Listen: Mick Jagger says he wrongly dismissed unheard Rolling Stones songs as 'terrible'

Mick Jagger has admitted to Planet Rock he initially dismissed the trio of rediscovered tracks that appear on the reissue of ‘Goats Head Soup’ as “terrible” and “useless”.

In a My Planet Rocks Goats Head Soup Revisited special last Sunday night (30th August), Mick Jagger and Keith Richards joined Paul Sexton from their respective homes in Tuscany and Connecticut to talk about the expansive reissue of The Rolling Stones' seminal 1973 album ‘Goats Head Soup.’

Among the plethora of bonus tracks on the deluxe reissue are the previously unheard songs ‘Criss Cross’, ‘All The Rage’ and ‘Scarlet’ featuring Jimmy Page.

Mick told Paul that his first kneejerk reaction when he heard about the unearthed songs from the Rolling Stones' vaults was to rubbish them.

“They said ‘oh, we’ve found these three tracks’,” Mick explained. “I said ‘they’re all terrible!’ That’s always my initial reaction – ‘they’re all useless! And the reason they wasn’t put out was because they were all useless’.

“Actually, I always liked the songs, but they weren’t finished so the struggle is what have you got in the sound department really. Now you can make things sound quite good easier than you used to be able to.

“Sonically, they sound like they were recorded then (in 1972), but even if they weren’t perfect then, you can make them sound a lot better. I think these three songs are up there with the rest of the songs that are on this record, they stand up with the rest of the material.”

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Jimmy Page also joined Paul Sexton on the phone as part of the My Planet Rocks special, to explain how his appearance on ‘Scarlet’ in 1974 – after the release of ‘Goats Head Soup’ came about.

“Ronnie Wood) was living at a house called The Wick in Richmond and he had a studio in the basement and he said that there was an invite to do a session and it was from Keith (Richards) and Ian Stewart was going to be there,” Jimmy revealed.

“So, I thought ‘well that’s going to be really great, let’s go along’. Ronnie didn’t actually play on it, but Keith came in and he set up his equipment and I took my guitar along and there was a drummer, who I didn’t know, and the engineer I didn’t know, but Rick Grech the bass player yes I knew him. (Keith) started kicking it off to illustrate what it was, obviously I was paying a lot of attention to what he was doing and I came up with a riff that would go with the contraflow to compliment what he was doing.

“It was great to work with Keith in this capacity right from the bare bones of something. I’d worked with him in the past but not like this, it was really, really cool. By the end of the evening, we had a really good take.”

Jimmy added: “More recently I was contacted and apparently there was a lot of excitement that they realised that they had this (song, ‘Scarlet’) and not only that but it’s bloody good isn’t it?! I was contacted and they sent through a file of the mix and I thought ‘wow, that sounds really powerful! It’s great.’ All of the guitar parts that I remember doing, they were on there and I thought it sounded solid and everybody is really on form.”

Elsewhere in the My Planet Rocks interview, Keith Richards said ‘Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)’ was his first choice of lead single over ‘Angie’.

“I can’t really remember how our minds were working to say ‘yes, that’s the single!’ Very astute anyway (laughs),” Keith said.

“It did surprise me, I was expecting one of the rock n’ roll tracks to be the obvious single – ‘… Heartbreaker’ I remember saying at the time, ‘that sounds like a single to me’ and everybody said ‘no, ‘Angie is really strong, man, and it breaks a bit of the mould.’ We had done this earlier on in the sixties with ‘Little Red Rooster’ – really nobody thought that was a single and it was a daring move at the time to put that out and it worked, and so did ‘Angie’.”

Mick added: “The lead off song ‘Angie’ was nothing to do with ‘Exile on Main St.’ was it? A pretty ballad with strings. As a lead track it couldn’t be further away from the gritty stuff of ‘Exile’. We’d had ballads before that had been successful, it wasn’t weird to do an acoustic style ballad… I could hear it’s musical, singable potential and always wanting to put strings on it and bringing out the potential of it in that way.”

The My Planet Rocks Goats Head Soup Revisited special is repeated on Planet Rock this Wednesday (2nd September) at 9pm.

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The one-hour special also features Mick and Keith talking about the recording process, the additional personnel on 'Goats Head Soup' including Bobby Keys, Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston, what late-great producer Jimmy Miller brought to the album, and the story of bonus tracks ‘Scarlet’, ‘Criss Cross’ and ‘All The Rage’.

The 'Goats Head Soup' reissue comes out this coming Friday (4th September).

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