Sympathy for the Devil

Recorded at Olympic Studios in London during the Beggars Banquet sessions in 1968, with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as writers and Jimmy Miller producing. The track was built around Nicky Hopkins’s piano and prominent percussion, with the band expanding the arrangement through repeated takes. As the opening track on Beggars Banquet, it marked a stark return to stripped-down rock after the band’s psychedelic phase. Its Satan-as-narrator lyric and chanting rhythm made it one of the most controversial and discussed Stones recordings at release. It became one of the Rolling Stones’ signature songs and a defining statement of their late-1960s image. The track has been repeatedly covered, remixed, and used in film and television, keeping it central to the band’s public identity.