Tattoo You: anatomy of a classic
- Photos by Peter Corriston
It's 30 years since the Rolling Stones recorded one of their best post-Exile LPs, the great forgotten album of the Eighties. GQ celebrates the Glimmer Twins' final coup de grace - the piecemeal beast that is Tattoo You - and retells the extraordinary story of its difficult birth.
When you reach a certain age - could be 18, could be 30, could be 45 - when you think you have found all the music you like, and when your computer and your shelves are heaving with your personal taste's greatest hits, you are often tempted to wander.
I know I am.
You get bored with the stuff you've got (the stuff you thought pretty much defined you) and start seeking out stuff you previously thought was naff, stuff that always felt a bit old, pedestrian, ordinary, odd. Or simply stuff you've never heard before. Hell, you might even start to like Nick Cave. This happens collectively as much as it does individually: how else can you explain the recent and decidedly curious veneration of Leonard Cohen? Had we really exhausted every other potential cult hero? And could it really be the turn of Kaiser Chiefs next?
And so, thinking back to a time when, say, you might have been passionately consuming Joy Division, the Human League, the B-52's and the Cramps (let's stamp it 1981), you begin looking around for other things you could have liked, another life you could have lived, searching for a parallel universe full of Bruce Springsteen, the Bee Gees, the Psychedelic Furs... the Rolling Stones. Say. Maybe Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon wasn't as bad as everyone assumed it was, maybe Yazoo weren't so rubbish after all. Uh-huh. And so you begin employing the same rationale you used at the age of 13: playing a record until you liked it, no matter how bad it was (in my case, I give you exhibit A: Ooh La La by the Faces). All those years you spent vacationing in Ibiza? Well, imagine instead you had gone to the Côte d'Azur instead.
In the summer of 1981, a new Rolling Stones album was released. Its title was Tattoo You. The album itself was a compilation of odds and sods from previous recording sessions, some from Some Girls, some from Emotional Rescue and some from the infamous Black And Blue sessions of the mid-Seventies - leftovers that had, as one critic would write, a "slovenly gait". And a rather wonderful one at that. The tracks selected covered the years since 1972 and featured such former contributors as Bobby Keys, Billy Preston and Mick Taylor (fact: the Stones were at their prime when Taylor was in the band). And they had been recorded everywhere from Paris and Rotterdam to Kingston, Jamaica and Compass Point in Nassau. Tattoo You was made possible by travel agents as much as anyone.
My sojourn with the record was kick-started by an article I read in Entertainment Weekly a few years ago, in which the director Greg Mottola (Superbad) described his efforts at authenticity in his film Adventureland. The movie is set in the Eighties and Mottola wanted a specific Stones song included on the soundtrack, "Tops", and he wasn't going to accept any substitutes. Intrigued (I'd never heard it), I sought it out and found it, right in the middle of Tattoo You.
Some Girls, from 1978, had been the perfect Stones album, containing one genuine worldwide smash - the disco-themed, four-to-the-floor "Miss You" - and various solid-gold classics such as "Respectable", "Beast Of Burden" and "Shattered". It felt old and new at the same time, both modern and venerable. Yet its follow-up, Emotional Rescue, was a ragbag of not very much at all, and those of us who felt we shouldn't have liked Some Girls in the first place felt vindicated. So by the time Tattoo You was released, those of us of a certain vintage with even a modicum of respect for the band simply ignored it, thinking it couldn't possibly be any good. But listening to it 30 years later, I realise how wrong we were, and although Some Girls is still considered primus inter pares, Tattoo You could be even better. I'm not holding it like a hymnal, but it currently gets more heavy rotation than any other non-current CD in the house. This record doesn't burn with intensity - and, in true Stones style, a lot of its high points you can imagine being the result of no more than a shrug of the shoulders - but it's a great, old-fashioned party album, a bachelor-pad staple, a classic of its kind.
This wasn't the 1964 vintage of elephant-cord hipsters, tab- collared shirts and Carnaby Street suede lace-ups. This was no Beggar's Banquet-era pageantry of death, no bohemian requiem. This was a serious acknowledgement of stadium rock, of which "Start Me Up" quickly became a quintessential example. By 1981, the Stones were a generic top-down, rock'n'roll-by-numbers outfit, delivering power-chord riff-rock for those in the cheap seats behind the stanchions, fans for whom nuance was a fancy French restaurant. We were entering a period when rock'n'roll was squeezing itself into a brand new pair of training shoes and rolling the sleeves of its pale-pink linen jacket up to the elbows, when there was little in the world that couldn't be solved by a Roland 808 and a 12" dance remix.
But although they had become an outfit committed to celebration rather than introspection, the burden of debauchery still sat lightly on their shoulders.
