BLAIR MORGAN

The reviews are still coming in for Foreign Tongues, and most critics seem relieved simply to have another Rolling Stones album. Fair enough. Mick Jagger is now approaching 83, Keith Richards is 82, and nobody seriously expected another studio record after Hackney Diamonds. Listening to it, though, I kept thinking of another Stones album - one that almost nobody rates - Dirty Work.

Recently there were four deaths that, on the surface, seem unrelated: guitarist Wayne Perkins, singer Dennis Locorriere from Dr. Hook, producer Jack Douglas, and actress and singer Claudine Longet. Yet together they form a map of the 1970s - excess, celebrity culture, reinvention, and the feeling that another world is slowly disappearing from view.

Los Lobos prove that a band can keep evolving, experimenting, and still stay together. The wolf, indeed, survives..

As the nights have closed in, I’ve found good company in three new music-related reads that cut across pop stardom, rock mythology, and gritty crime fiction.

In which our hero reaches the 3/4 Century mark , a couple of books shed light on the most interesting phase of his career ...

Rock critics, whoever and whatever that means these days seem to falling over themselves in praise of the new Stones album Hackney Diamonds - the "best since Some Girls" said The Times of London, "they've still got it" , says NME. and on and on . After letting the tracks sink in, and at the risk of putting a dampener on all the Stones "luurve" out there I'm afraid most of these "Diamonds" would have been better left in the mine.. Ladies & Gentlemen - Hackney Diamonds 1. Ang

Can't exactly recall but could have been my first purchases; a collision of True Colours by Split Enz and The River by Bruce Springsteen or maybe much earlier the "Red and Blue" Beatles collection - think the cover shots 1962 vs 1969 , a young mind could get carried away thinking about how did these guys go from there to there in such a short time?