How the Glimmer Twins and Chris Kimsey gave 'Some Girls' its punk edge – and that drum sound on 'Miss You'

The most immediate shock of Some Girls is Charlie Watts’s drum sound on the opening track, “Miss You.” It’s tight, dry, and almost mechanical — a deliberate punk-disco hybrid that came straight from the Glimmer Twins’ competitive reaction to the late-’70s New York scene. Jagger wanted the band to sound urgent and lean, and engineer Chris Kimsey delivered by miking Watts’s kit with almost no room ambience and compressing the snare hard, giving it that sharp, clipped attack that cuts through the mix like a Ramones record. Watts himself hated disco but played the groove with his usual jazz precision, and the tension between his restraint and the song’s four-on-the-floor pulse made the track feel both modern and restless.

Kimsey later recalled that the entire Some Girls session was stripped back — no big reverbs, no thick phasing, just raw hits. The Glimmer Twins pushed for that punk-inspired immediacy after hearing what the Sex Pistols and the Clash were doing, and they forced the band to record live in the studio without overdubs for most of the basic tracks. The result wasn’t just a drum sound; it was a whole album that felt like a response to the era’s energy, with “Miss You” proving that a band twenty years into its career could still sound hungry.