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Flashback: The Rolling Stones live in Brussels 1973

THE STONES AT FULL BLAST, 1973
By 1973, The Rolling Stones were a force of nature—wild, wired, and utterly unstoppable. Jagger was pure fire, snarling through Starfucker, then melting hearts on Angie. Keith and Mick Taylor traded riffs like punches in a back-alley brawl, while the crowd just soaked in the chaos. The Stones weren’t chasing trends—they were creating them, proving that rock ’n’ roll still had teeth, sweat, and a wicked grin.

October 17, 1973: Forest National, Brussels, Belgium (2 shows)
According to Keith Richards, Bobby Keys didn’t show for band assembly on this concert day in because of intoxication, which resulted in his being banned by Mick from future Stones tours until 1982, with occasional concert exceptions. Audio from those shows (mainly from the second show) were released as Brussels Affair (Live 1973) in 2011.

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When the Stones Hit Their Peak: Brussels 1973

By 1973, The Rolling Stones weren’t just a band—they were an institution in motion, bruised and beautiful. The swagger that had carried them through Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. was still burning, but now it was sharper, leaner, and somehow even more dangerous. Onstage, Mick Jagger was pure electricity, snarling one moment and sighing the next. His delivery in Starfucker turned punk before punk even existed, while Angie revealed a cracked tenderness few frontmen would dare show. Keith Richards and Mick Taylor played like duelists in a smoky bar fight, weaving riffs that made the crowd feel both seduced and assaulted. This was a band that had seen everything and still sounded hungry.

Chaos, Champagne, and the Road

Behind the curtain, things weren’t nearly as tight as those riffs. Rock saxophonist Bobby Keys’ infamous 1973 firing came after he missed one of the Brussels shows, reportedly because he filled a hotel bathtub with champagne and drank most of it himself. The tab ran high enough to cost him his spot in the band for more than a decade. Keys later offered other explanations, but even he admitted the champagne story wasn’t entirely off. It was classic Stones—extravagance, chaos, and charm all bubbling over in the same bottle. While they were conquering Europe onstage, the backstage scene was its own kind of circus, equal parts mayhem and myth-making.

Keith Richards in his book Life: “Bobby went down in a tub of Dom Perignon. Bobby Keys, so the story goes, is the only man who knows how many bottles of it it takes to fill a bath, because that’s what he was floating in. This was just before the second-to-last gig on the ’73 European tour, in Belgium. No sign of Bobby at the band assembly that day, and finally I was asked if I knew where my buddy was — there had been no reply from his hotel room. So I went to his room and said, ‘Bob, we gotta go, we gotta go right now’. He’s got a cigar, bathtub full of champagne and this French chick in with him. And he said, ‘fuck off’. So be it. Great image and everything like that, but you might regret it, Bob. The accountant informed Bobby afterward that he had earned no money at all on that tour as a result of that bathtub; in fact he owed. And it took me ten goddamn years or more to get him back in the band, because Mick was implacable, and rightly so. And Mick can be merciless in that way. I couldn’t answer for Bobby. All I could do was help him get clean, and I did”

Opening the Vaults, Fifty Years On

Decades later, depending on which Stone you ask, they’re either gearing up for a grand 50th anniversary celebration or pretending they couldn’t care less. But one thing’s clear—they’ve started opening their vaults like never before. After years of silence and only a couple of rarities collections, they kicked things off with the Exile on Main St. reissue, then followed it up with a raw 1978 tour video and a revamped Some Girls. Now, Brussels Affair takes center stage as part of the “Stones Archive” series, a treasure trove for fans who crave the real, unpolished Stones.

The setlist from that Belgian night perfectly captures a band straddling eras—balancing the rough glory of Exile with the sleek darkness of Goat’s Head Soup. As Brown Sugar ignites the crowd, you can almost feel the sweat and smoke of a time when rock was still wild, loud, and gloriously imperfect.

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