‘Shattered’ at Pathé Marconi: Jagger’s Spoken-Word Punk Screed Against Late-70s New York

The Stones tracked most of Some Girls in Paris, but “Shattered” was born in a single feverish session at Pathé Marconi. Keith Richards had the riff—a jittery, almost disco-funk pattern on a cheap Japanese guitar he’d picked up in Tokyo. Jagger, openly borrowing energy from the punk scene he saw exploding in New York, insisted on a spoken-word delivery for the verses, ranting about the city’s decay (“Love is just an archaic rhyme”) over a fake newscast intro that opens the track. The whole thing was cut in one take; the band barely rehearsed it.

The fake newscast—Ron Wood and Jagger ad-libbing lines about “rat-race” and “shit-stained” streets—was a direct nod to the grim headlines of ’77 New York: fiscal crisis, blackouts, graffiti, serial killers. Jagger’s cynical lyrics, like “I’m in a trance / Let’s go to France,” mirror the band’s own escape from England’s tax exile and their ambivalent fascination with American urban rot. The recording at Pathé Marconi (where the Stones also cut “Miss You”) gave the song its tight, compressed sound—a deliberate contrast to the ragged live feel.