Ronnie never got off the last tour. He kept on after we finished the last show. On the road it's all right, because you burn off a lot of the stuff you do onstage. But when you get home and you're not in touch with your environment, your family - he didn't stop. He realized he had to do it. It was his decision. When I found out about it, he was already in the spin dryer.

It's getting to be like a habit. We've done the train, the boat, and the bridge. We'll probably do a submarine next time.

Keith: It's like you've been drafted. On this day until the tour finishes, you're back on the road. That blimp ride marks the starting line. You sort of cut the anchor and off you go into the clouds, up in the sky, maybe even to Shanghai (laughs).

Ron: Having your life mapped out for you for the next few years is great. It's the years of not doing anything that are difficult, where you kind of wander off and get into trouble because you don't have something to aim towards and improve on.

We're going to do three kinds of shows on this tour - a stadium show, an arena show, and a theatre or club show. In a place like New York, we'll do all three. So that's going to be fun for us. It's also a challenge for us to do these three kinds of shows where you have to jump from one to another.

I've done solo things here and there, but the Stones are numero uno. The Stones are the reason I'm here. They are my whole working life... (W)e all went out there and tried it on. But we all come back to the Rolling Stones. There is an electromagnetic thing that goes on with it. It draws us back to the center.

After all these years, for me, it's great to get out there, do what I do, meet the folks and have a good time. There's enough trouble in the world. Let's take some time off, pals, and have a good time.

Either we'd stay home and become pillars of the community or we'd go out and tour. We couldn't really find communities that still needed pillars.

I sing in a rock and roll band so I go on the road. It's not much more complicated than that. That's what my life is.

Keith: The last tour ended in 1999, and I thought, I probably won't get a phone call for about 18 months. And, sure enough, slightly after (18 months had passed), Mick calls up and goes, Do you think we should do something next year? I just wait for people to get antsy at home. 

Charlie: No, this won't be the last tour. What I said before is, If it's the last tour, fine. But it probably won't be the last time we'll play. The last tour was two years long. I don't think we can do a 2-year tour again. Who knows? When we started the last one, it was for a year. Something happened in the middle and it went on for two. If things are really great on this, (the tour might be extended). All the temptation will be to carry on. Keith's (theory) is never to stop because you don't have that start-up feeling again. It's kind of nice, except there's other things to do. 

Mick: People started asking Is this going to be your last tour? in 1966 - I distinctly remember that. I've always dated that. I'm not the Oracle of Delphi... so I don't know. As I was in the blimp, I was thinking about after the 2003 section of the tour what we were going to do. I was actually planning gigs for 2004. 

Mick: After we've said hello we might play some blues or something. It doesn't take long to get acquainted. I spend a lot of time with Ronnie and Charlie. I don't see Keith much - he lives in Connecticut - but I saw him a couple of months ago, so it's all very normal. 

Ron: You just slip into them. There's a few jokes - though since I've straightened up, I'm not so much of a jester as I used to be - then you walk up to your instruments and it's like no time has gone by.

Keith: The only difference between us and the Beatles is that we're still going. So, unlike the Beatles' greatest-hits set (1) we felt we had to put on two or three new tracks in a to be continued kind of spirit. I didn't want it to be all just nostalgia. Also, I didn't want to turn up for rehearsals for this tour without having played together with everybody since the end of the last tour. That would have been a little too much - straight into Start Me Up all over again... Playing new music really tightens the band up.

Getting everybody together for amonth in Paris, I didn't mind if we came out with no tracks at all. But as it turned out, we came out with 30 tracks! On our very first night in Paris we got three tracks down. Everybody went, Yeah. Out of the 30 songs we recorded, we mixed four or five. We're still dickering between them right now, figuring out what will go on the album. But my strategy worked, I think. Everyone's got their chops together and they're really looking forward to this tour. It's not just a regurgitation. It's still a working band. 

I daren't hardly say it, but it's probably the best Stones yet - at least for a long time. With the Stones, it usually takes two or three weeks to knock off the rust. Yet somehow, we were all well oiled. Something was right. 

Mick: I think what's important to me is that I'm personally writing new songs and the band is cutting new songs. But there's no point pretending that the Rolling Stones is a new band. There's bits of you that would like to relive that. It's like being a novelist or a film actor. You think, Won't it be great when I burst on the scene with a new movie or novel, instead of being a veteran of 15 movies and 25 novels, and with this one, it's Surprise me...

