The Rolling Stones get a lot of comedy flack for keeping the tour bus running after all these years and a whole lot more wrinkles, but in all fairness to them they still manage to make it look cool. When you couple that with one of the greatest back catalogues in the history of music, it’s fair to see that they’re still one of the greatest touring band’s on the planet and the upcoming documentary, Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin America, is going to be the perfect opportunity to see them doing what they do best.
The film will be coming to Channel 4 this weekend with an air date of Saturday the 19th November 2016 at 11pm, featuring Mick, Kieth, Ronny and Charlie as they take their blues bus into Latin America for yet another big-scale tour. Filmed throughout the first half of 2016, it will feature The Rolling Stones’ travelling cavalcade as it goes from Santiago, Chile to Buenos Aires in Brazil before touching down in one of the few countries in the world the band has never played before, Cuba.
The Havanna gig was a historical moment for both the band and the country with such a huge event taking place in one of the most economically shut off places in the world. The show was the culmination of a ten city tour of Latin America, which is pretty impressive when you consider the Stones have a combined age of 289-years, but even more so that they’ve finally added Cuba to their tour slots.
With the Barack Obama-led thaw on relations between Cuba and the US, it had started to look as though things were looking up for the communist country. However, the recent election of Donald Trump to the US presidency has drawn all of that into question, so any attention it gets now is a positive, which is why the free gig and documentation of it in Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin America is so important. You can add that it’s also a country in which you could have been detained for listening to rock music in its darker past, so the huge gig was also a note to progress and we’re hoping it helps to ensure that there’s a whole lot more still to come.
It’s essentially a road movie of sorts, which had been released earlier this year at a number of select cinemas following its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s not all a simple jaunt in the sun of South America and the Caribbean as logistical surprises arise to make things difficult, but when you’ve been touring since the 1960s there’s probably very little that could actually faze you.
In addition to the shows that will feature on Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin America, director Paul Dugdale has also captured the travel and pre-show activity of the band as they tour. This includes more than a few candid moments, ranging from Ronnie Wood getting into street art in São Paulo to Mick and Keith reminiscing about writing Honky Tonk Women together before launching into an unplugged rendition of the 1969 track.
The Channel 4 transmission of the documentary film is set to be a great opportunity to see the rock and roll whirlwind of it all, while also getting an insight into the band members together as they talk about their ups and downs over the years. While they haven’t released much in the way of new material in recent years, apart from Doom And Gloom back in 2013, the documentary will only highlight once again why they’re such a huge part of the music world still.
Is the Ole Ole Tour out yet on dvd December 2016. In London, U.K.