Keith Richards: “Anything I do is a tribute to Charlie Watts”
Keith Richards has opened up about moving The Rolling Stones forward without drummer Charlie Watts after the drummer passed away back in 2021.
“Anything I do is a tribute to Charlie Watts,” Richards says in a new interview with Rolling Stone,. “It’s impossible for me to lay anything down without automatically thinking that Mr. Watts is laying the backbeat down.”
“If you’ve got Charlie Watts on it, man, that’s it,” Richards exclaims. “I so miss that, man.” Watts is featured on two songs from the band’s upcoming studio album Hackney Diamonds, ‘Mess It Up’ and ‘Live By the Sword’.
Watts’ position behind the drums has been taken over by Steve Jordan, Richards’ longtime collaborator and producer. “Steve actually moves the stage when he plays the drums,” Ronnie Wood claimed in the same interview. “He’s very earthquake-y.”
Mick Jagger was also leaning heavily on Jordan’s rhythms during the album’s initial production. “I’m a very groove-orientated person, so [when I write] I got an idea of what I think the groove is,” Jagger says. “It’s a band, so you can’t really lay the law down completely, but I kind of know what groove I’m going for.”
The album’s first single, ‘Angry’ came about when Jagger and Jordan were jamming. “I would just whap out the song’s lyrics to get the tempo,” Jagger says. “What accents can we put in? You want the chorus to be a different, slightly different feel from the verse. It’s a lot to do with danceability and spitting the lyrics out in the right tempo.”
Check out ‘Angry’ down below.
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