Album Review: The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

5/5

One of rock and roll’s founding texts, Sticky Fingers was the album where the Rolling Stones fully embraced the stereotype of louche Brits playing at being Mississippi bluesman. Were it anyone else, the results might have plumbed the depths of self-parody. However, Sticky Fingers, released in 1971, was endlessly assured and is rightly regarded as an iconic record.

Listened to with modern sensibilities, what’s striking about this buffed-up reissue is the extent to which the Stones have influenced subsequent generations of rockers. You can hear Jack White in the droning riffs of ‘Sway’ while it’s clear U2 have drawing endlessly on ‘Wild Horses’ across the decades (‘Brown Sugar’, for its part, was smartly repurposed as the Dandy Warhols’ ‘Bohemian Like You’).