Mick Jagger posted a phone video of himself on Sunday, hands over his head, hips going, on a packed dance floor under a disco ball, with the caption “Enjoying the summer, hope you are too.” The song playing behind him was a Rolling Stones track off a Rolling Stones album that came out five weeks ago, and if you did not clock that the first time through, congratulations, the ad worked.
The song is “Mr. Charm,” the lead single from Foreign Tongues. The clip did what clips do. Fox News called it proof he still has the moves like Jagger, which is the joke everyone reached for, and the comment sections filled up with people doing arithmetic about their own knees. He turned 83 on July 26.
The Best Kind of Promotion Is the Kind That Is Also True
Plenty of artists have posted a night out. Very few of them are 83, and almost none of them are dancing to a track they wrote and recorded this year rather than one they recorded when Nixon was in office.
That distinction is the whole trick. A legacy act doing legacy-act promotion has to trade on nostalgia, and nostalgia has a ceiling: it reminds the audience that the interesting part already happened. Jagger skipped that entirely. He put on the new single, in a club, with strangers, and let the footage make an argument no press release could make, which is that the record is a dance record and he means it.
He has been saying so all along. In a breakdown of the track with producer Andrew Watt, Jagger described “Mr. Charm” as four on the floor and danceable, which is a fairly specific claim to make about a song and then have to back up. Sunday was the receipt.
The Album Underneath the Video
Foreign Tongues, the Stones’ 25th studio album, came out July 10 and went to number one in the UK. Official Charts noted it was the band’s 15th chart-topping album, which draws them level with the Beatles and leaves only Robbie Williams ahead of them on the all-time list. Watt produced, as he did on 2023’s Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds. Paul McCartney turns up on it. So does Robert Smith of the Cure, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
And so, from one of his last recording sessions before he died in 2021, does Charlie Watts.
That is the detail that keeps this from being a novelty item. A band that lost its drummer five years ago made a record with him on it, called the record their last, and then went to number one with it. The dance video is genuinely funny. The thing it is advertising is an ending.
It is also worth saying plainly that the Stones did not have to make a good album. Legacy acts have a well-worn alternative: license the catalog, tour the hits, put out a covers record nobody reviews, and let the back end pay for everything. Foreign Tongues took the harder route, hired the producer who had just won them a Grammy, brought in McCartney and two players from bands that formed while the Stones were already veterans, and tried to write songs that would survive being put in a setlist next to “Gimme Shelter.” Most bands sixty years in do not attempt that, because the downside is a public failure and the upside is a chart position they no longer need.
The Tour Is the Open Question
Which brings up the part nobody has resolved. Foreign Tongues has been described everywhere as the final studio album, and the band has said it will revisit the idea of touring sometime later this year or in early 2027. Revisit is a carefully chosen word. It is not a yes, and after fifty-plus years of announced dates it is conspicuously not a no either.
A stadium tour at 83 is not a vanity question, it is a logistics one. It means eighteen months of scheduling, insurance underwriters who need to be convinced, a crew of hundreds whose year depends on the answer, and a frontman who has to do two hours of cardio in front of 60,000 people roughly ninety times. The whole apparatus is waiting on one man’s body.
So he posted a video of that body working fine, dancing to the new single, at a club, on a Sunday.
Maybe it was just a good night out. Jagger has never been the sort to overthink a party, and reading strategy into a man enjoying himself is its own kind of insult. But the Rolling Stones have been the most commercially sophisticated operation in rock since the seventies, and the notion that the one clip of the summer that answered the only question anyone has about their touring future went up by accident requires believing they got careless at exactly the moment it mattered.
Either way, the video is out there, the album is a number one, and the man is dancing. If a tour gets announced this winter, remember where the campaign started.