Composers: Mick
Jagger, Keith Richards & Andrew Oldham
Recording date: October
1965 Recording
location: IBC Studios, London
Producer: Andrew
Oldham
Engineer:
Glyn
Johns
Performed onstage: 2005-06*, 2013, 2017*
(*in
2006 in Milan and 2017 in Lucca, as Con Le Mie Lacrime)
Probable line-up:
Acoustic guitar: Keith
Richards
Vocal: Mick Jagger
Strings: The Mike Leander Orchestra
TrackTalk
We never dreamed of doing As Tears Go By ourselves when we wrote it. We just gave it straight to Marianne Faithfull. We wrote a lot of songs for other people, most of which were very unsuccessful.
We just
wrote it. And Andrew Oldham was managing (Marianne Faithfull) so decided
to do it with her. I think we thought it was very soft for us to do at
the time, being a sort of blues band.
It was
pop and we didn't record it (at first) because it was crap. We had a successful
crap ballad... I can say now it's a wonderful tune, but we didn't think
it was that great at the time.
I wrote
the lyrics, and Keith wrote the melody... It's a very melancholy song for
a 21-year-old to write: The evening of the day, watching children
play... It's very dumb and naive, but it's got a very sad sort of thing
about it, almost like an older person might write. You know, it's like
a metaphor for being old: You're watching children playing and realizing
you're not a child. It's a relatively mature song considering the rest
of the output at the time. And we didn't think of doing it, because the
Rolling Stones were a butch blues group. But Marianne Faithfull's version
was already a big, proven hit song... It was one of the first things I
ever wrote.
I sang
about children then. I wrote that song when I was 20. It was reflective
- though they weren't my children at that point (laughs).