Composers: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date: September
1993, November 1993-April 1994
Recording locations: Sandymount
Studios, Ron Wood's home, St. Kildare, Ireland; Windmill Lane
Recording, Dublin, Ireland;
& A&M Recording Studios, Los Angeles, USA
Producers: Don
Was & The Glimmer Twins
Chief engineer: Don
Smith
Performed onstage: 1994-95
Line-up:
Drums: Charlie
Watts
Bass: Darryl
Jones
Acoustic guitars:
Keith Richards
Electric guitars:
Keith Richards & Ron Wood
Lead vocals: Mick
Jagger
Background vocals: Mick
Jagger, Keith Richards & Bernard Fowler
TrackTalk
Hybrids, ones (that Mick and I wrote) together (include): Love Is Strong, Got Me Rocking, and Sparks Will Fly... Sparks Will Fly was actually eyeball-to-eyeball with Charlie Watts more than anybody to start with, because we would not let anybody else play on it until we'd honed down that rhythm track thing dead right. You know, it was like, three's a crowd (laughs) for a minute, until we'd worked it out. And then we let everybody else in.
We had a big bonfire going one night out in
Ronnie's garden. I was throwing all these logs on it, and these sparks
started flying, and suddenly I started running back to the studio, I've
got one! Incoming! Charlie was the only guy there, and he and I played
the thing. Nobody else was allowed to play it for months, until we'd got
it right. It all has to do with the rhythm and the guitar, and after that
the rest of it fell into place. Charlie's laying down the law on that one.
You've got to know a guy so well to play that tight together. It's unspoken,
because it's all going by in front of you in 3 seconds.
Keith Richards is the easiest person in the
world to play with and so we just played like we normally play. I just
started off and he comes in, or he'll start off and I come in. And we'd
do three goes at it, look at each other and he'll say, Try it tomorrow.
Keith usually calls the shots because he's writing the thing. And he knows
if it's right or wrong. We didn't do many takes of that.
(A)ll I had here, exactly, was the hook (sings
because
sparks will fly) and the way it was taking off. Mick's bit was the
other bit where we hit the verse - boom. It dovetailed straight in, and
we had that.
I don't remember (alluding to anal sex). (Laughs)
It just spilled out. Honest... Actually, even Keith raised an eyebrow.
He was going around afterwards going, Did he really say that? Did he?