(There's an) old- fashioned idea that you can only be good while you're unknown, and hopefully not having any money, and even better, slightly mentally ill. AND a drug addict - always helpful. That makes you interesting. It doesn't necessarily make your WORK more interesting. It tends to drop off if you're older and a drug addict and don't work hard. So if you become too bourgeois and only want to live a
comfortable life, can you be bothered to get up in the morning and write a song? That's a valid criticism. I don't think it applies to me. Because I love writing songs - whether they're good or not is another matter - and I love working really, really hard. In the last five years, I've been working like a dog. 

What did I feel when I heard about the knighthood? (Pause) Cold, cold rage at his blind stupidity. It was enraging, I threatened to pull out the tour - went berserk, bananas! But, quite honestly, Mick's fucked up so many times what's another fuck up?

Keith: Mick's got an ego. I insult the man. But he has the hide of a rhino, and he's just determined to be who he is. I just try and deal with it. If I see that whatever he's doing I consider to be not a great help to our enterprise, I'll stick the boot in. But it don't matter, he'll come back, have a bruise the next day, we laugh and say How you doing? He's a pretty canny character to come against. I'm a bit of a moralist when it comes to the Stones, and Mick has been a bit flippant about them. But then, what do you do with lead vocalists? They're fairies. You've got to let them have their head and then rein them in. It's basically a continual jousting. 

Mick: Keith has his own personality and he likes to make his own noise. I think Keith feels it's mandatory to keep his image by doing that. We have a pretty mature relationship. Otherwise we wouldn't be working almost every day together. We agree on just about everything. 

(H)onestly, the last thing we thought of was all this coinciding with the 40th anniversary. And we realized, with some shock, Oh God, they're gonna rub it in, man... When a band has stayed together this long, there is a certain secret professional pride in that. But I don't think any of us would go around saying that - certainly not to each other, or even to ourselves. I guess there's just a thing in our society about decades - numbers that end in zero. I don't know why...

I'm timeless now, I'm beyond time. But also on the other hand, to us it's another tour and this is what we love doing and it just happens to come 40 years after we started... We're not here for nostalgia, we're not here to light the birthday candles or anything like that. But it's very nice to be 40 years old in the band. (Laughs) I'm a lot older in real life, (touring) keeps me young. 

Mick: I find Toronto a very congenial place to work. It's not too small and not too big and not too isolated. It's not Manhattan, but it's a high-pressure place. We did try rehearsing in the country and I found that deathly dull.

Keith: The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws. It's why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it.

It's not really a 40th anniversary tour for starters. I think that's a couple of years away. The history books say 1962? Well, Charlie wasn't in the band then. From my point of view, it's fuelled on pure energy - if I can muster it up. My requirements? A huge list, but mostly it's not stupid things like what colour chocolates you've got in your dressing room. I really require lots of rehearsal - I like to be almost OVER-rehearsed -, lots of sleep and lots of privacy, i.e. one hour a day.

The most difficult part of a tour - a lot of it - is in the preparation of it. Same as in the preparation of a movie... It's NOT going to work - if it starts well, it will probably end well; if it starts badly, it will probably end badly. So it's very important you get all the preparation right.

I don't do as much as I used to because I've got some very good people that I've been working with for, say, over nine or ten years now, that I trust to run the various departments of the tour. So I don't have to be crazily detail-conscious as I used to be. But, nevertheless, you know, you still have to review the show, it's very boring, and you watch the videos and you make notes and you talk to people and say Not that shot, that video shot, Not that one, Not that one, Not that one... Because people - and it's very subjective and it's YOUR show, you know, so you don't want to completely leave it to other people. And there are people who get, I think, lazy onstage and other people in the organization also get lazy so you have to constantly vibe it up. 

Keith: A lot of this has come out because of the way the tour is structured (i.e. playing different set lists for stadium, arena and theater shows). If we're going to do this, we need to put more ammo in the magazine. It also brings a lot of threads back to things you've done but thought, Oh, that was then. Here I am, playing Heart of Stone, and suddenly a bit of you goes back to when you were writing it: I didn't realize it was this good.

