As with any couple, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have had their ups and downs. Whether this is because of musical disagreements, romances or general hedonism, ‘The Glimmer Twins’ have experienced an array of sticky periods during their time together.
One of the most fraught came in the second half of the 1980s when the band had been together for over 20 years. Heading into their 40s, the group had climbed to the top of the music industry, long since cemented their place as icons, and broadly speaking, were on the other side of the hill. Punk had arrived and changed the rock zeitgeist, meaning the cultural relevance of acts such as The Rolling Stones plummeted to a historic low.
Whilst 1981’s Tattoo You might have been a return to form for the band, they weren’t exactly pushing themselves to new creative heights on it. Plus, to Generation X, who dominated music consumption at the time, the quintet had been around forever, so people weren’t exactly losing sleep over what they were getting up to. They were old news.
This sentiment also manifested in Mick Jagger’s actions. In 1985, he was on record as losing interest in The Rolling Stones, as he released his debut solo album, She’s the Boss, which, to be fair to him, isn’t terrible at all. However, his sudden lurch into being Mick Jagger without the band caused a great deal of friction between him and his old partner in crime, Keith Richards.
In 1986, The Rolling Stones released the album Dirty Work, the follow-up 1983’s mediocre Tattoo You follow-up, Undercover. Making the record was a challenging experience for all involved. According to Richards, their frontman was the real problem, given that he was neglecting his band responsibilities in favour of his solo album, with a generally stinking attitude.
Their relationship started to strain in the early 1980s as, according to Richards in his memoir Life, Jagger’s egotism had become “unbearable”. Revealing the comical nicknames the vocalist earned for himself in this era, the guitarist wrote: “It was the beginning of the Eighties when Mick started to become unbearable. That’s when he became Brenda, or Her Majesty, or just Madam.”
Fast forward a few years to the making of Dirty Work, and Richards had seen enough of Jagger. “By the time we gathered in Paris to record Dirty Work in 1985, the atmosphere was bad,” Richards writes in Life. “The sessions had been delayed because Mick was working on his solo album, and now he was busy promoting it. Mick had come with barely any songs for us to work on. He’d used them up on his own record. And he was often just not there at the studio.”
Pouring his anger into his music, he wrote a number of new songs about Jagger, who would ironically sing them. “So I began writing a lot more on my own for Dirty Work, different kinds of songs,” Richards explained. “The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody. Bill Wyman almost stopped turning up; Charlie [Watts] flew back home. In retrospect I see that the tracks were full of violence and menace: ‘Had It with You,’ ‘One Hit (to the Body),’ ‘Fight.’ We made a video of ‘One Hit (to the Body)’ that more or less told the story — we nearly literally came to blows, over and above our acting duties. ‘Fight’ gives some idea of brotherly love between the Glimmer Twins at this juncture.”
Richards would claim that after Dirty Work hit the shelves in early 1986, he and the other band members, Ronnie Wood, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, sought to tour it. However, Jagger sent them a letter refusing to hit the road, as he wanted to continue pursuing his solo career. Per the guitarist: “That’s when World War III was declared.”
Following this, the relationship between Jagger and Richards was at breaking point. However, as the pluckiest men in rock, they would eventually reconcile and put the band first. The release of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds has shown that they are not done yet.
