The Rolling Stones have spoken about their memories of the late Amy Winehouse.
The legendary English rock and roll band cover Winehouse original You Know I’m No Good, recorded for her second album, the multi-award-winning Back To Black, on their forthcoming album Foreign Tongues.
In a new interview with The Sunday Times, guitarists Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards reflect on their connection to the late singer, who pasesd away in July 2011.
Wood, 79, used to hang out with Winehouse in London, and knew her better than his bandmates.
“She would go: ‘Oh Ronnie, what am I going to do?’,” Wood recalls. “I said: Look, everyone knows you’ve got vodka in the water bottle. Get it together and get on stage. But if you could get her up there and she stayed there, it’d be great. I’m sad because she didn’t do her full span. It was like saying goodbye to Billie Holiday again.”
Keith Richards, meanwhile, has expressed his regret at not getting to spend more time with Winehouse.
“I was always sort of, ‘Well, I’m bound to meet her down the road,’” he says. “You expect things to happen, and unfortunately no. But that’s what records are for. I’m just very glad and honoured to have played with her at least once.”
The Stones played with Winehouse at the Isle Of Wight festival in 2007, covering the Temptations’ Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.
Asked by NME.com why they elected to cover Winehouse on Foreign Tongues, Mick Jagger replied, “I think it’s all part of the slight Britishness of it. Ten of the tracks [on the album] were recorded in London… We did pretty much her arrangement. The same key – and I did the horn part on harmonica which was fun cos it’s always fun to play harmonica in a minor key.”
The Rolling Stones’ 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, will be released on Friday, July 10 via Polydor/Universal Music.
Producer Andrew Watt says that the record is “rawer” than the group’s last album, Hackney Diamonds, which he also produced.
The album features cameo appearances by Paul McCartney, Robert Smith from The Cure, Steve Winwood and more. It was recorded in less than one month at Metropolis Studios in west London.