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Rolling Stones songs: Factory Girl
Waiting for a girl and her knees are much too fat/ Waiting for a girl who wears scarves instead of hats…
Mick Jagger: vocals Keith Richards: acoustic guitar Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: tabla Guest musicians: Rik Grech (fiddle), Rocky Dijon (congas), Dave Mason (mandolin)
Factory Girl sits quietly on Beggars Banquet (1968), but it does not behave like a background track. Instead, it feels like the Stones briefly stepping sideways out of their own mythology and into borrowed shoes. The song unfolds as a small, deliberately awkward scene: a man waiting outside a factory, killing time, growing impatient, and sketching a portrait of the woman he loves with equal parts affection and irritation. Mick Jagger delivers the lines with a knowing wink, adopting a voice that is exaggerated, rough-edged, and intentionally uncomfortable. This persona is far removed from his real-life image at the time, and that distance is the point. Factory Girl becomes an experiment in character, tone, and musical ancestry—an old-world folk sketch dropped into a late-’60s rock album. It sounds ancient and casual, but every choice is deliberate, from the stripped-down arrangement to the sly humor woven into the lyrics. The result is a song that feels both playful and unsettling, rooted in tradition while questioning its own right to exist there.
A caricature in waiting
At its core Factory Girl is built around impatience. The narrator is stuck waiting, feet wet, time slipping by, while his girlfriend remains inside the factory. Rather than offering sympathy, he responds with a running commentary that borders on caricature. Her appearance is described bluntly and unflatteringly, her habits sketched in quick strokes that emphasize disorder, poverty, and chaos. Curlers replace glamour, scarves replace hats, and Friday nights dissolve into drunken trouble. Jagger leans into the grotesque, not to condemn but to exaggerate. The humor lies in its bluntness and repetition, as if the narrator is talking himself into annoyance. This approach mirrors Jagger’s long-standing habit of inhabiting characters rather than confessing feelings. As with many Stones songs, the voice we hear is a mask—one that allows irony and discomfort to coexist. The laughter comes easily, but it never quite settles into cruelty.
Keith Richards (2003): “To me Factory Girl felt something like Molly Malone an Irish jig. One of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song. In those days I would just come up and play something, sitting around the room. I still do that today. If Mick gets interested I’ll carry on working on it; if he doesn’t look interested, I’ll drop it, leave it and say, ‘I’ll work on it and maybe introduce it later.'”
Folk roots and borrowed voices
Musically Factory Girl abandons rock swagger almost entirely. Keith Richards conceived it as a folk piece, closer to an Irish jig or Appalachian ballad than anything electrified. His fingerpicked acoustic guitar sets the tone: spare, circular, and inviting. The song draws from the same well of traditional music that fascinated collectors and musicians throughout the 1950s and ’60s, particularly the kind of material preserved on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Even the title echoes an older Irish ballad, reinforcing the sense that this tune belongs to no single era. Jagger responds by reshaping his voice, exaggerating vowels and dragging phrases until they sound like something lifted from a field recording. The performance is knowingly artificial, yet informed by close listening. He sounds less like a tourist mocking the style and more like someone testing how far he can inhabit it without losing himself.
Mick Jagger: “The country songs like Factory Girl or Dear Doctor on Beggars Banquet were really pastiche. There’s a sense of humour in country music anyway, a way of looking at life in a humorous kind of way – and I think we were just acknowledging that element of the music. The ‘country’ songs we recorded later, like Dead Flowers on Sticky Fingers or Far Away Eyes on Some Girls are slightly different. The actual music is played completely straight, but it’s me who’s not going legit with the whole thing, because I think I’m a blues singer not a country singer.”
An unusual studio assembly
The recording itself reflects this departure. With Brian Jones absent, the Stones invited outside musicians to help realize the song’s atmosphere. Ric Grech contributes fiddle lines that lean into bluegrass tradition, while Dave Mason adds mandolin, sharpening the Appalachian edge. Charlie Watts abandons his drum kit entirely, opting for tabla played with sticks—an unconventional and technically incorrect approach by his own admission, but one that suits the song’s loose, percussive feel. Rocky Dijon’s congas provide subtle rhythmic grounding, and Bill Wyman’s bass slips in quietly before the first verse. Nothing here feels crowded. The arrangement remains skeletal, leaving air around each instrument. Rather than polishing the performance, the production preserves its fragility, reinforcing the illusion that the song could have existed long before the Stones arrived to record it.
Charlie Watts (2003): “On Factory Girl I was doing something you shouldn’t do, which is playing the tabla with sticks instead of trying to get that sound using your hand, which Indian tabla players do, though it’s an extremely difficult technique and painful if you’re not trained.”
Satire, legacy and the long afterlife
Factory Girl occupies an uneasy space within Beggars Banquet. Alongside other country-leaning tracks, it is the hardest to defend against accusations of mockery. Yet the satire is never targeted at its subject alone. Jagger’s delivery suggests a performer aware of his own absurdity, poking fun at the very idea that he could convincingly adopt this role. That self-awareness softens the blow. The song’s authenticity lies not in realism but in respect for the form it borrows. This balance has allowed the song to endure well beyond its studio origins. The Stones revived it on tour decades later, including appearances in 1990, 1997, and 2013, with a notable live version captured on Flashpoint. Its transformation into “Glastonbury Girl” for the festival only underscores its flexibility. Factory Girl may be slight in length, but it remains one of the Stones’ most revealing experiments—a moment where humor, tradition, and self-doubt briefly shared the same room.
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