Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on the Paradiso ‘stripped’ shows (1995):
Mick: “All sitting on stools in a line – that wasn’t really the Rolling Stones. Also, I thought MTV Unplugged was really boring television… The results of the filmed Tokyo sessions were terrible. It was the dullest TV I’d ever seen – and boring without an audience. So we finally decided, Let’s do a club show. And we lighted on the Paradiso. It’s an interesting old place. We’d never actually played there. But I went there to score drugs once (laughs). We had to do this nod to the acoustic business, to see if it works. In rehearsal, Beast of Burden was really good. But last night, with the audience, it was a bust because I couldn’t hear anything. I wasn’t singing on my own out there. I had 100 backing vocalists going, Never, never, never in funny Dutch English. I felt that we would take the best elements from Unplugged, the intimate thing of it, without actually doing it completely unplugged.”
Keith: “When this whole thing came up, I said, Guys, forget about the acoustic guitars. It’s about ATTITUDE. Scale it down, take it back to where the song was when you were cutting it.”