The result, last year's roughly hewn and spirited Talk is Cheap, drew a positive response from critics who hailed its return to Stones basics: no-nonsense lyrics and tough-guy guitar. That time, Richards, the band's most committed member, was in a position to say no: he had begun recording his own solo album. He approached Richards and the others about reuniting late in 1987. The buck stopped with me for the last three years.' He added, 'I learned a lot more self-discipline and more of a sense of responsibility.' When both of Jagger's solo albums turned out to be commercial flops and his planned American tour had to be cancelled, he found himself turning back to the Stones. Richards, who was left in a kind of caretaker role, said: 'I'd learned a lot of things by being the don, the top man. While Jagger was off on his own, a new dynamic emerged among the rest of the Stones, who had been left in limbo. 'You go for the immediacy, rather than a technically better version that loses that immediacy, which I think is the essential ingredient of rock 'n' roll.' 'Working on a deadline has been great,' he said. Sitting in what was once the art instructor's office at Wykeham Rise last month, Richards - sipping from a plastic cup holding his favorite bourbon, Rebel Yell - told Maclean's, 'This album is in the classic Rolling Stones mould of Mick and I actually sitting down together and writing songs as we used to do in the motels in the earlier days on the road.' Richards, who was dressed in a light, ankle-length black coat and seemed fatigued but contented, said that he and Jagger wrote the songs for Steel Wheels - while staying at the Eddy Grant studio complex in Barbados last January - in only two weeks.

The album is the result of their reconciliation last year.

Each has worked separately, and their differences have threatened to break up the band. Jagger and Richards have spent much of the 1980s at odds over the direction of the Stones. 'You got the wrong group - we're all married.'Р В РІР‚СњР В РІР‚С›lthough the new record lacks the unpredictable, menacing tone of the Stones' best work, it may well become known as a minor classic itself, largely because it captures the creative sparks that fly when the wilful Jagger and the more visceral Richards work together.

'Where are the girls?' one journalist asked Wyman. An identical chauffeured Lincoln arrived carrying a rumpled and ravaged-looking Keith Richards - a conspicuous 20 minutes later. Out stepped a tired-looking but immaculately dressed Mick Jagger, who strode through the front door past graduating-class photographs of fresh-faced debutantes in the lobby. The sun was beginning to set on the stately old schoolhouse by the time a chauffeur-driven grey Lincoln pulled up the drive. On a balmy afternoon last month at Wykeham Rise, bassist Bill Wyman, guitarist Ron Wood and drummer Charlie Watts, about a dozen crew members and four foreign journalists were awaiting the arrival of the band's two most famous members.

The three-month tour opened with a blast of raw energy last week in Philadelphia and made a two-concert stop in Toronto this week, before going on to Vancouver, Montreal and about 36 U.S. For eight weeks this summer, The Rolling Stones took possession of the secluded Wykeham Rise School in the small northwest Connecticut town of Washington - a two-hour drive from New York City - to prepare for the band's first concert tour in seven years. For a British rock band with a salacious past, the setting was devilishly ironic: a former girls' boarding school, nestled in the moneyed hills of New England.

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