They might never stop – and with a discography like this, why should they?

In the 1960s, a bunch of white lads from the home counties of England formed a band that tried to imitate the blues music they so admired being made by black musicians across the pond. It doesn’t sound all that cool, does it? Thankfully for everyone, somewhere along the way they landed on one of the most influential and definitive sounds of 20th-century music.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards – and from 1975 onward, Ronnie Wood – have pretty much been on the go since, racking up a remarkable discography that in its collective state could be considered genuinely definitive of what we think of as rock ‘n’ roll today. Picking and ranking the best from that discography is a big ask – but we thrive under pressure. These are ten of the best from The Rolling Stones…

Someone once told me that every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes a minute off your life and gives it to Keith Richards. That might go some way to explaining the quality of the Stones’ late-career albums – this one fizzes with all the energy of their 60s work, and has a steady maturity on songs like “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” to go with it. It’s a cover album they knocked out in three days, which doesn’t exactly scream “they really cared about this one,” but the likes of “Commit a Crime” contain elements of everything good about the Stones – a killer riff, Jagger’s voice oozing over laconic vowels and then whipping round the corner of a consonant, and Woods and Watts ably channelling everything into the grooves of an unstoppable rhythm. Good work, fellas.