It speaks volumes about the hardiness of the Rolling Stones that we’re not marking the 60^th anniversary of the band’s recording career with a review of a deluxe remastered edition of their debut album or anything memorialising the past. Instead, The Rolling Stones: A Life In Pictures emerges as the band announce a new US tour – in support of a new album, Hackney Diamonds. 

The ability of The Rolling Stones to endure and to keep creating is part of what we celebrate in this new visual history. As you’ll see (and read) inside, what that means isn’t simply the dogged ability to keep going when death robs the band of a key member like Brian Jones or Charlie Watts. It’s more about a genuine embrace of the unexpected when it occurs, a musical rolling with the punches. 

In a roundabout way, you could argue it’s led to some of the band’s greatest triumphs. Without the arrival of Mick Taylor, there would be no Sticky Fingers. If the UK didn’t have such dramatic taxation in the early 1970s, no Exile On Main St. Without the many convictions and visa refusals arising from the making of that album, it’s arguable that we’d be without the torpid grooves of Goats Head Soup. 

Inside, you’ll find images from those key stopping points on the band’s journey, and many more besides. Making a breakthrough on tour with the Everly Brothers in the UK in 1963. Discovering America for the first time in 1964. In the studio. Backstage larks. Making promotional videos. Even on their way to appear in court. Beyond their fame, it’s in the special, rather subversive, character of the Rolling Stones to give something special to a photographer, whatever the occasion.  

It’s on stage that the band are at their best, though, and it’s there where we leave them here. Playing a new song with Lady Gaga and heading out again, on to their next adventure.

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