Rolling Stones Kick-Start ‘Hackney Diamonds’ Tour With Thrilling Houston Concert

Over the past couple of decades, the Rolling Stones have looked for any reason to hit the road besides the release of a new album of original songs. They’ve launched tours celebrating their 50th anniversary, reissues of select archival records, the 2016 covers LP Blue & Lonesome, and their 60th anniversary. Some years they headed out on the stadium circuit for no particular reason whatsoever, knowing a Stones tour is a major event in and of itself.

But after a nearly two-year break from touring, the Stones emerged last year with the shockingly great Hackney Diamonds. It’s a rock-critic cliche to label any Stones album their “best since Tattoo You,” so we’ll avoid that. Let’s just say it’s their strongest album since the Eighties. (We maintain that 1983’s Undercover is wildly underrated.) Making something like Hackney Diamonds is a feat that virtually nobody anticipated for a group that formed months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it sent them on the road this year with a renewed sense of purpose.

The first step was Houston’s NRG Stadium on Sunday night. After a strong opening set by Gary Clark Jr. that centered around his new LP, JPEG Raw, the band took the stage to the familiar opening notes of “Start Me Up.” This is the first time Mick Jagger has faced a stadium crowd since his 80th birthday last year, but his voice and body seem like they stopped aging sometime around Steel Wheels. It’s almost impossible to fully believe until you see it in person. (“People say Joe Biden is too old to be president,” an elderly woman behind me said early in the night. “They need to look at Mick!”)

After “Start Me Up,” the clock went back to 1965 for a loose “Get Off of My Cloud,” and then to 1972 for a gritty “Rocks Off,” one of the clear high points of the evening. “This next one is pretty old and ancient,” Jagger said afterward, “but we’ve never done it in Houston before. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever done it in the USA before. It’s called ‘Out of Time.'”

He wasn’t kidding. The 1965 Aftermath track wasn’t played live once until their 2022 European tour, and this was the first time it crossed the Atlantic. But it’s not something you hear much on classic rock radio, and the audience reaction was pretty muted at first. “I don’t think you really knew it,” Jagger said at the end. “But you got to know it as it went along.”

The Hackney Diamonds portion of the evening began at this point with leadoff single “Angry,” which popped onstage much like it did during their surprise album release show at the New York club Racket last year. “Beast of Burden” won the fan vote for the night, and it provided veteran backup Stones singer Bernard Fowler with a much-deserved spotlight moment. “You’ve got one more vote in November,” Jagger said. “Don’t forget to vote then too. What to play now? Something old … something new.”

The “something new” was the live debut of “Mess It Up” from Hackney Diamonds. It’s one of the two songs from the album featuring the late Charlie Watts on drums, though Steve Jordan expertly re-created his parts onstage. He was the new guy when the band last toured America in 2021, and emotions were still raw right after the loss of Watts, but Jordan has proven to fans by now that he was the best man on the planet for this near-impossible job.

“It’s been a great a few days in Houston,” Jagger told the crowd. “We’ve been rehearsing here a bit. I took an amazing trip to the space center. That was great. I was a bit disappointed there were no Beaver Nuggets there.” (This is a continuation of Jagger’s 2021 bit where he called out a local delicacy every night on tour. He went really obscure with this reference to a Texas brand of sugary corn puffs he’d almost certainly never dream of actually eating.)

At the midway point of every Rolling Stones concert in recent memory, Jagger introduces the band one by one before heading offstage so Keith Richards can sing a couple of songs. For some reason, perhaps to squeeze more new songs into the set without cutting any of the standards, Richards was limited to just a single tune. He made it count by singing 1981’s “Little T & A” for the first time since 2016, though it was disappointing he didn’t get a chance to break out “Tell Me Straight” from Hackney Diamonds. It feels inevitable that’ll happen before this tour ends.

Jagger returned for “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Gimme Shelter,” which gave new background singer Chanel Haynes a chance to emerge from the wings and show off her stunning pipes. She first entered Stones World in 2022 when Sasha Allen, their previous background singer, couldn’t make a Milan show. Haynes was playing the lead role in the West End musical Tina at the time, and she parachuted in at the last second to save the show. This frustrated the producers of Tina, who fired her for handing the show off to her understudy that night when she wasn’t ill, but it impressed the Stones enough to hire her for this tour.

It was a wise choice. With all due respect to past Stones backup singers Lisa Fischer and Sasha Allen, who are both very gifted vocalists, “Gimme Shelter” hadn’t sounded quite this haunting since Merry Clayton sang on the original recording back in 1969. Haynes’ first howls of “Rape! Murder!” echoed all across the stadium, stunning even the security guards pressed against the stage. She then walked with Jagger down to the edge of the catwalk for the climactic “just a kiss away” segment, beaming with confidence and swagger.

The main set wrapped up with “Honky Tonk Women,” “Miss You,” “Paint It Black,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” These are songs they’ve done hundreds and hundreds of times for good reason. The hardcores may yearn for deeper cuts like “Memory Motel” or “Moonlight Mile,” but Jagger knows they’d cause many people to sit down and start scrolling through Instagram. And when you have a song like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in your repertoire, you simply have to play it every time you do a gig.

“Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” one of the finest songs on Hackney Diamonds, kicked off the brief encore set. If it wasn’t challenging enough to channel Merry Clayton a few songs back, Haynes had to now deliver Lady Gaga’s soaring vocal parts from the original recording. Unsurprisingly, she crushed it. For a moment, it really felt like witnessing a scene from some alternate-universe version of A Star Is Born.

The night closed out with a joyous “Satisfaction,” meaning they played just three songs from Hackney Diamonds. That’s typical for a tour in support of a latter-day Rolling Stones album, but this one really deserved more. They dropped “Midnight Rambler,” one of the Richards songs, and the acoustic set to make room for the three new ones in the show, but it be worth further restructuring to squeeze in “Whole Wide World,” “Bite My Head Off,” and “Tell Me Straight.” These are stellar songs that deserve a spot in the set, even if it means tossing aside “Paint It Black” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” sometimes.

Whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, it’s worth taking a few steps back and realizing how miraculous it is the Rolling Stones exist in any form after Ronnie Wood’s lung cancer scare in 2017, Mick Jagger’s heart surgery in 2019, Charlie Watts’ death in 2021, and the countless times that Keith Richards has cheated death over the decades. (A character in Wayne’s World 2 joked that Richards “cannot be killed by conventional weapons.” It’s not so clear at this point that even unconventional weapons can do the job.)

The band’s 60th anniversary tour in 2022 seemed like it could be the end of the Rolling Stones saga, but we’re somehow now living through an entirely new era of their history. They even have a bunch of outtakes from Hackney Diamonds that they hope to release on a follow-up album. Whatever happens, they’re now in completely uncharted waters for a rock & roll band. It’s thrilling to witness.

The Rolling Stones’ 4/28/24 Set List in Houston

“Start Me Up”
“Get Off of My Cloud”
“Rock Off”
“Out of Time”
“Angry”
“Beast of Burden”
“Mess It Up”
“Tumbling Dice”
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
“Little T & A”
“Sympathy for the Devil”
“Gimme Shelter”
“Honky Tonk Women”
“Miss You”
“Paint It Black”
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
“Sweet Sounds of Heaven”
“Satisfaction”