The Beatles and the Stones should, by rights, have been assigned to some sort of rock’n’roll museum by now – nice to look at, but surely irrelevant in this day and age.
Yet here we are in 2005, with new records from both McCartney and The Stones. Something must be wrong. Well maybe, yet you can’t deny that the opening salvo from Big Bang is a cracking record. ‘Streets Of Love’ is the kind of ballad that the Stones’ excelled at in their heyday and ‘Rough Justice’ is far more attitude laden than you could reasonably expect from a band featuring a cricketing knight, a jazz drummer and a painter. Mind you, that’s what having Keith Richards in there does for you.