-titled debut album only featuring one original composition. This song, ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’, was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. After a few years of developing their craft, the two became an iconic songwriting duo, rivalling their friendly competitors, John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles.
Jagger and Richards were childhood friends, although they reconnected in the early 1960s when they bumped into each other at a Dartford train station. Richards wrote a letter when he was 18 describing the meeting, which is included in his memoir Life. He said: “You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin’ on Dartford Stn, I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs came up to me.”
Richards added: “He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous.”
Once they were members of The Rolling Stones, their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, encouraged Jagger and Richards to begin writing together. The story of their first writing endeavour has been told in various contradicting ways, with Richards revealing that Oldham locked the pair in the kitchen to write, resulting in ‘As Tears Go By’. However, Jagger asserts: “Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him. I think Andrew may have said something at some point along the lines of ‘I should lock you in a room until you’ve written a song’ and in that way he did mentally lock us in a room, but he didn’t literally lock us in.”
According to Lennon, who co-wrote the Rolling Stones’ second single ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, he and McCartney were the reason Jagger and Richards started writing. When McCartney and Lennon played the Stones an unfinished song, they went to the corner of the room to finish it. Lennon explained to Playboy: “We came back, and that’s how Mick and Keith got inspired to write … because, ‘Jesus, look at that. They just went in the corner and wrote it and came back!’ You know, right in front of their eyes we did it.”
In the UK, the first Jagger-Richards composition to be released as a single was ‘The Last Time’, which hit number one, proving they had what it takes to become successful songwriters. In Life, Richards wrote: “It took us eight, nine months before we came up with ‘The Last Time,’ which is the first one that we felt we could give to the rest of the guys without being sent out of the room.”
After many years of writing successful hits in the 1980s, the pair adopted the moniker of The Glimmer Twins, inspired by an old couple they met on a cruise ship. When Jagger and Richards refused to reveal their celebrity identities, the couple repeatedly exclaimed, “Just give us a glimmer”. Under this pseudonym, the pair wrote many of the band’s hits and often used the name as a production credit.
Although Jagger-Richards are one of music’s most successful partnerships, that doesn’t mean things have always been plain sailing. In the 1980s, the pair’s relationship weakened, with the musicians communicating their strained feelings through their songs and very public interviews. Richards penned multiple tracks that he later realised were subconsciously written about Jagger, such as ‘Had It With You’, which includes lines such as “I love you, dirty fucker” and “Shouting out instructions/ But I had it I had it I had it with you”. The song’s lyrics reflect a complicated love, mirroring how Richards found Jagger’s behaviour increasingly challenging to handle as time went on.
Around this time, Richards referred to Jagger as ‘Her Majesty’ or ‘Bitchy Brenda’. Since then, the pair haven’t retained the closest of relationships, with Richards calling Jagger’s album Goddess in the Doorway “Dogshit in the Doorway” in 2011. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2013, Richards explained: “Not everybody likes everybody all the time. But maybe you have a need for that conversation to continue, and music is the one way you can do that. It’s stronger than the other things that get in the way. It would be a miracle, wouldn’t it, in 50 years for two guys to get on, let alone three or four?”
However, Richards asserted: “My main means of communication is through music. Call it a gentlemen’s agreement or something like that. It’s unspoken, but I notice that many of the barriers or whatever you want to call them tend to disappear once we start working”.
Luckily, despite their ongoing feud, the band have continued working together, making them one of the only remaining bands from the 1960s still touring, with their latest album, Blue and Lonesome, released in 2016.
