Blue and Lonesome – review

Last week I posted briefly about the imminent launch of the Rolling Stones’ new album Blue and Lonesome, an unexpected but (for some) welcome return to their early roots in blues and rhythm and blues. This further report comes in the wake of at last receiving my Amazon pre-ordered copy which I had paid for nearly two months ago.

As has been my almost constant experience over the past twenty years, my first reaction to hearing the latest offering of every one of my favourite – or indeed generally acknowledged to be legendary or important – bands or artistes of the past fifty years has been mixed.

It is a well-established fact of the music business that both the industry reputation of a popular music combo and the accumulated affection in which it is held by its fans will affect its chances of having commercial success with a new release.

This even applies to the Rolling Stones, even though some might argue that over time they have achieved a status that somehow manages to combine being so overwhelmingly famous around the world that the ‘vagaries of the moment’ in terms of current fashions and consciousness do not apply with (simultaneously) being totally irrelevant dinosaurs of a past age who are noteworthy only because, against the odds, they are still alive – well, some of them anyway.

So let’s get the preamble over first.

I’ve read just about every media review I could find and the gist of them is that with Blue and Lonesome the Stones have pulled off a minor triumph. You can sense that there’s a huge well of respect for the band – despite their allegedly ‘off the scale’ lack of modern relevance – and an inner desire in the critics to applaud any new music they record if it is deemed to be of any merit at all. At the same time it has also been fun to register where the scribes rank Blue and Lonesome in the list of Stones’ albums. One wrote it was their best ‘since A Bigger Bang (2005)’ and another, who must be nearly as old as me, went for ‘since Some Girls (1978)’(!).

I’d describe it thus. It’s great to hear the Rolling Stones ‘a rockin & a reeling’ through an eclectic set of R & B covers, some familiar and some not so to this listener, recorded almost as live as it was played and with minimal post-production twiddling. Apparently, according to a BBC Breakfast Time interview with Mick Jagger I caught last week, the whole enterprise took just three days from conception to completion of recording.

Having said that, I’m left strangely ambiguous about the result. I’ve only played it through once so far and, you know what, I feel it’s okay yet nothing particularly special.

By that I mean yes – it’s the Rolling Stones. And yes – they’re playing classic R & B. And yes – it’s very good: Mick Jagger on vocals and harmonica in particular shines through.

And yes – if you’re asking – it probably sounds very different to any version of these songs that they might have recorded in the early Sixties, simply because these days they’re now in their seventies and bringing fifty years of experience to bear on the music.

However, and yet.

Had this album been released by a young band in their early twenties – or even, dare I say it, by the Stones anonymously under some adopted name, without any promotion or the whole publicity hoo-hah that accompanies everything the Rolling Stones do – would it be regarded as a great or breakthrough piece of work?

Probably not.

That’s why I’m a little conflicted today.

I know that from time to time in the near future, probably when I’m driving somewhere and have a little time to kill, I’m going to slam Blue and Lonesome into my dashboard and crank up the volume. Because I love this type of music and because it’s the Rolling Stones.

But if it had been produced by a brand new band just setting out and trying to make their way in the music business, would I have bought it?

Probably not.

That said, let’s be honest. If it had been recorded by a brand new band I probably wouldn’t even have come cross it, let alone had an opportunity to sample any of its tracks.

And would my life have been diminished by that probability? I doubt it.

There’s a certain conundrum in all of this. When we listen to music, do we do that just for the pleasure of the sounds? Or do we gain more from the ‘connections’ in our lives that the music evokes and reminds us of – if any – than we can ever do from listening purely to the music?

Come to think of it, how often do we deliberately listen to a piece of music – or even come across it by chance upon the airwaves – that in anticipation is a ‘classic from a past era that meant so much to us’ … and then find that our latest reaction to it is nothing like those we once had, or even that (frankly) it now sounds old-fashioned, tinny, quaint, insubstantial and possibly even plain rubbish?

Tastes change, after all. Mind you, so do people.