Album of the week: Rolling Stones – 'Foreign Tongues'

Sir Mick Jagger, who turns 83 this month, has collaborated with old friend Keith Richards, who reaches the same age at the end of the year, and “new boy” Ronnie Wood, who doesn’t hit 80 for another 11 months, on the (checks notes) 25^th studio album by The Rolling Stones. And by any metric – by their own peerless catalogue, by the work of any other extant octogenarian artists in any field (Martin Scorsese? Anthony Hopkins? The recently departed David Hockney?), by the energy of a band a quarter their age – it’s a triumph that is both all-ages and age-defying.

Foreign Tongues is a riotously good rock’n’roll record of the type they really don’t make any more. Unless “they” are the Stones. It opens with ‘Rough and Twisted’, a low-slung boogie propelled by a slide-guitar blues riff from Richards that’s so instantly classic you might find be compelled to reacquaint yourself with Exile on Main St., just to make sure Keef isn’t ripping himself off. See also: the alley-cat harmonica from Jagger that will take the roof off whatever stadium they next perform in (no mean feat in a stadium).

‘In the Stars’ is similarly (yes) skyscraping, powered by a killer chorus, organ from the maestro Benmont Tench and unashamedly POP backing vocals from wunderkind producer Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old oldie-whisperer who’s worked similar wonders with Paul McCartney and Ozzy Osbourne.

Even leaner, even faster, even raunchier are the breakneck ‘Hit Me in the End’ (rhythm courtesy of late drummer Charlie Watts, involved in initial recordings prior to his death five years ago) and ‘Divine Intervention’, the latter featuring Jagger breaking out his still-mighty falsetto and The Cure’s Robert Smith on guitar. He switches up his voice again on ‘Ringing Hollow’, finding invigorating fresh corners in the sleazy country-rock template they minted with producer Jimmy Miller as they oozed from the ’60s to the ’70s, while also offering a wearied if glancing takedown on Trump’s America in the lines “there’s always a scoundrel trying to whip up the crowd” and “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown”.

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They do soul, too, in both the Curtis Mayfield-channelling ‘Jealous Lover’, replete with more falsetto and Fender Rhodes piano from Steve Winwood, and in a tribute to an equally iconoclastic talent: the Stones’ take on Amy Winehouse’s 'You Know I’m No Good' manages to shackle the Deep South to the Near North, i.e. Camden. It shouldn’t work; it does, fantastically.

Equally revelatory is ‘Some of Us’ (“are on our knees”), sung with the timbre of ancient timbers by Richards, a rootsy ballad of both acceptance and defiance by an arthritic great-grandpa who can still command a “room” of 70,000, the capacity of the band’s last UK show, at BST Hyde Park in London, four years ago this week.

The only time the Stones sound their age – in a mostly good way – is on the penultimate 'Back in Your Life’. It’s a stoned, sprawling, six-minute elegy in which a torn and frayed Jagger surveys the span of his magisterial life and wonders “what would it take to get back in your life / I hate that I’m losing a friend / I’ve tried making you laugh / I’ve tried making you cry / is this how our story will end?”. With indefatigable energy like this, one suspects not.

Still, as he sings on the life-affirming elixir of 'Mr Charm' – a head-banging, maracas-blurring rocker in the vein of ‘Gimme Shelter’, complete with belting backing vocals worthy of that song’s vocal powerhouse Merry Clayton – “life’s too short, nothing lasts forever”. But on the strength of Foreign Tongues, the Stones just might.