FILE - Mick Jagger, left, Ronnie Wood, center, and Keith Richards, right, of the band "The Rolling Stones," perform onstage during the last concert of their "Sixty" European tour in Berlin, Germany, Aug. 3, 2022. On Monday, Sept. 4, 2023, the Rolling Stones announced they will release their first album of original material in 18 years. Titled “Hackney Diamonds,†the legendary rock band will reveal the full details on Wednesday, Sept. 6, at an event in Hackney in East London. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, File)
LONDON (AP) – The Rolling Stones are back, and they’re “Angry.”
At least that is the title of the debut single from the band’s new album, the first in 18 years to contain a dozen original songs. It’s also the first album the band has released since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts.
The three surviving Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood – came to London’s Hackney district on Wednesday to unveil the new album, “Hackney Diamonds” and announce its release date: Oct. 20.
Jagger said not all the songs are furious. The album also contains “love songs, ballads, country-type” sounds, he said.
Recorded in December and January, it features drummer Steve Jordan on 10 of the 12 tracks in Watts’ place. Two more songs were recorded in 2019 with Watts.
Hard-core fans lined up in a heatwave outside the Hackney Empire, where the band members were interviewed onstage by “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon to an audience of dozens of sweltering journalists and an online audience around the world.
Inside the ornate former Edwardian musical hall where Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel once performed, Jagger, 80, Richards, 79 and Wood, 76 gave details of the Stones’ first studio album of new songs since “A Bigger Bang” in 2005. The band released a set of blues covers, “Blue & Lonesome,” in 2016.
Of Watts, Richards said: “Of course he’s missed incredibly.”
The announcement of the new material follows a cryptic teaser campaign, in which the band’s iconic mouth and tongue logo was projected onto the façade of landmarks in cities around the world, including New York, London and Paris.
“Hackney Diamonds” is a slang term for shattered glass, and the band also teased fans with an ad in the local Hackney Gazette newspaper for a fictional glass repair business: “When you say gimme shelter, we’ll fix your shattered windows.”
Jagger said the phrase evoked “when you get your windscreen broken on Saturday night in Hackney and all the bits go on the street.”
Richards said the band hit upon the title after “flinging ideas around the table, and we went from “˜Hit and Run,’ “˜Smash and Grab’ – and somehow between that we came up with ‘Hackney Diamonds.'”
It was fitting, he said, because the Stones are a London band.
Founded in 1962, the Stones show no signs of planning to retire. Last year the band played a 60th-anniversary tour of Europe.
Brazilian fan Taric Fioravanti, from Sao Paulo, lined up to get a glimpse of the band, saying he hoped the new songs would sound like his favorite Stones album, “Some Girls.”
“I love these guys,” he said. “Keith Richards is one of the biggest guitar heroes in the history of rock music.
“(And) they’re 80 years old. Most bands have stopped making new music” by that age, he said.
