Gathering Moss

The underwhelming in-concert document has been a regular feature in the Rolling Stones discography over the last couple of decades, and one could be forgiven for treating this new one with indifference.

Of course, Shine A Light has a certain prestige about it, being the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s concert film of the same name, but that arguably doesn’t matter much when stripped of the visuals. And so it proves.

Yes, the band are tight, and stay locked into a groove that belies their advancing years, but this is nothing especially revelatory. For every ‘All Down The Line’, which boasts a tight and toughened rhythm, there’s a ‘Tumbling Dice’, which strips the guts from the original and replaces them with a whole lot of nothing much. (The much-lauded guest performance from Buddy Guy on ‘Champagne & Reefer’ is absent from my review copy.)

The second disc offers up most of the ubiquitous classics, and there’s little the Stones can do to make them seem anything like the well-worn hits they are. The swagger, insolence and menace that marked their best work is understandably long behind them, which essentially reduces the likes of ‘Paint It, Black’ to well-polished karaoke, while the rendition of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ is closer in tone to the Guns N’ Roses cover than their own dastardly ’68 masterpiece. Surprisingly, there’s nothing here from A Bigger Bang, their most recent studio offering and easily their best since ‘78’s Some Girls.

While the film itself may well present Mick Jagger in all his stage strutting glory – he is after all his own best parody - here one can only go by his voice, which certainly tries the patience when he attempts to inject that American-country twang into his vocals. (Jack White makes for a better Gram Parsons stand-in on ‘Loving Cup’.) It’s not altogether surprising that Keith Richards offers the single best vocal of the set, on a mean and (relatively) dirty ‘You Got The Silver’ – however, he promptly undoes his good work almost immediately on a sloppy ‘Connection’, a curiously mediocre selection given the wealth of material at their disposal.