CD OF THE WEEK:Exile on Main Street (Deluxe Edition) Polydor****

On its release in 1972, Exile On Main Streetbook-ended the still remarkable trilogy that also included Let It Bleedand Sticky Fingers. For The Rolling Stones, the period between 1968-1972 represents one of the richest seams in recent music history. Here was a band at their most thrillingly potent, who had long outgrown their r'n'b covers- band roots and their later "British Invasion" status.

During these prolific years, the band were melding country and soul onto their bedrock of blues and fashioning the sound that still defines them today – despite, or because of, so many misfiring albums over the past two-and-a-half decades.

Having fled the UK on the tax exile express, the Stones pitched up in Keith Richards’s opulent French bolthole at Villefranche-sur-Mer (formerly a second World War Nazi headquarters). The album should have been a mess – the band were now divided into those holding it together and those in the grip of hardcore drug addiction.

Augmented by producer Jimmy Miller and Bobby Keys, the sessions were fractious – they were rarely all in the studio at the same time. Jagger had “issues”, Wyman was bored stiff and Richards was chasing his own dragons. But what emerged was a double album that remains one of their best-ever records.

Very much Richards's album, from Rocks Offto Soul Survivor,this was their sound stretched out into new forms – and operated both as a kaleidoscopic review of the 1960s and a lodestar for the 1970s.

All attention here will be focused on the second disc, which contains 10 new songs from the original sessions. Two of these are alternate takes (of Loving Cupand Soul Survivor), and the remaining eight previously unreleased tracks have all been tweaked over the past few months to get them roadworthy. The "new" single, Plundered My Soul, is a minor classic, a sleazy drawl of a song, with Jagger doing his best Nashville country vocals and Richards's guitar going walkabout.

The other “new” tracks piece together a fuller picture of those interminable south of France jams from (gulp) 39 years ago. To be blunt, The Rolling Stones haven’t done anything of real worth in the studio since 1981’s Tattoo You, but this will transport you back to a time when they were the only band in town. See rollingstones.com

Download tracks:Plundered My Soul, Following the River