Ron: We've been this loose in rehearsal before, but there is something magical about these rehearsals which I've never seen. We just about nailed every song on Exile. We're doing I Got the Blues with four horns. It's such a buzz. And you see the honesty that's coming out. Mick is singing full tilt all the time. A lot of vocalists would go, It's not the show yet, I'll just brush over that bit. He's IN there, man. 

When we played at the Palais Royale in Toronto as a warm-up for the Forty Licks tour, the rest of the Rolling Stones were incredibly nervous. I had never seen them so nervous. I tried to calm them down because they were so intense: It's going to be great guys, we sound great. And they made tons of mistakes, tempos flying everywhere, which was the result of nerves, but you're thinking, How many times have we rehearsed this tune? It was very ragged, but I guess that Keith and the rest of the band hadn't been onstage in a long while.

I'm always confident, but this time I'm even more confident because I'm looking at life through a straight viewpoint now. T(he club gig in Toronto) was my first gig the other night that I'd done straight, and it was a real eye-opener. I noticed the lack of anxiousness, having to have another drink before I go on to bury the butterflies. And I was noticing things in the audience for a change, instead of just blindly playing away. I'm still struggling after six months, but I just take it a day at a time. None of us is getting any younger, and I thought, I've had a damn good innings at burning the candle at both ends, I'll just try doing what's good for me and seeing what a natural high is like. It's unbeatable really, if you can hold it down. It takes a lot of courage and commitment. 

(I)t would be superfluous for the Stones to discuss strategy or have a hug... (W)ith the Stones, it's like, Oh, do me a favor! I'm not going to fucking hug you!

I know that all the band needs is an audience. To rehearse anymore would be pointless. It would be blunting the sword. I get a little icy feeling, which builds up until just before you go on: Open up the cage, let the tigers out. By the time I get up there, it really is us leaping out: The cage is open, here we come.

You sometimes wish the press would review the show as a show instead of doing all this pontification about your history. Some of the journalists have been doing this as long as we have, and they don't know what to say anymore, so they add up our ages and print that. But I'm not complaining, because the reviews are really good. 

From right out of the gate, from those first gigs onwards, there was an amazing feeling on the tour. Charlie Watts and Darryl Jones were on their third tour together and had forged this immense rhythm section - and the band as a whole was continuing to evolve, to find itself. I think the Stones are still looking for the ultimate Stones. It's like the Holy Grail, whether we ever find it or not is immaterial; it's the quest that is important.

Keith: I'm calling it the Underwear Tour - small, medium, large. But for the band, it makes it far more interesting. At last we have the sort of balanced tour that we've been aiming at for years, but for one reason or another - usually lawyers and the need to make more revenue - we couldn't do it. It would always be stadiums, stadiums, stadiums, and just a couple of little places here and there.

Mick: We thought, How are you going to do a town like Boston differently?... So why not spend a week there and do three different kinds of shows? That way you can do a theater show, which can be full of music so you don't have to do a massive performance with lights and things - and where you can more or less do what you want and play songs you haven't done before... Then an arena show would be a bit of both - a combination of well-known songs and not quite so well-known. And then when you get to the stadium, you do a full-blown, well-known set list, which is probably very suitable for a stadium where people probably don't want to hear mystery tunes. That's just my opiinoion.... Plus, you're in town for a full week and you get into the swing of the city. 

Keith: Somebody told me in Boston we did over 60 different songs in three shows. That's what I've been looking for for years - to get out of the straitjacket.

I think Mick is coming to terms with what he is, and that he's still got a lot in him if he wants to get in there and deliver. I can't remember another tour when he didn't lose his voice after the first show. Because Mick's tendency, at most rehearsals, was to half-cylinder through the songs, not put the power in it. When he finally got to the show, boom - shock to the system. The voice would go. It became a point where you would expect it. Mick rehearsed hard this time. He went all the way and the proof was in the second show (at Gillette Stadium). His voice was in fine form. After that, you feel like, Yeah, we're rolling.

I think we tried Knocking once (before) the whole way through. When the actual song finished and we were into the jam, it collapsed totally. The wheels fell off. We tried it one other time - We'll just do the front bit - and neither satisfied us. Nobody wants to go near something that has a jinx on it. But you have to take the jinx off, take the voodoo away and have another look.

Today, I did a series of stretches and exercises. Th(e show) dominates your day. Getting here is the most important thing. Getting here and being well when you get here.

