Last week, The Rolling Stones took over New York City club Racket NYC to celebrate the release of their highly anticipated new album Hackney Diamonds, the band’s first album of new material in 18 years. During that performance, the band invited Lady Gaga on stage to offer up a thrilling rendition of “Sweet Sounds of Heaven.” A live video recording of that performance is out now. Check it out below.
With DJ Questlove spinning, the celebration quickly turned into a rock show when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood took the stage to perform seven songs from the new album and iconic hits—“Shattered,” “Angry,” “Whole Wide World,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Bite My Head Off,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the aforementioned “Sweet Sounds.”
In an interview with us earlier this month, Jagger revealed that the band hadn’t planned on waiting 18 years between albums. “We recorded a lot of stuff and we did a lot of sessions,” he tells us. “But there was no deadline, there was no ‘Let’s finish these next week,’ none of that. It was just ‘Do two weeks’ recording’ and then there were no plans to come back together again.”
There were occasional, impressive singles, notably 2012’s “Doom & Gloom” and 2020’s lockdown narrative “Living In A Ghost Town.” But generally, after each of their record-breaking tours, the band would retreat to their respective corners. When it was time to reunite, it was not to make an album, but to begin rehearsals for the next epic itinerary.
That all changed when they finally made a firm commitment to get in the studio, and hooked up with a new producer, 32-year-old, Grammy-winning New Yorker Andrew Watt, at Henson in Los Angeles. By their own description, he has breathed fresh air into a venerable rock institution. After trial sessions, they got down to serious business in L.A. last December, and Jagger gave the band a finishing date of Valentine’s Day.
“I’ve got to give the man hats off for this push,” said Keith Richards of his bandmate of 61 years. “He said ‘Come on, we’ve just got to do something. Doesn’t matter what we do. We’ve got to make a record.’ I said ‘Ok, let’s not pussyfoot about. You’ve got what you want to sing, let’s go.’ And the man had got a lot stored up.
“It was a pleasure to put it together, it was a pleasure to work with Andrew Watt, who really added the gas in there and kept the thing going. Probably the most important thing about the record, at least from my point of view, is it was a lot of energy and it was a forced-in blitzkrieg. You either went in all the way or you didn’t, and it came pretty much as we’d hoped. It was interesting work, and now I’m still catching up with it, actually. I never used to work this fast.”
Buy or stream Hackney Diamonds.