LONDON — The Rolling Stones keep on rolling: They're planning to release a new album, possibly this year, Ronnie Wood said Monday.
Fresh from their historic free concert in Cuba on March 25, the "world's greatest rock band" is in London for the preview of The Rolling Stones: Exhibitionism, a vast interactive multimedia exhibit covering 20,000 square feet of London's high-culture Saatchi Gallery with five decades of Stones history.
But Stones fans may be more interested in what Wood had to say when he and Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts arrived together for the show's private preview, all smiles and arms around shoulders. The show opens to the public Tuesday.
The Stones last released a studio album in 2005, but Wood said they have been in the studio and recorded some new material and some blues covers.
"We went in to cut some new songs, which we did," the 68-year-old Wood said. "But we got on a blues streak. We cut 11 blues in two days.
"They are extremely great cover versions of Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter, among other blues people. But they really sound authentic."
When asked when the new material would be released, Wood said only: "This year."
"When we heard them back after not hearing them for a couple of months, we were, 'Who's that? It's you,'" Wood said. "It sounded so authentic."
Richards, however, wouldn't go into any detail on the recent recording sessions.
"There's one coming," the 72-year-old guitarist said of a new album. "I can't say no more. My lips are sealed."
The Stones, which started as a blues band in 1962, just wrapped a tour of Latin America with their gig in Cuba, which followed by a few days the even more historic visit of President Obama to the island, a first for a POTUS in nearly a century.
The Stones have released 22 studio albums in Britain and 24 in the United States. A Bigger Bang was the last, and the band toured the album in 2005, '06 and '07.
They resumed touring in 2012 to mark the band's 50th anniversary, but have only released a couple of new songs since then.
"We're a working band," Wood said. "We'll be working again before the end of the year."
And as everyone knows, from entertaining to excess, the Stones rarely do things on a small scale.
Their stuff on display at Saatchi includes more than 500 artifacts borrowed from the band's archive and private collectors, including musical instruments, lyrics, sketches, film clips, outfits, posters, album artwork and stage designs. There is even a fake donkey.
"In the end, we had over 25,000 things to choose from," said Australian rock promoter Tony Cochrane, the show's executive producer. "I knew the Rolling Stones had a warehouse where they had kept a lot of their personal artifacts, memorabilia, famous instruments and the like. But no one could have known how enriched the collection was."
The result is a treasure trove for fans, who can ogle everything from a marabou-feather cape Mick Jagger wore to sing Sympathy for the Devil to a Maton guitar owned by Keith Richards whose neck fell off during the recording of Gimme Shelter (the song ends with a barely audible clunk).
Even casual fans will likely be impressed by the exhibition's attention to detail. It opens with a life-size recreation of an apartment the band members shared in 1962-63 in Chelsea, a then-raffish, now-affluent London neighborhood.
"It was a hovel," Richards says on a recording, and the recreation captures the peeling wallpaper, mold-stained walls and unmade beds, the dirty dishes, empty beer bottles, broken eggshells and overflowing ashtrays. It even smells.
Exhibition curator Ileen Gallagher said the band members were "pretty astonished" by the result. "Although Mick said it wasn't quite that messy."