(I)f you go back to the old days, we just toured. A tour's a tour. But I think it's pretty valid. There are four new songs on the album. We recorded them in Paris recently. They're not old songs dug up, they're songs that we've just written. And I think it's a good time to do a collection.

Mick: There was no theme for the Forty Licks tour. We had three different sizes of stage, but no unifying concept. I really could not find an overriding theme for the three shows apart from the fact it was three shows by the Rolling Stones! So we created the artwork with the three tongues and worked with that, and in the end I just said, I really like the stage and the theme is original.

Charlie: The stage for Forty Licks was very beautiful, like a sleeker version of the one we had for Steel Wheels, which was fantastic to look at... We settled on a very stripped-down stage apart from the huge screen overhead, which was all very nice, but we had to decide what was going to be shown on this bloody great big screen. It's an idea I would like to develop more. If you use the screen as a stage set, it could create a totally different environment for each song. It could become a ballroom in Versailles or a black screen with doors and windows opening for another mood.

I did some some work with a voice coach, Don Lawrence, for the tour. It was a more scientific way of preparing for the show because you really do need a proper warm-up routine for your voice, in the same way that you need one for your body. And as well as the warm-up element, I wanted to be able to sing for a two-hour-plus show without breaking down - which is very hard to do - and to give myself some extra back-up so that I didn't start getting bad throats and miss shows. The problem is that when you get a really bad cold it can completely throw you. You can do the show, but you're always on the edge - a nightmare really. On the Bridges To Babylon tour I had missed a few shows, and that was nearly always to do with a cold, so I wanted to avoid that on Forty Licks.

I also did some dance work with Stephen Galloway, a ballet dancer frrom the Frankfurt Ballet... His job was to teach me some of the moves that he liked, but also to pick out moves that I did which he liked, which was useful because I can't remember the moves. If you're not a trained dancer, it's like not being a trained musician or a trained singer; you can't remember what you do that's good... I came away with a much larger movement vocabulary.

I become more intense as a singer than as a performer, where the accent is more on gestures. And there are songs I can't do in bigger places. Stray Cat Blues is not a number I'm particularly mad about, but it worked really well at the Wiltern Theater in L.A. And you get an intensity from a soul tune like That's How Strong My Love Is that you can't get in a stadium.

I mean, I like all the really well known tunes, I like doing them. You know, I can bring things to them. I can bring things to Satisfaction, to Sympathy for the Devil and Angie and all these tunes. And I can do those every... every other night.

Ronnie started playing really well once he was staright, because he used to be silly before: his performance would get in the way of his playing. That either proves how badly Ronnie played when he wasn't straight, or just how good he is when he is straight, the latter, I think... Ronnie's problem is that he is not very good at concentrating on anything, because most things come so easily to him.

I think that the Stones - it's a fortunate and also slightly unfortunate thing that you have this long, long history because... in some ways you're put in a box... to do a certain kind of thing. But I think that it has a great longevity and it has a great history all of its own... I think the analogy with film is really the James Bond series. You have a very successful thing but if you go off it completely it won't be successful anymore. You know what I mean? It's a long running thing. So there is a certain constraint within it. But within all things there are constraints and within all things there are conventions. Within art forms there are conventions; even when you try and break them, what are you doing? You're breaking out of a convention which you understand and you regulize... 

But I think the Rolling Stones have achieved a lot. They've got a very broad musical spectrum that they cover, from all kinds of different music. So there's a very broad thing. But it's still, image-wise and..., there's a certain restriction which you're bound to follow. Which is good. Most music has restrictions.

I don't particularly find it difficult (to keep it fresh). But it is a challenge. It's always a challenge in any business, in any creative endeavour to keep whatever you do fresh. And the Rolling Stones is the same as everything else. Yeah, it's not that easy but it's not that difficult.

I'm very proud of it and I'm very proud of the music the Rolling Stones produced and still produce and still play. The wonderful thing is that you produced a lot of material, a lot of different, a very wide range of material, with different feelings and different styles, from blues and country music and rhythm & blues and rock & roll and bla-bla-bla and all this. There's a LOT there. So that you can then look at it - you know, as we started off rehearsals for this tour - and you look at it and you say Wow, we really - we did that... and That is really odd, how did we manage to do that? That was really crap and that was really great. And then you try and play all these different tunes in all these different ways and say, Well, we've got an awful lot of material here.