Tattoo You by The Rolling Stones

Tattoo You, released on Rolling Stones Records on 24 August 1981, is the Stones' great act of salvage. Touring commitments and feuding inside the band made it hard to book real sessions for the follow-up to Emotional Rescue, so the production team went digging through the vaults, pulling out outtakes and half-finished fragments going back nearly 10 years. Through 1980 and 1981 the players dropped in when they could to finish them off.

You'd never guess it was pieced together. "Start Me Up" is one of the best-known songs they ever cut, a hard-rock strut that climbed to number two in America, while "Waiting on a Friend" and "Slave" show a looser, loungier side. Old hands turn up on the older tapes: Mick Taylor on "Tops", Nicky Hopkins, Billy Preston and Ian Stewart on keys. It went to number one in the US, the last Stones album to get there, closing a run of eight straight that began with Sticky Fingers, and Peter Corriston's cover design won a Grammy.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.