By the mid-1980s, the Rolling Stones were not a functioning band. They were a brand — an enormously successful brand — held together by contractual obligation, financial self-interest, and the stubborn refusal of both primary parties to be the one who ended it. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had reached a point in their relationship where direct communication had essentially ceased. They communicated through intermediaries, through lawyers, through the passive-aggressive medium of interviews given to separate journalists in separate cities on separate continents.
The breaking point was She’s the Boss (1985) — Jagger’s first solo album, recorded and released while the Stones were nominally on hiatus. Richards’ position on this was unambiguous and expressed in every available forum: a solo album meant Jagger was more interested in his own career than in the band, and the band was the thing, and anyone who disagreed was wrong. He said this in interviews. He said it to friends. He said it, allegedly, in private messages to Jagger that were not friendly in tone.
Jagger said that the Stones’ hiatus meant he was free to record independently. He was correct as a matter of contract. He was wrong as a matter of Richards, which was the more consequential jurisdiction.
The revenge was Talk Is Cheap (1988) — Richards’ own solo album, recorded with a band called the X-Pensive Winos, and one of the finest rock records of the decade. Richards made it at a period when he was sober for the first time in years, energized by the work, and apparently liberated by the absence of Jagger’s management instincts and commercial calculations. The album is loose, swaggering, and alive in a way that the mid-period Stones had not been for years. Critics adored it. Richards promoted it by sitting in interviews and saying, repeatedly, that he had no problem working without Mick Jagger and that the results spoke for themselves.
The results did speak for themselves. That was the revenge. Not a confrontation, not a public attack — just a record that demonstrated, clearly and musically, that the thing Jagger had undervalued was the thing that actually worked.
The Stones reunited, eventually, because the money was too significant to walk away from permanently and because both men understood, even through the bitterness, that their best work required both of them. The Steel Wheels tour of 1989 was one of the highest-grossing tours in history. They performed side by side every night. The resentment was still there. The music was still extraordinary. Some creative partnerships are more durable than the relationships within them.
Richards wrote about the entire period in his memoir Life (2010) with characteristic directness — naming his disappointments, his fury, and his eventual acceptance that Jagger’s brand-consciousness and his own instinctive purism were both necessary for the Stones to exist. He was generous in the end. Generosity, from Keith Richards, always sounds like something that cost him something. That is what makes it convincing.