Start Me Up

The riff they threw away

Here is the part that never stops being funny. "Start Me Up" is the song that has opened more Rolling Stones concerts than almost any other, the one that has launched stadiums, football games, and an entire era of personal computing. And the band essentially binned it.

The sessions in question date back to 1978, when the Stones were cutting the material that became "Some Girls." According to the long-told studio accounts, the band became obsessed with turning this particular groove into a reggae song, and they chased that idea into the ground: take after take, reportedly dozens of them, all skank and offbeat guitar, all going nowhere. Somewhere in that pile, almost as a throat-clearing exercise, they played it once or twice as a straight rock song. Then they moved on and forgot about it entirely. Keith Richards has said he barely remembered the track, and that when he heard it again he was convinced they must have stolen the riff from somebody else, because it sounded too obvious to be theirs.

Three years later, the Stones had a problem. They wanted to tour, they owed an album, and relations inside the band were cooling into the long frost that would define the 1980s. The solution was not to write new songs together. It was to send engineer Chris Kimsey into the vaults with instructions to find anything salvageable. He combed through years of outtakes, and buried in the reggae graveyard he found the rock version. The band overdubbed it, Mick Jagger rewrote the words, Bob Clearmountain mixed it, and the result became the lead single from "Tattoo You" and one of the biggest hits of their life.

So the surprising truth is this: the song that sounds like the Stones at their most spontaneous and self-assured is actually an archaeological find. It is a band being rescued by their younger selves.

Background: a patchwork album made by a band that could barely share a room

To understand "Start Me Up" you have to understand where the Rolling Stones were in 1981. They were roughly eighteen years into their career, which in rock terms at the time was ancient. Punk had arrived, declared them dinosaurs, and begun to recede. Disco had come and gone. Jagger was 38 and dancing in front of audiences who included people half his age and people who had bought "Satisfaction" as teenagers.

Crucially, Jagger and Richards were drifting apart. Richards had come through serious legal and personal trouble at the end of the 1970s; Jagger had become the band's manager-in-all-but-name, fixated on tours, deals, and staying current. The creative partnership that had produced "Exile on Main St." was no longer the kind that produced albums on demand. "Tattoo You," released in August 1981, was the elegant workaround: a record assembled almost entirely from leftovers, offcuts, and abandoned attempts going back years, with a rock side and a slow, soulful side. It should have sounded like scraps. Instead it spent weeks at number one in America and is still regarded as the last unarguably great Stones album.

The physical home of the riff is worth knowing, because it plants a flag for anyone who loves this band. The 1978 work happened largely at Pathé Marconi Studios in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris, in a complex better known for classical and French pop recording than for English rock bands. The Stones liked it precisely because it was unglamorous and cheap, and because its smaller demo room had an accidental, roaring sound. A huge amount of late-period Stones DNA was captured in that unfashionable Parisian building.

For British readers there is a neat irony in that. The Stones were tax exiles and permanent travellers by then, a band from Dartford and west London who had to leave Britain to keep making British-sounding rock and roll. "Start Me Up" reached number seven in the UK and remains one of the most reliably recognised riffs at any British sporting event or wedding disco, despite having been recorded in France by men who at that point could not comfortably live in England.

For American readers, the hook arrived in September 1981, when the Stones launched a US stadium tour built around the song. That tour was, by the standards of the day, enormous, reportedly the highest-grossing of its time, and it helped invent the modern template of the stadium rock spectacle: huge stage, huge sponsorship, huge opening riff. "Start Me Up" went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, kept off the top spot by the Diana Ross and Lionel Richie ballad "Endless Love," which may be the single most 1981 fact in this entire article.

Core meaning: an engine, a body, and a joke about stamina

The lyric is built on one sustained double meaning, and Jagger plays it with a completely straight face. On the surface the language is mechanical. The song talks about ignition, about being switched on, about running and not stopping, about the thrill of acceleration. It is the vocabulary of a car being fired up and driven hard.

Underneath, obviously, it is about sex. The engine is a body. The person being addressed is a lover who functions as the ignition key, and the singer's boast is about endurance: that once he is set in motion he will keep going indefinitely. The song's most quoted line, which I will not reproduce here, delivers a punchline about reducing an adult man to tears, and the comedy of it lies entirely in the ambiguity, since it could be ecstasy or exhaustion and Jagger refuses to say which.

What makes the lyric work is its lack of romance. There is no longing here, no narrative, no beloved with a name or a face. It is pure drive, almost cartoonish in its single-mindedness. Jagger reportedly wrote the final words quickly in 1981, years after the music, and that shows in the best way: the words are not trying to be poetry, they are trying to match a riff. The riff makes a promise of unstoppable momentum, and the words simply restate that promise in the language of bodies and machines.

There is a third layer that only became visible with time. In 1981, a man approaching 40 singing about never stopping was a bit of swaggering self-defence against a music press that had declared him over. Decades later, with the same man still singing it in his eighties while sprinting the length of a stadium walkway, the boast has quietly become literal. The song has outlived its own joke and turned into a statement of fact.

Musically, the engine is Richards' five-string open-G tuning, the trick he adopted in the late 1960s: drop the lowest string entirely, tune the rest to an open chord, and suddenly a simple shape rings with that fat, loose, slightly ragged chime nobody else quite gets. Charlie Watts' drums do the other half of the work, hitting with a very slight behind-the-beat drag that makes the whole thing swing instead of charge. It is a fast song that somehow never sounds hurried.

Cultural context: the song that sold the modern world its on-switch

"Start Me Up" has had an unusually strange second life, because its central metaphor turned out to be commercially irresistible.

