Mick Jagger, the lead singer who keeps cutting Rolling Stones albums faster than the band can take them on tour

There is now a public asymmetry between the lead singer of the Rolling Stones and the band he co-built. Mick Jagger spent under a month inside Metropolis Studios in West London cutting the group’s twenty-fifth studio album with producer Andrew Watt, while Keith Richards — who is older than him by six months and has lived a louder life — said he could not physically commit to the tour that was supposed to follow. The album, Foreign Tongues, releases regardless. The tour will not. The trade is one Jagger has been preparing for since the late seventies, and the part of him the public most often misses is how systematically he has prepared.

The middle-class detail that gets buried in every Jagger feature is that his father was a physical-education teacher who helped popularise basketball in Britain and his mother, born in Sydney, voted Conservative. He grew up in Dartford, Kent, ran into Keith Richards at Wentworth Primary School at seven, lost him to a different secondary, and re-met him on the platform at Dartford station as a teenager carrying a stack of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports. He had a place at the London School of Economics on a government grant by then. He stayed long enough to be plausible and walked out in 1962 to sing in a band Brian Jones was building above a Soho pub. The LSE registrar is the only person on this list still notionally waiting for him to finish his degree.

The Rolling Stones’ first decade did its talking through records that have never gone out of print: Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., Some Girls. Jagger’s contribution to those albums is not the voice alone but the discipline that decided which of Keith Richards’ riffs got cut and which got dropped; the band’s archive of unreleased songs is the secondary discography that proves it. Acting came in beside the music — Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, then Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly, both shot in 1970. Performance kept its cult standing; Ned Kelly did not survive its reviews. The film-acting habit went quiet for two decades while the Stones produced Tattoo You and the largest stadium tour of the early eighties.

The eighties were the years the partnership with Richards came closest to collapse. Jagger’s solo debut She’s the Boss arrived in 1985, Primitive Cool in 1987. Richards publicly called him ‘Brenda’ for the duration, then wrote her into Life, and the press read it as betrayal. The corrected reading, with forty intervening years, is that the solo records taught Jagger how to lead a session without Keith — technical knowledge that is now load-bearing in the way Foreign Tongues exists at all. The Steel Wheels reunion in 1989 cleared the deck. Voodoo Lounge and Bridges to Babylon followed.

Through the two-thousands and twenty-tens Jagger ran a second career that the music press tended to file as a hobby. Jagged Films produced Enigma in 2001, the James Brown biopic Get on Up in 2014, and the Capotondi art-world thriller The Burnt Orange Heresy in 2019, in which he also took the antagonist role. HBO’s Vinyl, the single-season nineteen-seventies record-industry series he co-created with Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter, did not survive its first ratings cycle. The fact that the show failed is treated as the ending. The fact that he co-built it from concept to pilot in a year, while touring stadiums on A Bigger Bang, is treated as a footnote.

The Jagger and Richards split that ran underneath the 2026 tour cancellation is the most recent surfacing of the oldest fault line in the band. The polite reading — Keith has arthritis, Mick is being respectful — is the one the press repeated. The undertext, which Jagger has not denied, is that the singer still wants to work the calendar of a thirty-year-old and the rhythm guitarist cannot. That has been the band’s argument since 1985. The ‘World War III’ of the Steel Wheels reunion was the same argument with the names changed. Both men know what they are not saying.

The shape of the present is that Jagger is producing two music-biography films — Bill Pohlad’s Miles & Juliette, with Damson Idris and Anamaria Vartolomei as Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco, and an untitled Sister Rosetta Tharpe biopic at Live Nation Productions with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor writing — and has just delivered a Rolling Stones album that took under a month to track. Andrew Watt produced; Paul McCartney sat in; Steve Winwood and Robert Smith of The Cure took guest vocals; Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummed where Steve Jordan did not. The lead single ‘In the Stars’ arrived on 5 May 2026. Foreign Tongues releases 10 July. The 2026 tour will not. The conversation about whether the band returns to the road will happen in 2027, on terms Keith Richards has reserved.

The private life has, in recent years, stabilized in a way the early ones did not. Jagger has eight children across five mothers, a knighthood conferred at Buckingham Palace in 2003 for services to popular music, and an engagement to the former American Ballet Theatre soloist Melanie Hamrick that was publicly confirmed in 2025. Their son Devereaux turns ten this year. Whether the engagement becomes a marriage is a question Hamrick has answered honestly in interviews: maybe; possibly never; both of them are content with the present arrangement.

The closing thing to say about Mick Jagger, with Foreign Tongues two months from release, is that the next record is already implied. He will be writing the one after this one before the year is out. Whether the Rolling Stones, as a touring entity, follow him to it is the question the band has chosen not to answer until 2027.