This unity is partly the work of Bob Clearmountain, who mixed the finished tracks and gave them his characteristic vacuum-packed clarity (you could bounce a quarter off each of Watts’ rim shots). Tattoo You is a compact, unified statement - despite the fact that some of its tracks (or segments of them) reportedly date back several years. That same thread of reasoned recognition runs through the entire album, as though a decade of posturing had somehow been digested into fuel for moving ahead. “You make a grown man cry,” Mick Jagger sings amid a clatter of handclaps and Charlie Watts’ precision swing, almost as if he hadn’t spent half his life trying to hold back the clock. Instead, maturity serves as the backdrop for rockers with real momentum and love songs with real objects, beginning with “Start Me Up,” the catchiest Stones single in ages. Tattoo You doesn’t address the subject of maturity, or deny its onset, in a burst of satyriasis. Just when we might finally have lost patience, the new record dances (not prances), rocks (not jives) onto the scene, and the Rolling Stones are back again, with a matter-of-fact acceptance of their continued existence - and eventual mortality - that catches Pete Townshend’s philosophical maunderings in its headlights and runs them down. But those years are over now, decisively, and with the triumphant release of Tattoo You, they seem shabby and sad.

From today’s viewpoint, much of the last decade consisted of camouflage - camouflage for an essential loss of nerve, an unwillingness to be seen unguarded for the length of an LP, or even a tune.

The rolling stones tattoo you songs