Mick Jagger has formed a new ‘super group’ with the motley crew of former Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and Indian composer A.R Rahman. Together they are Super Heavy.
According to Rolling Stone, the band have been recording together for the last 18 months, maintaining a low profile the whole time. The result is that an album is expected to come out around September.
Jagger said, “It’s different from anything else I’ve ever been involved in… The music is very wide-ranging – from reggae to ballads to Indian songs in Urdu.”
Apparently the band began life when Steward called Jagger from his Jamaica home. Stewart said, “I live in Lime Hall right above St. Ann’s Bay… It’s kind of the jungle, and sometimes I’d hear three sound systems all playing different things. I always love that, along with Indian orchestras. I said to Mick, ‘How could we make a fusion?’ We were talking about an experiment, and then we started talking about voices. It was all born from that conversation.”
Jagger was immediately on board, with the twosome procuring the services of Stone, Marley and Rahman soon enough. Jagger said, “We wanted a convergence of different musical styles… We were always overlapping styles, but they were nevertheless separate.”
When the band gathered for the first time in a Los Angeles studio, they took some time to gel, it seems.
Stewart said, “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing… We were just jamming and making a noise. It was like when a band first starts up in your garage. Sometimes Damien would kick it off and then Joss would sing something on top of it. We might have a 22 minute jam, and it would become a six minute song.”
The band currently have no plans to tour.