In 1995, Microsoft licensed it for the global launch of Windows 95, the operating system that introduced the Start button to hundreds of millions of people. The fit was almost too neat: a song about starting, soundtracking a computer whose whole innovation was a button that said Start. Reported fees have ranged wildly over the years, from a few million dollars up to figures in the double-digit millions, and the real number has never been confirmed, so treat every version of that story with suspicion. What is not in doubt is the cultural effect. For a generation of people who did not buy rock records, the Rolling Stones became the sound of a beige PC booting up, and the band confirmed its status as a brand that could be rented by the largest companies on earth.

From there, it became civic furniture. Stadium PA systems, baseball innings, football entrances, gym playlists, ice rinks, political rallies, and film trailers all adopted it. The Stones played it at the Super Bowl XL halftime show in 2006, where broadcasters reportedly muted a word or two to protect a family audience from a song that had been in heavy rotation for a quarter of a century, which tells you something about how thoroughly it had been absorbed as harmless background energy. The band themselves have treated it as a reliable weapon, usually deploying it as an opener or a late-set detonation, and audiences respond to the first two bars the way Pavlov's dogs responded to the bell.

That ubiquity has a cost, and it is worth naming. Hearing a song ten thousand times in commercial contexts can hollow it out. Plenty of listeners now experience "Start Me Up" as a jingle rather than as a record. The cure is simply to put on the album version, loud, with the knowledge that it was dug out of a bin, and listen to how loose and nasty the guitars actually are. There is real grit under the gloss.

Why it still resonates today

Because everyone understands the feeling of needing a push.

That is the quiet genius of the thing. Strip away the innuendo and the song is about the moment of ignition, the transition from inert to moving, which is the most universally difficult transition in human life. Nobody struggles to keep going once they have begun. Everybody struggles to begin. A song that is three and a half minutes of pure starting energy is useful in a way that most great records are not: it does a job. People play it before job interviews, before matches, at six in the morning before a run, at the start of parties that have not yet caught fire.

It also survives because of its construction. The riff is simple enough that a beginner can approximate it in an afternoon and strange enough that no beginner can nail its feel, which is the perfect combination for longevity. And it carries that extra charge now of defiance against time. The band that recorded it in a cheap Paris studio in 1978 had already been written off twice. Charlie Watts, whose drumming makes the song swing, died in 2021, and the surviving members kept playing it anyway, which turns a boast about stamina into something closer to a tribute.

The best stories in music are rarely about genius striking on schedule. They are about luck, mess, and someone bothering to look again. "Start Me Up" exists because a band stopped trusting their own judgement and let an engineer go through their garbage. It is a reminder that the thing you dismissed may be the best thing you ever made.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Tattoo You (1981) — Hear "Start Me Up" where it belongs, as the opening salvo of an album secretly built from offcuts. The record's second half slides into slow, saxophone-soaked soul, and the contrast reveals how wide the Stones' range still was even when they were not writing new material.
• Tattoo You: 40th anniversary deluxe edition — The expanded reissue adds a trove of previously unreleased vault material from the same era, which is the closest most listeners will get to understanding what Chris Kimsey was wading through. Hearing the leftovers makes the hit sound less inevitable and more lucky.
• Still Life (American Concert 1981) — The live album from the tour that "Start Me Up" launched captures the song doing its actual job in front of tens of thousands of people. It is rough, fast, and slightly out of control, which is exactly how the song was designed to function in a stadium.

📚 Follow the story

• Life by Keith Richards — Richards' memoir is the best possible guide to the open-G tuning that powers this riff, and he is candid about how little he remembered of the song's creation. His account of the late-1970s chaos explains why the band ended up raiding its own archive.
• Rocks Off by Bill Janovitz — A song-by-song examination of the Stones' catalogue by a working musician, strong on exactly the question this song raises: how a very simple arrangement becomes unforgettable. It treats the later hits with the same seriousness as the 1960s canon.
• According to the Rolling Stones — The band's own collective oral history, with Jagger, Richards, Watts, and Wood each giving their version of the same events. The disagreements are the point, and the "Tattoo You" chapter is a useful lesson in how differently four men remember one room.

🌍 Visit the places

• Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris — The unglamorous suburb west of central Paris that housed the Pathé Marconi studio complex where the riff was first captured. There is no shrine to visit, which is somehow fitting, but standing in an ordinary French neighbourhood knowing what was taped there is its own kind of pilgrimage.
• Dartford, Kent — The Thames-side town where Jagger and Richards grew up and, famously, reconnected as teenagers on a railway platform over a stack of American blues records. The station and surrounding streets are startlingly ordinary, which makes the scale of what followed much easier to feel.
• Sir Morgan's Cove, Worcester, Massachusetts — Before the vast 1981 stadium run, the Stones reportedly played a tiny, barely announced club warm-up in this New England city, causing local chaos. It is a reminder that the biggest tour of its era began in a room smaller than most bars.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn open-G five-string tuning — Take the low string off a cheap electric guitar, retune the rest to an open chord, and you are holding Richards' secret weapon. Suddenly a one-finger shape rings out with that loose, ragged shimmer, and you understand why he has spent fifty years refusing to tune normally.
• Play it behind the beat — Try the riff twice: once rushing, once deliberately dragging a hair behind a metronome. The second version is the Charlie Watts lesson, and feeling the difference in your own hands teaches more about this band than any biography.
• Build a sixty-second ignition playlist — Use the song as it is actually used in the wild: three or four tracks whose first two bars make a room move, played before something you are dreading. The Stones built the perfect tool for beginning things, and the only way to test that is to need it.

🎵 Listen to this song