Chainsaws, cannibalism, and video nasties: The Rolling Stones’ strange ‘Too Much Blood’ single
The Rolling Stones had entered the 1980s strong. Ten years previously, they were in the middle of their golden album run, between Let It Bleed‘s apocalyptic thunder and the immortal strut of Sticky Fingers, as the biggest band on the planet. As the decade rolled on, essentiality between the band began to ebb, the caricatures began to take shape, and singles such as ‘It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (But I Like It)’ would stand as concert staples but lack a lyrical finger on the pulse they’d held such a gift for only a few short years ago.
Soaking up some punk and disco, in came 1978’s Some Girls, a phenomenal comeback led by the swinging ‘Miss You’ which heralded the Stones’ return as classic rock royalty. Through 1980’s Emotional Rescue and the following year’s Tattoo You, the Stones seemed to enter the charts in full swing, with the prancing video for ‘Start Me Up’ thrusting the band to a new generation of the MTV era.
The band’s comeback soon gave way to the start of their perennial commercial swell, ploughing on as a touring behemoth and dropping albums to flog their world tour. The Stones’ machine would trundle along to their 60th anniversary and beyond, yet internal dramas, frontman Mick Jagger’s aspiring solo ambitions, and the rapidly shifting cultural climate threatened to derail their permanence. Tensions so heated that Keith Richards looked set to wallop his guitar on Jagger’s head on 1986’s febrile yet awful ‘One Hit (To the Body)’.
For many, Tattoo You is the last Stones album worth spinning. Nevertheless, 1983’s Undercover is unfairly glossed over. A vibrant plume of new wave fizz and mutant disco flourishes, which sees the Stones at their most playfully irreverent and experimental, eschewing rock heritage and jumping earnestly into the pool of New York’s hip underground clubs and bars. Far from sounding like a stodgy group’s desperate bid for youth appeal, Undercover sees Jagger and co perfectly at ease, prickled with the creative tug-of-war between their frontman’s radar for contemporary trends and Richards’ hopeless love for music’s rustic foundations.
‘Too Much Blood’: The Stones go full freak mode
It’s the third single, ‘Too Much Blood’, that stands as the album’s centrepiece. A shuffling groover packed with horn blasts, whip synth snares, and Richards’ fretwork at his most alchemic, the track examines the lurid violence lurking behind the era’s entertainment and oozing from the grim news cycle obsessed with serial killers and murder sprees: “I can feel it in the air / Feel it up above / Feel the tension everywhere / There’s too much blood”.
In a rare moment for the group, Jagger begins to offer a stream of consciousness semi-rap, regaling the sordid tale of French student Renée Hartevelt’s killing at the hands of Japanese classmate Issei Sagawa, who proceeded to eat various body parts of the victim. For a song examining a society afflicted with an addiction to violence, ‘Too Much Blood’s’ fascination with a grisly case of cannibalism reeks of grubby prurience. Perhaps that’s the point, highlighting how morbid fascination proves a lucrative market for the true crime trash industry to this day.
The single keeps its tongue in the cheek for the rest of its salacious strut. Jumping from grim reality to video nasties, Jagger takes a lyrical steer toward the moral panic that struck the rental world, terrified of what innocent young minds were being exposed to through the litter of exploitation and mondo VHS and Betamax tapes hiding in the house. “Did you ever see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Horrible, wasn’t it? You know, people ask me, ‘Is it really true, you know, where you live in Texas, is that really true what they do around there, people?’ I say, ‘Hey man, every time I drive through the crossroads I get scared, there’s a bloke running round with a fucking chainsaw…'”
Later confessing he prefers An Officer and a Gentleman to Leatherface’s Ed Gein-style horror trip, the frontman’s freeform flow perhaps mushes into a pointless stream of open thoughts, but it’s spiked with an animated charm that would soon be lost. ‘Too Much Blood’ is the last time the music world would ever see the band so flippant and joyously unhinged.
“It came out as a sort of anti-gratuitous cinema of violence,” Jagger confessed in 1984, “And it’s a kind of anti-violent thing. But it’s also a good dance track”.
