The Rolling Stones Have Dropped Brown Sugar From the Set After 50 Years

One song missing from the current Rolling Stones setlist is the classic ‘Brown Sugar’.

Mick Jagger explained to the Los Angeles Times, “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes. We might put it back in.”

‘Brown Sugar’ is the second most played Rolling Stones song, behind ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. The song was pretty much played at every Stones gig from 6 December 1969 at the Altamont Speedway gig to 30 August 2019 in Florida.

‘Jumping Jack Flash’ is a few years old and had a head start across 1968 and 1969.

The song ‘Brown Sugar’ was written in Australia. Mick Jagger was filming his starring role in the Ned Kelly movie. The movie was shot at Braidwood, New South Wales, 285 kilometres south of Sydney and 87 kilometres west of Canberra.

In the Stones book ‘Rolling Stones 50’ Mick Jagger explained, “I Wrote ‘Brown Sugar’ in Australia in the middle of a field. There were really odd circumstances. I was doing this movie ‘Ned Kelly’ and my hand got really damaged in this action sequence. So stupid. I was trying to rehabilitate my hand and I had this new kind of electric guitar, and I was playing in the middle of the outback and wrote this tune”.

So while ‘Brown Sugar’ was born on Australian soil, so was Mick’s mother. Eva Scutts was born in Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. She moved to England and married Basil ‘Joe’ Jagger. The couple had two sons, Michael and Chris.

Chris has contributed to two Stones albums ‘Dirty Work’ and ‘Steel Wheels’ as well as Eric Clapton’s ‘No Reason To Cry’ album. A few months ago he released a new song ‘Hey Brother’.