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Something Unreleased, Something Personal: Inside a Fractured Era
Behind the raw grooves and strained riffs of Something I Want—also known as Your Love—lies the turbulent spirit of a band drifting apart. Recorded in early 1985 at Pathé Marconi Studios in France, the track belongs to the Dirty Work sessions, a time clouded by tension, personal demons, and creative distance. While Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Bill Wyman, and a mostly absent Charlie Watts laid down the instrumental base, Mick Jagger was often elsewhere—literally and figuratively. His solo career was taking off with She’s the Boss, and his priorities no longer revolved solely around the Rolling Stones.
Jagger’s vocals on the album were largely added in post-production. The result was a record stitched together more by obligation than unity. The song Something I Want never made the final cut—but it carries the echo of an era where the Stones weren’t breaking up… just breaking down.
Live Aid, Substitutes, and Silent Drums
The cracks became public on July 13, 1985, when Jagger performed his own set at Live Aid while Richards and Wood backed Bob Dylan separately on acoustic guitars. The world saw it: the Glimmer Twins had dimmed. Meanwhile, Charlie Watts’ role in the Dirty Work sessions was minimal due to struggles with heroin and alcohol—a fact he openly admitted in a 1994 interview with 60 Minutes. For the first time since Sticky Fingers, Jagger’s guitar playing wasn’t credited. Studio substitutes like Steve Jordan and Anton Fig filled in on drums, while Ronnie Wood even handled them for Sleep Tonight. When the album dropped, Jagger opted out of the tour, focusing instead on his second solo project Primitive Cool. In this messy in-between period, Something I Want remains an unreleased artifact of a band at war with itself—creative, but not cohesive.
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