Emotional Rescue

Emotional Rescue is a 1980 studio album by British rock group The Rolling Stones, released on the Rolling Stones Records label. It was the follow-up to the hit album Some Girls and was also a box office success.

Produced by The Glimmer Twins (Keith Richards and Mick Jagger), the album was recorded from January 1979, first in Nassau in the Bahamas and then in Paris, with post-production in New York City at the end of 1979.

Emotional Rescue was the first album after Keith Richards was acquitted by a court in Toronto, Canada in a trial for drug possession - he had threatened a prison sentence of several years. The Stones recorded dozens of new songs, so that many of them were used for the later album Tattoo You and only ten were used for Emotional Rescue.

Most of the songs were recorded with the standard line-up of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ron Wood and Bill Wyman, with keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart, saxophonist Bobby Keys and harmonica player Sugar Blue added for the title track Emotional Rescue. Michael Shrieve joined in on percussion.

The album cover, designed by Peter Corriston, features photos of the Stones taken using a thermal imaging camera. The original edition of the album was released wrapped in a large poster showing more thermal images of the band; the whole thing was in a plastic sleeve. The music video for Emotional Rescue also features footage taken with a thermal imaging camera.

When the album was released in June 1980, the single release featuring the disco-influenced title track Emotional Rescue climbed into the UK Top 10: It reached number 9 in the UK Top 75 Singles, and number 3 in the Billboard Hot 100. The album itself made it to number 1 in both the UK Top 75 Albums and the Billboard Pop Albums, making it the Stones' first number one album in the UK since Goats Head Soup (1973). On the US charts, the album stayed at the top for seven weeks. While the album was a huge success with fans, music critics were less enthusiastic about it. Among other things, they complained that the best songs on the record came at the end. Diedrich Diederichsen complained in his review in Sounds that the Rolling Stones had lost all bite:

"From every song grunts a saturated, grinning joie de vivre from people who want for nothing and have [...] come a long way from feeling lacking or self-doubt."

Later reviews were less harsh, but Emotional Rescue is still considered one of the Rolling Stones' more mediocre works.

In 1994 Virgin Records released a new version of the album. All tracks were digitally remastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering Studios.

Title List

  1. Dance - 4.22 (Jagger/Richards/Wood)
  2. Summer Romance - 3.15 (Jagger/Richards)
  3. Send It to Me - 3.42 (Jagger/Richards)
  4. Let Me Go - 3.49 (Jagger/Richards)
  5. Indian Girl - 4.22 (Jagger/Richards)
  6. Where the Boys Go - 3.29 (Jagger/Richards)
  7. Down in the Hole - 3.57 (Jagger/Richards)
  8. Emotional Rescue - 5.39 (Jagger/Richards)
  9. She's So Cold - 4.12 (Jagger/Richards)
  10. All About You - 4.18 (Jagger/Richards)

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