Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones, the new albums explained with Emmanuel Carrère

The French writer Emmanuel Carrère, presenting his latest book Kolchoz, explained it well: 'It is as if there were two axes in life, the horizontal one - of our relationships, our friends, the people who accompany us in life - and the vertical one, which binds us to the generations of our children and our parents, our grandparents. I have the feeling that I have always lived in the horizontal axis, and now, as the years go by, I am interested in the vertical axis'. Carrère is 68 years old, feeling old and looking over his shoulder, after a life spent investigating his contemporaneity.

Paul McCartney is as old as 83, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards 82, but the logic, evidently, should not be very different: the artwork of late looks either to the past or to the future, just like The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Macca's 21st solo album due out on 29 May, and Foreign Tongues, 25th studio work by the Glimmer Twins due on 11 July.

The two records, announced in recent weeks, have much in common. First of all, the record company: Universal Music, the first major in the global market, grappling with the escalation to capital of the Pershing Square fund. Then the producer: Andrew Watt, a 35-year-old New Yorker with a knack for revitalising rock mammas (see Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop), who also produced Hackney Diamords (2023), a previous not-so-exciting Stonesian release. In short: we are talking about two 'cousin' albums, as McCartney plays bass on one track of Foreign Tongues (a circumstance that already occurred on Hackney Diamonds), because Beatles and Rolling Stones - in spite of the vulgate that wanted them to be pitted against each other like Coppi and Bartali, Rivera and Mazzola - have always got along well. These two albums, following the Carrèrian vertical axis, look to the past to try and interpret the future.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is an ode to Liverpool, understood as the anonymous city in the North of England where it all began, but also the "centre of consciousness of the human universe" (copyright Allen Ginsberg). Starting with the title: Dungeon Lane is an obscure little street in the Speke district, the one that houses the airport now named after John Lennon and that some seventy years ago was the scene of the Beatles raids before the Beatles. In the moving acoustic ballad Days we left behind, the first single from the album, Paul does not mince words: 'We met at Forthlin Road/ and wrote a secret code/ to never be spoken'. The reference is to the street in the Allerton neighbourhood where today you can visit the house the McCartneys lived in, in whose unlikely wallpapered living room the Fab Four's first hits were written. Home to Us. Home to Us, if possible, does even more with the first 'duet' between McCartney and Ringo Starr since the break-up of the Beatles, a logical continuation of what had been the Now and then experiment.

Foreign Toungue, aside from the questionable cover artwork by American artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, is intended to be a rough and tumble record, as in the Stonesian spirit of its origins. It opens with the electric blues of Rough and Twisted, with Mick quoting Nijinsky even though he is not Battiato and Ron Wood dabbling on the slide (by the way: old Ronnie will be playing at the Lucca Summer Festival on 17 July, make a note of that because it's always worth it). In The Stars is as sly as Mess it Up managed to be on the previous album.