The Rolling Stones – Flashpoint Review

Flashpoint may share a cover art aesthetic with chemical burn warning labels, but The Rolling Stones need not suggest there’ll be anything explosive within. Live material from the band’s official archive ranges from the brilliant with Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! to clunky lows with Love You Live. A wide berth in their glory days, and many of the issues for either album are, at the very least, based on the audio quality and sentiment in the crowd. Too loud a cheer, too quiet a response, it’s the back-and-forth which live albums live or die on. But Flashpoint, released at an admittedly awkward time for the band, struggles to bring the passion Mick Jagger and company often showed for stage performances. Even at their lowest in the studio, the group could be banked on for a solid on-stage outing. Not this time, and Flashpoint never pulls it together as the band were frequently capable of doing both during their glory days and after. Flashpoint is part of the latter period, once Keith Richards and Jagger had buried the hatchet, but not completely.  

Those sharp edges do not help Flashpoint. Opener Start Me Up sounds a bit sluggish, though it hits the core moments of the song, just without the drive and higher energy fans of the band would want. A fascinating collection of songs for a live album, too, with the likes of Sad Sad Sad and Rock and a Hard Place featuring early on. Neither is a particularly bad song, and Sad Sad Sad at least has the blues rock roots which would serve The Rolling Stones well as they mounted this sonic comeback with Steel Wheels and successful live shows after, but Flashpoint doesn’t capture the atmosphere. At least the band are not afraid, at this point, to highlight some of their very best songs that aren’t quite in the Let It Bleed category of inevitably, always played. Miss You here sounds marvellous, but that is built on the qualities of the song itself, rather than anything the band does for it here. It sounds a tad sparse, Jagger moaning and grunting his way through the quiet spots.  

The Rolling Stones sound keen to lean into those moments of quiet, too. You Can’t Always Get What You Want starts off with just a bit of guitar and Jagger letting the crowd sing the lyrics, a poor trade-off to hearing the frontman himself display his understanding of a decades-old song, but at least it’s in the set. With the band clanging away in a stripped-back style, they fail to bring about the same energy and thrills such a song should, inevitably, feature. Even when The Rolling Stones bring in rarities like Factory Girl, the mood hardly shifts. It trails off with little fanfare into Can’t Be Seen, a much better offering by the band but still well short of that energetic thrill or touching sentimentality the group often pivots between. Eric Clapton makes all the difference with his appearance, but he replaces the two core members of The Rolling Stones and shows he can do their shtick better than they can at this point in their careers.  

An odd moment to make the highlight of the show, but an audacious Paint It, Black, salvages Flashpoint single-handedly. Worth a listen just for those adaptations alone. Nothing short of incredible, borderline gothic-rock with contempt layered over those legendary lyrics. The Rolling Stones take far too long to find their rhythm on Flashpoint, and even then, they need Clapton to shift the tone for them. A hot streak towards the end of the album, with Jumpin’ Jack Flash and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, is the standard you’d expect of The Rolling Stones, though it doesn’t forgive the strangely sloppy start to Flashpoint. Strong work in the latter half is worth a listen, though for those in attendance that night, they’d have been better served showing up halfway through the set, unless they were desperate to hear Miss You, that is.