The Rolling Stones – She’s So Cold

The Rolling Stones Released a Disco Single with Mick Jagger in Falsetto and Watched Half Their Audience Walk Out — Then They Released the Rock Song They Had Buried on Side Two and Watched Them Come Back.

The Stones in 1980 were in a position no rock band their size had been in before. They had spent the back half of the seventies adapting — to disco on Miss You, to punk on the back-cover sneer of Some Girls, to whatever the next thing turned out to be — and the strategy had worked. Their 1978 album Some Girls had been their biggest American seller of the decade. The follow-up, Emotional Rescue, would top the Billboard 200 for seven weeks in the summer of 1980 and give them their first UK number one album since Goats Head Soup seven years earlier. The lead single — the title track, with Mick Jagger singing in Bee Gees-derived falsetto over a danceable rhythm bed — went to number three on the Hot 100 and number nine in the UK. And the part of the audience that had grown up on Brown Sugar and Tumbling Dice looked at it and asked, with varying degrees of patience, whether the band remembered how to write a rock song.

She’s So Cold was the answer. Released as the album’s second single in September 1980, with Send It to Me on the B-side, it was an unmistakably Stones rock track in the style their audience had come for — Charlie Watts pushing the tempo, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood twin-guitar, Bill Wyman locking the bottom in the spaces Watts left for him, and Jagger singing in his actual voice for the first time on the album. The lyric was Jagger in his most exasperated mode, the woman of the title cold to the singer’s increasingly desperate appeals, the chorus eventually arriving at “she’s so goddamned cold” — a phrasing direct enough that the promotional copies pressed for American radio carried two versions, one with the original lyric and one with “goddamned” cleaned up for stations that needed the option.

The Sessions That Filled Two Albums

The recording had been made in 1979 across three studios — Compass Point in Nassau, Pathé Marconi in Paris, and end-of-year overdubs at The Hit Factory in New York. The sessions were the band’s first since Keith Richards’ exoneration on the Toronto heroin charge that had hung over the back end of the seventies and could have ended his career entirely. He arrived at them clean, and the productivity that followed was such that the band recorded enough material for two albums in a single working stretch. Several tracks left off Emotional Rescue — Hang Fire, Little T&A, No Use in Crying — would form the core of Tattoo You the following year. She’s So Cold made the cut on Emotional Rescue, the album’s penultimate track, sequenced just before Richards’ first lead vocal on a full album closer in All About You.

The single peaked at number twenty-six on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1980, and number thirty-three in the United Kingdom. It also reached number nine on Billboard’s Disco Top 100 — a chart that, in late 1980, had absorbed the Stones’ disco material from both this album and Some Girls into the same slipstream that was carrying everyone else’s. Critically, Emotional Rescue was treated as a step down from Some Girls: a Rolling Stone review dismissed most of the melodies as familiar; The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called it “an ordinary Stones album” in his year-end Pazz & Jop summary. Christgau later softened, noting in his eighties retrospective that the record’s looseness made it more interesting than the band’s other less-than-great albums, and naming She’s So Cold alongside Where the Boys Go as one of the tracks where the album’s mid-sixties lyrical charm broke through.

The Video and the Long Tail

The promotional video, directed by David Mallet on a brightly-lit colourful set in London, was shot in the same session as the video for the title track Emotional Rescue — Mallet getting two videos out of one set-up at a moment in 1980 when MTV was still over a year from launching and the music video had not yet hardened into the high-budget production form it would become by the middle of the decade. The footage shows the Stones working through the song in what amounts to a glorified band performance with light theatrical touches — Jagger in a blue jumpsuit, Richards and Wood trading guitar lines, Watts behind the kit. Pre-MTV music videos of this kind were treated as promotional ephemera at the time. The MTV era would, within eighteen months, redefine what a video was supposed to do, and the She’s So Cold clip became one of the early reference points for what bands had been making before the format took over.

The song itself has had a longer afterlife than the album it came from. Emotional Rescue as a complete listen has not aged into the canonical Stones rotation the way Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., and Some Girls have. Its title track surfaces on greatest-hits compilations but is rarely played live. She’s So Cold, by contrast, kept its place in the Stones’ rotation — it was performed on the band’s Tattoo You tour in 1981 and 1982, returned to setlists periodically in the decades since, and remains, for many fans of that period of the band’s career, the track that quietly held the line between the disco experiments of Miss You and Emotional Rescue and the rock-orthodoxy return of Tattoo You‘s Start Me Up a year later. The Stones had not stopped writing rock songs. They had simply been recording them between everything else.