Let's wind back the tape 30 years and spring it from the machine and here we are in Camden, 1983, Chalk Farm market, second home to a ragged ephemera of household junk-cum-collectibles, dead men's suits by the rackload wheeled across the cobbles, and lines of blokes with crooked smiles and weird hair bent over boxes of tape cassettes. It is here I bought my first Stones bootleg. Still have it, a C60 tape with a photocopied sleeve and typewritten track list. Claudine , Fiji Jim, We Had It All, Let's Go Steady...At the stalls by Dingwalls, you'd find the original bootleg vinyl, the art work a riot of decadence and abandon - syringes, spoons, girls, tourniquets, pimps, guitars, The Stones caricatured.
20 years on, I'm talking to a musician friend who worked on the trade route that saw every studio-sourced boot pass up and down the line like saints' relics, turned over and over again, copied and collected, filed and passed on, if you were the right kind of person to pass on to. The business was tribal, arcane. That's all in the past.
"Anyone can get them now,' he moans, "the fun's gone out of it." Compressed media and faster downloads came to the internet - the technology Keith Richards reckons "should've been kept secret" - and the old analog world of bootlegs has evaporated like river mist under the bright lights of YouTube.
Now here I am, December 2011, burning the FLAC files of a new Stones album to CDR, pressing the Play button, adjusting the headphones and waiting for the scrub and brush opening of Claudine to ignite and spread in glorious high fidelity.
Maybe you have Some Girls posters here and there, the old Stones of legend returning like time-travelling pirates to the passages and walkways of the present. The original LP sold some six million copies. The new edition, with an extra disc of unreleased tracks, has shifted probably a thousandth of that figure. Yeah, the fun has gone out of it. Some Girls was the first Stones album I bought, aged 14, and now it comes with pristine versions of those old, Camden Lock bootlegs.
But do the fresh layer of vocals Jagger has poured over these gamey old meats really work? Would my 20-year-old self foraging the stalls of 1983 prefer them as they were, imbibed unadulterated but from the studio mixing desk instead of the phantom nth generation hiss of a cassette?
Tricky question. I love hearing these old boots with a new sheen, though I have my own fan's lament at what is not on the final tracklist - the peerless Munich Hilton Long , with the Stones in psychic weaving mode and a rhythm section of Motorik precision, or Keith's impassioned, unbalanced I Need You.
Perhaps it's better for them to remain lo-fidelity, ill-gotten gains, though they're easy to find these days - just a click away on YouTube - and you can see why songs such as Claudine, that came close to the finishing line first time around, have been picked for release over the ragged company piling up from the rear - the cosmic, circling, wordless riffs and bejewelled skeletons of tracks that will always remain under-the-counter offerings of just bass, drums and guitars.
The Stones, unlike their peers, came late to the repackaging business. Too late. Boxed sets began with Nick Drake in the 80s. Dylan had his Biograph back in 1985, The Beatles did their Anthology in the early 90s; The Who have assembled expanded editions of pretty well every album they've done. But The Stones? 2009's Get Yer Ya Yas reissue came with a few extra tracks and fabulous sets from BB King and Ike & Tina Turner, while last year's Exile set introduced the concept of Jagger polishing up unreleased gems with new words and vocals.
At least on Some Girls, the resemblance between old and new is close enough to work well. But they missed a trick, I think. In the era of Rock Band, interactivity has become a public right of way, so wouldn't it have been better to bypass the CD format completely and put out a Rock Band-style Some Girls game - a set of extras where you get to mix the original tracks yourself, do your own Chris Kimsey impression, burn your own album, and bitch about it afterwards?
Not that you'd wish that kind of access on the fabulous accompanying concert DVD, Live In Texas, where you get it raw and in the raw - the 1978 band stripped to its basics, and in fighting-fit form, with stunning versions of the best Some Girls songs - Beast of Burden, Just My Imagination, Miss You, Respectable - filmed in glorious, sticky 16mm colour.
But for my money the release of the year is not on CD, vinyl or any physical format, but the FLAC download of The Brussels Affair - the Stones live in 1973, the second show of the day in Brussels, and one of the greatest rock n roll live shows ever released, the kind of music that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, that makes you want to kick the furniture over and jump through the roof. If there's one essential rock n roll purchase this year, this is it. It is the first of a dozen mooted live releases from the archive - the next is due in January - and it's of the finest vintage, the elixir of rock n roll stagecraft.
The centre of the set is held by two songs clocking in a 12 minutes each - You Can't Always Get What You Want, with the brass section excelling themselves besides Mick Taylor's fluid, beautiful soloing, Jagger enunciating rather than shouting half syllables, Richards rhythm guitar a thing of inspired, in-the-moment beauty, minimal and tough as leather, and Wyman and Watts the gatekeepers of rhythm. Watts's drums on this 1973 set are the true lead instrument while Wyman's throbbing basslines play up and down the spine, and on the monstrous Midnight Rambler, the band sound and move as one great beast, the call and response with the Brussels crowd utterly thrilling, and embodying the energy, abandon and the whole darn point of rock n roll in its prime.
Keith's riffing, with its cut-up distillation of r&b to the kind of pure crystal flake that keeps you flying for days, makes this music you could hang in MoMA or the Turbine Hall, the heavy stuff from a time of giants, and no one can hold a candle to it now. Almost 40 years on, this stuff burns like a case of spontaneous human combustion. Do yourself a favour, and get it while you can.
Some Girls and Live In Texas are on Rolling Stones Records and Eagle Rock
The Brussels Affair is available from StonesArchive.com.
Tim Cumming's book The Rapture is published by Salt Publishing http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844717385.htm