“Bill! BILL!!! Stop! STOP!!! The bassline, man… What you playin’ at? Disco’s been over for six whole months. Get your mind off the 13-year olds in Tramp and focus on the task in hand, man!”
“Mick…Mick! It ain’t disco…it’s John Taylor, innit?”
1983 was a strange year for your chart-friendly heritage rock acts.
Paul McCartney was zigzagging between writing duets with Michael Jackson and rewriting his own songbook for 1984’s roundly-battered Give My Regards To Broad Street project.
Rod Stewart was delighted that the musical world had finally caught on to his mullety, spiky, teased and coiffured bonce, but was dressing in the same sort of shiny red leather ‘n shoulder padded blouson-with-matching-pants outfit that Eddie Murphy was garnering all those laughs in. And only some of those laughs were for the jokes, let me tell ya. It’s been scientifically proven that Rod’s musical output of the era – the synth-laden Body Wishes – is absolutely no-one’s favourite Rod record at all.
The Rolling Stones were in a similar position. They hadn’t been relevant for a decade. Not really since 1972’s Exile On Main Street had they been at the forefront of things. The musical world they lorded over – they were the self-confessed Greatest Rock ‘N Roll Band In The World, lest we forget – had since birthed glam and disco and punk and post-punk (or New Wave as Jagger would call it) and the Stones had wilfully ploughed on, with a nod to punk here (Some Girls‘ Respectable) and a tasteful tip of the trilby to disco on the same album (Miss You) and a feeble gesture to post-punky new wave there (at a push, Emotional Rescue‘s She’s So Cold) and now they were in the middle of a synth revolution.
Where exactly did a group of has-been rock ‘n rollers continually out of step with the musical fashions of the era fit in in 1983?
Keith was happy to remain a blues-rocker. Mick though wanted to look outwards. He looked to his left. ‘Indie’ was about to go overground, blown in on a breeze of harmonica wheeze with The Smiths’ Hand In Glove. Pffft. This tinny, wimpy music was an irrelevance to the Stones, a bug on the sole of their stack-heeled shoe that they could squish at will. Mick looked to his right, to the pop charts and the new wave (not New Wave) of British acts currently whipping it up in the States. And right at the forefront of that invasion, in their blousy powder blue and pastel pink suits, their Lady Di haircuts and cocaine-powered self-importance was Duran Duran.
Perhaps, with their penchant for models and yachts and sunnier climes and front page splashes, Duran Duran were the natural successors to the Rolling Stones. Perhaps not, though. Park that thought. Let’s not get too silly and carried away.
Either way, the 1983 model of the Stones was a barely-functioning shadow of its former multinational corporate-self. That age-old cliche musical differences meant that Mick ‘n Keef, its two managing directors weren’t speaking. Mick recorded during the day. Night owl Keith worked under cover of darkness. If they found themselves together, they were nasty, spiteful and downright hostile to one another. “Jagger started to become unbearable,” said Keith in his autobiography, Life.
Sly and Robbie, the great Jamaican rhythm section, were brought in as de facto mediators, massaging the egos of both leaders whilst softening the need to include the other’s work on the record. The resultant album – Undercover (Of the Night) – was a largely forgettable and irrelevant record of the times…but its eponymous lead single was an absolute triumph. Pompous? Yes. Over-produced? Very likely. But essential and terrific? Indeed it was. I should know – I played the copy I bought in Irvine Library’s sale of old records for 25p over and over and over again. I had no idea what was cool and what was not…only that Undercover was such a great track from a band well past their sell-by date.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night)
It’s the drums that hit you first. Great production. Live, reverby, in the room. Charlie – I’m really hoping it’s Charlie and not Sly Dunbar – sounds awesome; loud, metronomic, tribal…the bedrock upon which the Stones’ aural madness is allowed to unspool.
It’s the bass that gets you next. Bill – and I’m really hoping it’s Bill and not Robbie Shakespeare – pulls of a juggernauting rubberised riff that thumps and pops in the spaces left by Charlie (or Sly). It’s disco, but it’s not disco. It’s funky but it’s not funk. It’s straight-up pinched from John Taylor, that’s what it is. Listen to Planet Earth and tell me Bill Wyman wasn’t impressed enough to spot something worth stealing. Either way, between them the rhythm section maintain their position as the driving force in the Stones as an R ‘n B dance band. Charlie and Bill really cook on Undercover.
Which leaves Mick ‘n Ronnie ‘n Keith. The guitars come in; metallic and to the fore, phased, flanged and boomeranging around the room with absolutely no subtlety or finesse at all. Reverberating, disappearing, returning twice as loud, a knuckle-dragging twin axe attack of stiletto-edged slashed riffing, it’s fantastic. This ain’t linear, twelve bar rock ‘n roll like Brown Sugar or Tumbling Dice, this is Keith the Human Riff going Godzilla for four and a half zany minutes.
Mick camps it up in the vocals, going pseudo-political about the hundred disparus lost in the jails of South America. C’mon Mick! Lighten up! You’re no Billy Bragg. You’re a silly, double-jointed, hand-on-hip, rubber-lipped rock ‘n roll song ‘n dance man in a purple silk suit and yellow sweatbands. Let’s dance, you fool. Little Mick needs no encouragement. Listen out for the bit when he double tracks himself with Keith’s ‘do do-do do-do-do’ guitar refrain and try not to see him wiggling his 26″ waist to Bill ‘n Charlie’s unstoppable groove. Great track, isn’t it?
If it’s extended pops ‘n bangs ‘n whooshes ‘n ech-ech-echoing guitars yr after, look no further than the extended and absolutely epoch-defining 12″ version.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night) Extended Cheeky Mix
Like all the acts of the time, it was absolutely de riguer to produce an extended, adult-themed and ultimately banned video to promote the single. Guns…masks…kidnappings…casual misogyny…violence in the streets…shoot-outs in the chapel… Proof, if it were needed, that bands with too much money love to flaunt their wealth in the silliest of ways.
The full 15-minute Undercover promo made it to the cinema for a brief run, opening as the supporting film for Scarface, believe it or not. Whoever thought that a gangster film about white-suit wearing cocaine fiends was a good fit with a gun-totin’ Rolling Stones promo was absolutely right on the mark. Well done that man.
Plain Or Pan 