Keith Richards Singing Rolling Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’ & ‘Gimme Shelter’

The Rolling Stones tend to get introduced as one of the greatest live bands in history, and fair play, they’ve spent nearly sixty years proving it. Even now, they still show up and blast through sets as if the whole ageing process was merely a suggestion. But for a band so famously loud and loose on stage, their studio work is just as interesting, even if it tends to get pushed aside in favour of tales about hotel-room furniture flying out of windows.

Behind the scenes, Jagger and Richards never approached recording with the neat, lab-coat precision of Pink Floyd or The Beatles. Those bands were busy fine-tuning tape loops and exploring the limits of studio engineering. The Stones’ approach was more along the lines of: wander in, see what happens, and hope inspiration turns up before the engineer gives up and goes home. Sessions were often chaotic, beautifully scruffy, and powered by whatever riff Keith had stumbled across at three in the morning.

Keith, of course, operated on his own schedule, which rarely aligned with concepts like “daylight” or “eight hours of sleep”. Engineers would recall him turning up at impossible times, cigarette already lit, muttering something about a new idea he needed to try “right now”. Half the time these half-awake experiments ended up becoming the backbone of a song. And because the Stones rarely bothered pretending that demos were strictly private, those early recordings now give us a rare look at the bones of some of their most iconic tracks.

Two of the most revealing are the demos for ‘Wild Horses’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’, both featuring Keith on lead vocals. It’s always a bit disorienting at first. Keith’s voice is absolutely fine, and his solo albums prove he can carry a tune. But we’re so conditioned to hearing Mick front these songs that Keith’s versions feel like wandering into the wrong cinema screen by mistake. You know you’re in roughly the right place, but something’s definitely off.

Take ‘Gimme Shelter’. The song came out of a dark patch in 1969, which might be why it has that creeping, end-of-the-world feeling. Richards famously came up with the riff while watching a storm roll in over London. They recorded it at Olympic Studios during a period when the Stones were shaking off the last bits of sixties idealism and gearing up for something grittier. Add in its later connection to Altamont and Merry Clayton’s spine-splitting vocal, and the song’s mythology practically writes itself. Compared to all that drama, Keith’s early vocal sounds a bit like he’s just testing the plumbing before the house gets built.

‘Wild Horses’, though, is a different story. Recorded during their stop at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December 1969, the track belonged to Keith long before it became a polished album classic. His demo of it actually suits his voice surprisingly well. The song often gets linked to Marianne Faithfull, but Keith brushed that aside. “Everyone always says this was written about Marianne but I don’t think it was; that was all well over by then,” he said later. “But I was definitely very inside this piece emotionally.”

He also described the song as a perfect example of how he and Jagger worked: “If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together this is it. I had the riff and chorus line, Mick got stuck into the verses. Just like ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Wild Horses’ was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road, being a million miles from where you want to be.”

You can absolutely hear that in the demo. Keith sounds like a man who has stared into the middle distance for several hours contemplating life, travel, and probably the state of his hotel room. His voice has a kind of worn tenderness, and the guitar is gentle, almost apologetic. Later covers might be technically stronger, but Keith’s version has that unpolished honesty you only get when someone’s recorded themselves while feeling all of it rather deeply.

That’s the charm of these demos. They strip away the swagger, the stadium lights, the decades of mythology, and leave you with the actual process: someone with an acoustic guitar, a half-formed idea, and the determination to get it down before the moment slips away. Before the legend and the live spectacles, this is how the songs started. A bit messy, a bit sleepy, a bit brilliant. Exactly like the Stones, really.

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