Mick Jagger at 74 has delivered his first solo musical foray into political commentary, with a pair of new songs that deliver grimly mocking takes on the age of Brexit and Trump.
The celebrated Rolling Stones frontman released England Lost and Gotta Get A Grip on Thursday, saying he wrote them while stirred by “anxiety [and] unknowability of the changing political situation”.
The songs represent Jagger’s first solo appearance on any release since 2011 and follows last year’s Stones album, Blue & Lonesome.
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Both tracks feature a sardonic Jagger half-singing, half-spitting his lines in a primitive rap over programmed beats and burring, blues-rock guitar riffs.
Jagger said in a statement he rushed to release the songs, which he began writing just a few months ago, while they still reflected the transatlantic political climate that spawned them.
‘’We obviously have a lot of problems. So am I politically optimistic? … No,” Jagger said.
England Lost uses a disenchanted, plain-speaking football fan as the narrator for what he said was the “feeling that we are in a difficult moment in our history”.
It’s a rough, rambling but ready vocal performance, with some blunt one-liners: “I went to see England but England lost / I went round the back but they said piss off.”
Jagger then sings he’ll “go home and smoke a joint” after a match he didn’t even want to go to, before adding: “I went to find England and it wasn’t there/ I think I lost it down the back of my chair / I think I’m losing my imagination/ I’m tired of talking about immigration / You can’t get in and you can’t get out / I guess that’s what it’s really all about.”
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Jagger said: “It’s obviously got a fair amount of humour because I don’t like anything too on the nose but it’s also got a sense of vulnerability of where we are as a country.”
If the England Lost music video is anything to go by, it’s clear enough that Jagger – one of the great re-exporters of US folk music to American audiences, whose band made arguably its best album while holed up in France as tax exiles – has misgivings about a Britain turning inward.
