(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) – Credit: Getty Images Within six months, he would be out of the band entirely, his drug and legal issues deemed a liability for their planned American tour.īy July 1969 he would be dead, drowned in his own swimming pool in an incident that would become shrouded in conspiracy theories despite the coroner noting the effect of alcohol and drugs on his organs and recording ‘death by misadventure’, a verdict reaffirmed by Sussex Police after a review in 2009.ġ968: Bill Wyman, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones recording their hit ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. His isolation from the other Stones, personally and musically, would increase as they developed this new, harder sound. Burdened by an increasingly chaotic personal life, burgeoning drug and alcohol problems and troubles with the police, Jones was an irregular and uneven presence in the studio. It also sealed the Jagger-Richards axis as the primary creative motor of the band while Brian Jones, its founder, was sidelined during the recording sessions. The step change in his guitar style brought a visceral kick to the new recordings, pulling the band away from the more ornate arrangements that had characterised their last two albums and adding what would become Richards’ trademark swing to their musical arsenal to complement the swagger in their public image. Also I wanted to try to go back and use what a lot of old blues guitarists were playing and transpose it to electric but keep the same basic simplicity and straightforwardness.’īrian Jones (1942 – 1969) and Mick Jagger of the British rock group The Rolling Stones, enjoying a food fight at the Kensington Gore Hotel, where the band staged a mock-medieval banquet for the launch of their new album ‘Beggars Banquet’, while the band’s drummer, Charlie Watts (left) looks on, 5th December 1968. ‘I wasn’t learning anymore I wasn’t getting some of the sounds I really wanted… Most times I went into different tunings because I had a song going and I was hearing it in my head but I couldn’t get it out of the conventional tuning no matter any way I looked at it. I just really thought I was not getting anywhere from straight concert tuning,’ Richards would recall in his autobiography. At the same time, they made a stride towards what would become their signature sound through Keith Richards’ discovery of the open tunings – where open, unfretted strings form a chord – that characterised much of the album, along with Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the preceding single recorded in the same sessions. Their origins as a blues band – their very name was taken from a Muddy Waters song – and the music that had provided source material for their earlier hits served as the foundations for Beggars Banquet. The Stones response was to move forward by looking backwards. Drifting away from the blues-derived aesthetic that had made their name it was disparaged as a derivative shadow of the Beatles’ innovations, receiving unfavourable comparisons to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Its predecessor, the patchy and poorly received Their Satanic Majesties Request had dabbled in psychedelia and experimental sounds. The album, though, marked a turning point, both for the Stones themselves and, by extension, rock more generally.
The subsequent protracted dispute dragged throughout the summer and autumn until an eventual release with a sanitised cover in the style of an event invitation. The launch had, in fact, been delayed by months since even the cover – a toilet wall daubed with graffiti – had given the band’s record label cause for concern. The launch party for the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, released 50 years ago this month, culminated in a food fight – a suitably messy end to a rather fractious process.
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