The Rolling Stones are still rocking in their eighties, with the launch of their rum and the exciting news that frontman Mick Jagger is engaged.
More than 60 years after their first gig in Oxford in 1962, Jagger and the band embarked on a world tour in 2024, celebrating their Hackney Diamonds album. This proved that, after all these years, they still have it.
The three-piece were rumoured to have planned a 2025 tour in London, Copenhagen, Barcelona and Paris, but have now confirmed they will not be playing the shows.
This could give Jagger, 81, more time to enjoy the company of his fiancée Melanie Hamrick, a former ballerina whom he has dated for a decade. According to Yahoo, the pair have not set a wedding date.
The band launched Crossfire Hurricane rum last year, receiving good reviews.
To celebrate the band’s enduring success, we've ranked our top 15 greatest Rolling Stones songs of all time – with number one being the absolute best.
Do you agree with our choices?
15. Tumbling Dice (1972)
Tumbling Dice stands out with its bluesy rhythm and double drums; the late and great drummer Charlie Watts and producer Jimmy Miller play the drums simultaneously, boosting the track’s signature groove.
The laid-back tune tells the tale of an unfaithful gambler and quickly becomes an earworm. You’re hooked from the moment that breezy guitar riff hits the beat. And when the protagonist croons, “Baby, I can’t stay”, the song feels so good that even his sins seem almost forgiven.
Much of the track was recorded in the basement of the Villa Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, where Keith Richards once lived. While the villa is famed for being the birthplace of the band's renowned 1972 album Exile on Main St., it’s even more notorious for hosting a summer of the Stones' legendary, decadent parties.
14. Fool To Cry (1976)
Reflective ballad Fool to Cry is the standout track from 1976’s Black & Blue and remains one of the band’s finest ballads. A graceful electric piano progression, played through a swirling Leslie speaker, anchors the song and creates an atmospheric backdrop.
It remains one of the Stones' most unhurried and resplendent moments, offering a striking contrast to the chest-thumping blues rock the band is famous for.
The track is rarely performed live, although it returned during the band’s May 2018 show at London Stadium for the first time since 1999. Fans were thrilled to hear Jagger still hit the chorus’s high notes, even four decades after the original recording.
13. It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (1974)
Although Ronnie Wood didn’t officially join the Stones until the following year, he first played acoustic guitar on the group’s joyously exuberant 1974 track It’s Only Rock 'N' Roll. He recorded an early version in his private studio in London.
The original demo also featured David Bowie on backing vocals, which didn’t survive onto the album version. A year later, guitarist Mick Taylor left the band following rising tensions. The video for the single was one of his last appearances with the group.
12. Beast Of Burden (1978)
Beast of Burden from 1978’s Some Girls sparked a comeback after a quieter few years for the group, reaching number eight in the US charts. The track is hooked around one of Richards’ slinkiest and most carefree riffs, taking down the tempo in exquisite style.
Some Girls opens with the disco stomp of Miss You. If that was the party getting started, Beast of Burden is the sound of the dancefloor slowly emptying, with the revellers steadily pairing off and stumbling into the night. A magical moment.
11. Angie (1973)
Rarely has the end of a relationship sounded so attractive as it does in Angie, the heartbreaking ballad that brings a close to the first side of the band’s 13th studio album, Goat’s Head Soup. Richards largely wrote the song and the session musician Nicky Hopkins provided the stunning piano accompaniment.
The track draws the listener into a doomed couple’s fractured bond, clinging onto love despite having nothing left to give. While the song’s tone seems a little defeatist in its approach, the final two lines (“Angie ain’t it good to be alive, we can’t say we never tried”) offer an oddly life-affirming take on human relationships.
10. Honky Tonk Women (1969)
This song opens with one of the greatest shuffles in rock — not quite Toto’s Roseanna, but not far off — before the delta-style drone starts. Jagger and Richards share vocals, making for a rousing barroom song lifted by freewheeling New Orleans horns.
It’s a Jack Daniels-soaked masterpiece, though not one that ever made it onto an album; the band kept it as a single. There is also an alternate take on Let It Bleed worth exploring; the whole album is a gem, and the cover is quite something too. None other than the renowned celebrity chef Delia Smith made the grotesque cake depicted on the cover.
9. Wild Horses (1971)
Forget the awful covers that came later; the original Wild Horses sees the Stones at their peak. What could have been a by-numbers ballad instead is a haunting record of loneliness, love and loss.
Taylor’s acoustic strumming shimmers underneath it all while the drums seem to stab and hurt. Over it all is Richards taking the lead again, bluesy licks tumbling between Jagger's wistful laments. The power of Wild Horses is difficult to explain: it sounds like the band are slowly drifting into nothingness.
8. Paint It Black (1966)
Paint It Black remains one of the group’s most popular songs, despite being one of the most incongruous when compared with most of their back catalogue. For example, it was the most-played Rolling Stones song on Spotify at the time of writing with 943 million listens — 333 million more than the second most popular, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
Brian Jones’ interest in Moroccan music heavily influenced the track’s sound. Meanwhile, Watts’ frenzied drumming adds irresistible urgency, which remains a highlight of Stones shows.
