Why Mick Jagger Sang in a Stairwell for 'Goats Head Soup'

During the recording of Goats Head Soup, Mick Jagger tracked some of his vocals inside a stone stairwell at Villa Nellcôte, the French mansion where the band lived and worked in 1972. The high, narrow space produced a natural echo that the Stones’ engineer Andy Johns couldn’t replicate with the rented mobile studio’s gear, so they made it a makeshift vocal booth.

The stairwell’s acoustics gave Jagger’s voice a haunted, cavernous quality — most audible on tracks like “Winter” and “100 Years Ago.” Johns later said the villa was a disaster for recording (leaky walls, weird power), but that stairwell was a happy accident they leaned into because it saved them from having to build echo chambers.