Jagger scoffed at the idea of the Rolling Stones as an institution. “It’s just a band,” he said.
But Ronnie Wood, the guitarist who joined in 1975, appreciates the band’s six-decade continuity. “That’s been my thing all these years, keeping my institution going,” he said in a video interview from his apartment in Barcelona. “When Mick and Keith fell out, I did my best to bring them back together – at least get them talking and get the engines running again.”
The album’s title comes from London slang. Hackney is a district in east London that has long had a bad reputation, although it has recently become more upscale. Wood explained that “Hackney diamonds” are shards of glass from car windshields that have been broken during break-ins.
“A lot of the tracks on the album have that explosion to them,” Wood said. “This is a really direct album.”
With the new LP, the band has regained “a sense of urgency,” Jagger said via video from Paris, with paintings of elegant French nobles on the wall behind him. Of course, the long-time members of the Rolling Stones – Jagger (80), Richards (79) and Wood (76) – weren’t getting any younger.
“I said to Keith, ‘If we don’t have a deadline, we’re never going to finish this record,'” Jagger said. “So I said, ‘The deadline is Valentine’s Day 2023. And then we’ll go out and do a tour.’ We had to do this before. You know, you have to finish Exile on Main Street because you have a tour booked.”
Even without new albums, the Stones continued to tour in the 2010s and 2020s. The band had occasionally gone into the studio to start working on songs but never got around to finishing them. Meanwhile, Jagger and Richards had, at various stages, each accumulated a backlog of new material that they had written separately but were awaiting the band’s collective work.