7. Street Fighting Man (1968)
Jagger was allegedly inspired to write Street Fighting Man by an anti-war rally at London’s US Embassy — and the track certainly seems to embody angry injustice. The acoustic-guitar-led track features Jagger’s uncharacteristically raucous delivery. A simple but devastating bassline from Bill Wyman and ingenious use of the Indian instrument Shehnai on the chorus add brilliant splashes of texture.
The separate elements combine to create a great, cacophonous mix, managing levels of heaviness that most metal bands would strive for.
6. Jumpin' Jack Flash (1968)
After some vague attempts at psychedelia, the Stones dug deep into their love of the blues and soul in 1968. They released Jumpin' Jack Flash that year, with Watts driving the track forward with such urgency that it feels as if his arms were powered by pneumatics. Every beat stings like a whip, snapping along with the riff over the top that Led Zeppelin would spend for ever trying to get to.
On tour, the song was as overpowering as using a blowtorch to light a cigarette: in the early Seventies, Mick Taylor could leave Eric Clapton for dead, and you hear it on the live cuts. If it doesn’t get you moving, write a will.
5. Sympathy For The Devil (1968)
Jagger never sounded more stately than when pretending to be the devil. The premise is dark enough, but the song is too vibrant to ever really scare: it’s flamboyant, not fearsome.
What sounds like Bill Wyman’s best moment is Keef on bass, while the crystalline piano seems ironic; a touch of gospel while Beelzebub holds court.
Richards also kills it with his lead; the solo is as sharp as barbed wire, a jagged twist of searing guitar cutting the speakers in half. The song is also pleasingly surrounded by rumours: during recording, a fire is said to have swept through the studio, destroying almost everything but the tapes.
It’s also rumoured to be the song that caused Slash to quit Guns N’ Roses, as Axl Rose asked a new rhythm guitarist to play on their 1994 cover. Stranger still, though, is that the first ever cover of the song was by lightweight pop star Sandie Shaw. What was the nature of that game?
4. You Can't Always Get What You Want (1969)
You Can’t Always Get What You Want is sometimes described as the Stones’ take on Hey Jude, which the Beatles had released a year earlier. It’s certainly true that the classical choir and overall production made for one of the most expansive songs ever released by the band, while the big, bold sing-along chorus shares a similar approach to the classic.
The lyrics contemplate Sixties drug culture in west London and find the band in a reflective and pragmatic mood, bringing an unforgettable close to the classic 1969 album Let It Bleed.
3. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (1965)
Their first US number one, Satisfaction is literally a dream come true: Richards says it came to him while asleep. Waking up, he grabbed an acoustic, played the riff repeatedly into his tape recorder, mumbled something about Satisfaction and then nodded back off.
With its raggedy, fuzzed-up edges, the iconic riff came about by luck. Richards plugged into a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, the only time he used it, and laid down the line as a placeholder, aiming to replicate the sound of the horn section he wanted on the record.
The rest of the band kicked back, insisting they kept it that way — and the rest is history. Otis Redding’s cover gives an idea of what Keith may have had in mind. Jagger gives one of his best performances, too, his voice teasing, playful: we know he’s getting plenty of Satisfaction really.
2. Start Me Up (1981)
Plenty is weird about Start Me Up; the terrible video (Jagger appears to be parodying himself and Watts can’t stop laughing at the rest of them); the single’s cover (a single goat’s hoof in a stiletto); and Jagger’s decidedly odd tribute to his lover (“You made a dead man come”).
Strangest of all, though, is that the 1981 hit started life in 1976 as a reggae track which never made it. Sheer luck meant an engineer found the old cut and gave the band a de facto opener for their concerts, with one of the most recognisable riffs in rock n’ roll history. Watts’ tripping cymbal at the beginning was supposedly a mistake as he struggled to catch the chords, but the band kept it in anyway. After all, it sounded a bit off–perfect.
1. Gimme Shelter (1969)
Gimme Shelter is possibly the perfect rock ‘n’ roll record. Something creeping and insidious swells within the opening notes of Richards’ trembling arpeggios. You can almost hear the drugs disturbing his blood; he wrote the song while wrapped in the gloom of knowing his then-girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, was likely cheating on him with Jagger.
The song carries more in it than heartbreak, though: it is 1969 distilled — the death of the freewheeling Sixties and the violence of Vietnam. The chorus says it all: “War, children, it's just a shot away/Rape, murder/It's just a shot away.”
Though the song is all Richards, who plays every guitar part, including those swampy leads, it belongs to gospel singer Merry Clayton, who got the call to record at nearly midnight. Her intensity and voice, cracking under the strain, make the record. Clayton was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage soon after, giving this song a layer of unexpected tragedy.
