![]() ![]() “ are rooted in the blues,” McCartney told Howard Stern in a recent interview. RELATED: Paul McCartney Honours Frontline Medical Staff During Emotional ‘One World’ Performance In a new interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music, the rock star responded to recent comments from Paul McCartney about the two bands. The Stones have their own equivalent, but where are the wizened updates of 'Angie', 'Wild Horses' or 'No Expectations'? It's some distance from addled disaster - but I rather fear that A Bigger Bang will soon be left for the metaphorical seabirds.Mick Jagger isn’t afraid of keeping the old Rolling Stones vs. McCartney has opted to revive a pared, understated strand in his oeuvre that allows him to act his age. In sticking so rigidly to endlessly repeated riff-rock, the whole thing seems to be based on a fatal mistake. And hats off for taking aim at George Bush in 'Sweet Neo-Con', but there are probably more effective political weapons than a laboured bit of agit-pop that rhymes 'hypocrite' with 'crock o'shit' and 'certain' with 'Halliburton'. Jagger's vocals are so mannered as to make him sound worryingly like Phil Cornwell's impression on Stella Street. Certainly, 'Rough Justice' and 'Oh No, Not You Again' revel in their own cliches and sound stupidly glorious. In fairness, such seductive intent is occasionally matched by the deeply unlikely virility of the music. ![]() 'Come on, bare your breasts/And make me feel at home,' he mumbles on 'This Place is Empty'. Eventually, Keith decides to stake his own claim to being a bulgy-trousered love pirate. The lyrics tend to be set in a roisterish demi-monde in which Mick Jagger is forever waking up next to Uma Thurman/Carla Bruni/delete as appropriate, putting on his trousers and laughing to himself about the animalistic magic of it all. The Stones' album, their first in nearly a decade, contains very few surprises. At the end of 'Riding to Vanity Fair', a quietly infectious piece in which he sounds a rare note of misanthropic bitterness, atmospherics once again take precedence over cutesy melodies, and the same thing happens on 'Promise to You Girl', he skids sufficiently off the beaten track to even include a wonderfully daffy recorder solo. 'How Kind of You' is based on homespun wisdom that can quickly grate, but it eventually dovetails into a distractedly trippy coda, in which McCartney capably uses that part of his mind that will forever be clouded in fragrant smoke. The single, 'Fine Line', bounces along with an endearing generosity of spirit, not unlike a lo-fi relative of 'Hello Goodbye'. In other words, this is not great art, but - partly thanks, if McCartney's interviews are to be believed, to the quality control exercised by producer Nigel Godrich - it has its moments. In the case of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, there are songs that might just about fit such logic - though rather than the peak work of the Fabs, or Wings' Band on the Run, we're talking about a belated retooling of the home-baked, endearingly doodly spirit that defined McCartney, Ram and Wild Life. There will surely be the odd voice that characterises one or both of these albums as the authors' best in several decades. Arrant nonsense it was lazily executed tripe. I remember rushing out to buy the Stones' 1989 opus Steel Wheels, having been assured by some pony-tailed fool that it marked a return to the devil-may-care wonders of the early 1970s. Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones provide just as many examples as any of their peers but nowadays, any work by rock's frontiersmen can find at least a handful of people who will claim it's the authors' best effort since their far-flung glory years. In a strange way, you end up wondering if those records can actually be said to exist any more. Most of it suggests the fate that befell those colonial archipelagos that were used for defence research, vacated, and then left to the seagulls. During the Eighties, the Sixties generation's heroes all made hours of music that was instantly forgotten.
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