Tattoo You: anatomy of a classic
- Photos by Peter Corriston
Tattoo You started inauspiciously, initially cobbled together in order for the band to have a new album to promote for their 1981 American tour; a record to go on the road with. By now, the band didn't need to make another mark on history, they simply needed content for their latest travelling carnival. This was pantechnicon rock.
According to the album's associate producer, Chris Kimsey, "Tattoo You really came about because Mick and Keith were going through a period of not getting on. There was a need to have an album out, and I told everyone I could make an album from what I knew was still there." The gossip surrounding the Stones at the time suggested that Jagger and Richards were getting on so badly that they couldn't be in the same room together, let alone write songs, and although Richards was still adjusting to a life without heroin, Ronnie Wood was apparently near-incapacitated from freebase cocaine (by the early Eighties he was rumoured to be spending $5,000 a day on his habit).
However Keith Richards begs to differ: "The thing with Tattoo You wasn't that we'd stopped writing new stuff, it was a question of time. We'd agreed we were going to go out on the road and we wanted to tour behind a record. There was no time to make a whole new album and make the start of the tour."
Maybe. One writer recalls visiting Richards' home in the early Eighties, and on entering the guitarist's pool room, seeing a hideous portrait of the owner with one hand holding a cigarette. On the other hand sat a glove puppet, a tiny Mick Jagger.
Either way, Kimsey spent three months with Jagger going through material that had been recorded for the previous five albums, finding stuff that had been either rejected or forgotten. Apart from two tracks, the songs were all written and recorded in the Seventies, and so were all of exquisite vintage.
"Tattoo You is basically an old record," says Jagger. "It's a lot of old tracks that I dug out. They're all from different periods. Then I had to write lyrics and melodies. A lot of them didn't have anything, which is why they weren't used at the time, because they weren't complete. And I put them all together in an incredibly cheap fashion. I recorded in this place in Paris in the middle of winter. And then I recorded some of it in a broom cupboard, literally, where we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved. Then I took it to Bob Clearmountain, who did a great job of mixing so that it didn't sound like it was from different periods."
"Some tracks weren't quite ready [for] Emotional Rescue," says Richards. "The music had to age just like good wine. Sometimes we write our songs in instalments - just get the melody and the music, and we'll cut the tracks and write the words later. That way, the actual tracks have matured, just like wine - you just leave it in the cellar for a bit, and it comes out a little better a few years later. It's stupid to leave all that great stuff just for want of finishing it off and getting it together."
The cover of the album was designed by Peter Corriston, who won a Grammy Award for it. This was just before the arrival of the CD, when album sleeves still meant something, before they became pauperised. The cover is striking for many reasons, not least because it is one of the few to only feature Jagger on the front. Their tattooed faces served to disguise the ageing process, maintaining the idea of Jagger and Richards as priapic rock gods. And just before the album was pressed, Jagger changed the title at the last minute from Tattoo to Tattoo You, causing Richards to publicly fume, claiming he had never been consulted about this.
Tops" and "Waiting On A Friend" were recorded in late 1972 during the Goats Head Soup sessions (and featuring Mick Taylor, not Ronnie Wood, on guitar; Taylor later demanded and received a share of the album's royalties); while the libidinous "Slave", with its elephantine riff, and the glorious "Worried About You", were recorded in 1975 during the Black And Blue sessions in Rotterdam. "Hang Fire" (originally recorded as "Lazy Bitch"), "Start Me Up" and "Black Limousine" (possibly their most underrated song of the past 30 years) were originally recorded for Some Girls, and "Little T&A" and "No Use In Crying" came from the Emotional Rescue sessions.
"On most albums there's one duff track," said Ian Stewart, the band's unofficial sixth member, "but on Tattoo You they're all good."
"Start Me Up" had the sort of riff that, when you first hear it, will wake you up in the morning, competing with your heartbeat. It was released in August 1981 and was so infectious it reached the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic, helping carry Tattoo You to No.1 for nine weeks in the States; the album was certified quadruple platinum in America alone. The song had originally been rehearsed during the Black And Blue sessions as a reggae song called "Never Stop", but was completely overhauled for its single release, a raunch-by-rote construction that would eventually become their most famous song. The infectious "thump" to the song was achieved using mixer Bob Clearmountain's famed "bathroom reverb", a process involving the recording of some of the song's vocal and drum tracks with a miked speaker in the bathroom of the Power Station recording studio in New York.
"Start Me Up" was recorded at the Pathé Marconi Studio - Paris' Abbey Road - in December 1977, the same day they laid down the rhythm track for "Miss You" (proving to be one of the most profitable days in their entire career). At the time it was little more than a Keith Richards ad-libbed riff with a reggae pulse, and there are innumerable "an-ting" takes languishing in the vaults.
