Album: Emotional Rescue
Year: 1980
. . .
Emotional Rescue came out just a couple of weeks after I graduated from high school, but unlike its predecessor, it didn’t really dominate the summer, despite being an even more eclectic set of songs in the manner of Black and Blue. Apart from the straight-ahead rockers, the Stones tackled disco with “Emotional Rescue,” which made it to #3 but never did anything for me & “Dance (Pt. 1)” which is fine, but completely overshadowed by its sister “If I Was a Dancer (Dance Pt 2)”; reggae (the silly “Send it To Me”); slow blues (“Down in the Hole”) and two of the most tepid ballads they’d yet recorded in “Indian Girl” and “All About You.”
And yet, this might all have been fine had all of the rockers worked for me. “Summer Romance,” “Let Me Go” and “Where The Boys Go” were all done in the same raw vein as the Some Girls rockers like “When The Whip Comes Down” and “Respectable,” and while they all had their moments, they all sounded thin and slightly uninspired in comparison.
The one exception was “She’s So Cold,” which isn’t one of Mick’s best lyrics — he’s so hot for her and she’s so cold, poor Mick — but gets over because of Mick’s vocal performance and the rhythm section. Check out how Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts are slyly fusing a disco beat to the muted new wave guitars, especially in the back half of the song when Bill’s bass runs out ahead of the song.
Meanwhile Mick is pissed. How dare she refuse his advances? This is the worst thing in the history of things!! So when he screams “she’s so cold / she’s so GODDAMNED cold” / she’s so cold / she’s so coolllllllllld” you almost take his side. Almost.
That said, “She’s So Cold” has a weird place in my life, as it was one of the last songs I sang for my post-high-school band, and — if I remember correctly — the only song from the 80s in our repertoire, and I have a vivid memory of hearing the guy who replaced me in the band after they kicked me out (because I really couldn’t song all that well, fair play) singing it because the rehearsal garage was down the street from me.
In any event, “She’s So Cold” was also released as a single in the U.S., but it it stalled out at #26 on the Billboard charts, making some people wonder if any Stones rocker would ever get near the top of the charts ever again, since all of their big singles since “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It)” had either been disco or ballads.
“She’s So Cold”
“She’s So Cold” official promo video
“She’s So Cold” live in Hampton, 1981
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