CD reviews: The Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street

Tone readers won’t need convincing about the status of Exile On Main St. Nearly 40 years on from its release, The Rolling Stones’ loosest, rootsiest album is entrenched in the canon as one of the great rock records and it should be in every collection.

For the first time, there’s a CD reissue to do it justice.

Exile has never been a clean-sounding album. As befits a disc largely recorded during a debauched few months spent in a rented villa in the south of France, there’s a murkiness that’s central to its appeal.

However, the new remaster allows individual instruments to burst through; compared with the 1994 Virgin Records reissue, the separation is astounding. Pianist Nicky Hopkins, in particular, is a beneficiary, while the improved sound also reinforces how much of their spark the Stones lost when guitarist Mick Taylor quit the band a few years later – his contributions are superb.

Less superb are the reissue’s 10 bonus tracks. The band members have tried to avoid the subject, but large chunks of these songs are new, with entire vocals and melodies only recently added to some of them. “It doesn’t really matter, in a way,” Mick Jagger told Uncut magazine in a recent interview. Except it does, because the Stones have spent the last 38 years patently incapable of coming up with music that matches the 18 original tracks of Exile. Then again, hardly anybody else has been able to, either. RB

Music: Five

Sound: Four and a Half

Bonus: Two