For Fans of The Rolling Stones

Recorded in the basement of a villa in the south of France while Keith Richards was on the run from the taxman, Exile on Main St. is the Stones at their most sprawling, most drugged-out, and paradoxically most focused. It sounds like it was made by people who had nothing left to lose. The songs blur together in the best possible way, a continuous smear of gospel and country and blues that resists being picked apart and demands to be lived in. Nothing in rock music sounds quite like it.

Cameron Crowe's film is set in 1973, the year after Exile, and it is saturated with exactly the world the Stones made possible: the casual debauchery, the backstage power games, the sense that rock and roll was both the most important thing in the world and a total racket at the same time. The fictional Stillwater is modelled on mid-period Stones and Allman Brothers archetypes. What the film gets right, beyond the music and the clothes and the buses, is the emotional seriousness underneath all the posturing. The Stones always had that too.

Keith Richards wrote a memoir that reads exactly like he sounds: unhurried, funny, casually devastating, and full of genuine insight about music and nothing else. His account of how he and Mick Jagger built the Stones' songwriting partnership from scratch, and how open tunings unlocked everything, is worth the price alone. He is also ruthlessly clear-eyed about the years he can barely remember. It is not a redemption narrative. It is better than that.