Line-up:

Drums: Charlie Watts
Bass: Darryl Jones
Acoustic guitar: Pierre de Beauport
Electric guitars: Keith Richards
Lead vocals: Keith Richards
Background vocals: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bernard Fowler & Ivan Neville
Piano: Keith Richards
 

TrackTalk

Thru and Thru is one (I wrote all by myself).

I was pissed out of my brain (when I wrote that)! (laughs) This is the weirdest thing, the circumstances. We were in Barbados early last year, writing songs, Mick and I. Charlie was there, and also Pierre de Beauport, my guitar man, who's also on Thru and Thru - he's the guitar at the end. And we'd been out to a club in Bridgetown. Tropical night. We had a night off, you know. And we get back to Eddy Grant's studio, which is where we were living and working, at 5 in the morning and get out of the car. And I start staggering in, and suddenly I turn around to Pierre. I said, Switch the stuff on, man. Incoming, incoming. I guess maybe in the car... But I just went into the studio and laid it all down in one take. There it was. I don't know if it was just in the car, but suddenly it came. And that's really, to me, what songwriting is. I have very little do with it, it comes on the wave.

You love 'em when they come like that. I didn't think it would turn up on this record. It would've probably been a backburner job if it hadn't been for Charlie, once again, saying, Let me take the drums down in the stairwell... Charlie provided me with the whole means of getting through it and out the other end.

(The monster drum sound) is the stairwell. It's on four or five songs on the album - You Got Me Rocking... It (was) a 4-flight stairwell, and I started off at the top, which is Moon Is Up, and I ended up at the bottom playing You Got Me Rocking and Thru and Thru... The studio's at the top. It's like going down, then? So it's open all the way down. So we started off out by the door there, and then Don Smith said, Would you go to the bottom and try it? It was a bit small down there, but it was all right. The problem is you can't hear anything down there except drums. Such tremendous sound.

(It's a s)trange little riff. And you know, the actual basis of it comes off of a Jimmy Reed blues, a special trick that Jimmy Reed had when he would play the V chord (motions his hand like he's swiping something, then laughs). And suddenly it just flooded back to me. Of course, it's not even a blues, but it was just that one figure on guitar. Then I said, If I slide it down there (slides hand down an imaginary fingerboard), it would still keep going. And I go, Ahhh...

(Pierre de Beauport) works for me; he's my guitar man, mechanic, and a damn good player, too. He happened to be the only guy around that night, and he's been with me from when I first came across that song. We cut the first demo of it together, so I thought he deserved to have his mark on it. As we were finishing the record, I said, Pierre, by the way, your acoustic's on. He said, You've got to be kidding! I told him, No, go for it.

I thought it was dead and gone. If it's a good song, it doesn't matter whether it immediately comes out of the starting gate. Our songs take a while to fall in. (Laughs) We're way ahead of people, and they need time to catch up.

On an album like Voodoo Lounge there are songs that people won't get for 10 years... and then suddenly they realise what I've been doing. Thru and Thru was exactly like that. It took off when it was put on the soundtrack of The Sopranos... Suddenly everybody was saying What's that wonderful record? and I'd say, Well, it's the last track on Voodoo Lounge.

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