Line-up:

Drums: Steve Jordan
Bass: Andrew Watt
Electric guitars: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Ron Wood (incl. solo)
Lead vocals: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger, Ron Wood & Andrew Watt
Piano: Matt Clifford
Rhodes electric piano: Matt Clifford
Keyboards: Matt Clifford
Percussion: Andrew Watt
 

TrackTalk
 

There were so many magical moments, like Keith coming up with the riff for Whole Wide World. Mick’s demo was completely different, and Keith started playing this riff, and then Steve started playing along, and it was such a vibe. I was just like Mick, start singing your verse, and he says Where’s the verse? It didn’t make sense to him. So I said, Just sing that verse over this. He started singing along, and boom, it went to the chorus, and it was a joy. These guys were having a blast.

(I)n Whole Wide World... (Keith) shortened the verse I'd written. So instead of playing like 4 bars on every chord he made it into two bars in every chord, which made it more kind of funky.

Mick always wants to speed it up and push it. I want to take it easy. We reached a happy medium on this one and I think we got it right. There is a difference between having impetus and running over your own feet.

Funky riff - really funky.

Whole Wide World is supposed to be sort of tongue-in-cheek, uplifting, so that whatever happens to you, you can always get over it. I threw in a few things from my youth in London to throw into some of those verses about living in Fulham and all that... I never really lived in Fulham, but it alliterates with filthy, so it’s better than Chelsea (laughs).

I don’t do backwards looks that much, but for this one I was picturing a bleak vision of London in my early 20s and it was a fun thing to write. Once again, the song has a punk vibe. I was imagining depression in the verses followed by a slightly more hopeful chorus.

On Whole Wide World I felt the story could be more personal. Most people would be like, Fuck you, this is my story. (Mick) was like OK, give me the night. I’ll come back tomorrow. And now they’re some of my favorite lyrics on the album. He wrote this story about his young days in London and getting arrested and being a kid on the streets. It’s so cool.

I kind of did (the) London (accent) on Mother's Little Helper. But the song's kind of British punk so I thought, Not too Americanised on this one, no Southernisms. And with the lyric I was thinking, it's about when the chips are down - why not use some of your old experiences? It's obviously not exact... (S)o I covered the difficult student years. Which weren't that difficult, really, but they weren't that great either. And then I thought, being in jail - that was pretty awful. I mean, I wasn't there long but I mean, not nice.

I wasn’t desperate, but you don’t know what’s going to happen to you at that age. You get a degree, but then what are you going to do? You’re in a band – and when you get a gig, it goes great, but gigs are few and far between. And you’ve got Brian and Keith moaning that they’ve got no money. It didn’t last long, though. We were really lucky – we went from zero to 100 very quickly.

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