“Our last tour? My God, I’ve been asked this question since 1965,” says singer Mick Jagger. “But no, I very much doubt it.”

Jagger was on the phone this week from Paris, where he is working on a new Stones album that will be ready by summer. He doesn’t deny that the band will once again focus on stadium-sized venues, but he denies – and vigorously – the persistent rumor that the Stones didn’t tour last year for fear of being eclipsed by Michael Jackson’s grandiose Victory Tour. .

“No, we weren’t afraid of Michael. “You couldn’t find markets more different than ours and his,” Jagger said sharply. “No, we just didn’t make it.”

What Jagger created instead was an entirely different Stones project: his first solo album. It’s ironically titled “She’s the Boss,” but its music is a surprisingly confident, guitar-heavy montage of rock backbeats.

Rather than taking a radical approach and delving into third-world rhythms or lavish high-tech arrangements as some observers thought, Jagger speaks squarely to the commercial mainstream. The album won’t be released for another two weeks, but the first single, the simple pop song “Just Another Night,” is already zooming up the charts.

“Basically, I think my talent is that of a rock singer. I’m a pretty traditional rock singer, so I didn’t want to make a self-indulgent solo album,” Jagger explains. “And I didn’t want to do reggae, even though I like it, or African music, which I also like. But it’s up to Africans to do it, not me.

Jagger is clearly relieved to talk about music, especially after finishing an interview with a British journalist who asked him about the miners’ strike in England (“I just spent 20 minutes talking about it, can you imagine that?” fumes) and a West German writer who questioned him about why he did not marry his girlfriend Jerry Hall, who bore him a daughter last year. (He admitted he hated the “legal tangle” of marriage, but this time he lashed out at the writer for asking him about it, according to a source.)

Talking about music is therefore not only a refuge, but it is the surest way to keep Jagger in line.

“Maybe I will branch out with my next solo album, but given my particular strength, I felt I had to stick to what I do best, which is rock music,” he says, picking up the thread of the conversation.

“And I didn’t want to be too technical. A lot of my friends have made albums that are too off the beaten track for my taste. I worked with Peter Wolf on his album,” he says of the Boston singer who is now solo after 16 years with the J. Geils Band, “and he covered a lot of styles on that, which is great, but I don’t particularly want to do that. I also didn’t want to do what David Lee Roth (the lead singer of Van Halen) did on his new album. He’s got some stuff in there with a big band sound, but that’s not what I do well.

Lyrically, the album is a lighthearted look at romantic relationships – again a conservative approach when compared to the more overt political rock of the Stones’ last album, “Undercover”, particularly the song “Too Much Blood “, which condemned the gratuitous violence seen on the network’s news.

“I am not a journalist. I’m not putting this profession down, but I don’t have an editor behind me saying, “Well, I want political commentary, Mick.” So I write what I feel at the moment of writing. I felt like in “Undercover” I touched on one or two social comments. When this record came out, commentators said, “Oh wow, Mick, this is terribly politically heavy.” Why don’t you write about personal relationships? “

“And I didn’t want to follow the Ethiopian movement lyrically either,” he says of the trend toward socially conscious songs that speak to widespread famine in that country. “Not that I didn’t feel like everyone else in wanting to do something about it, but it was just a time in my life where I was writing about personal relationships. And writing something that didn’t really strike me at the time would be sort of forced. The song “Running Out of Luck” started to get a little apocalyptic, but I definitely cringed a little. And it’s the only song that’s not really about personal relationships.

The promotional campaign behind “She’s the Boss” is expected to be close to a blitzkrieg. Jagger is already on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone and Interview magazines. His label, CBS Records, is also planning its first simultaneous compact disc release with the album. CBS New England branch manager John Addison goes so far as to say, “We think this album might have more longevity than a Stones album.” »

That’s some pretty heady hype, even by ’80s standards.

Jagger, who previously attended the London School of Economics and knows a thing or two about marketing, takes on the problem with enthusiasm. He downplays any pressure and says he just wanted to have a good time making music. “I went on vacation last year and wrote most of these songs,” he says. “I wrote them very quickly.” (Carlos Alomar, David Bowie’s former guitarist, co-wrote two others.)

It didn’t take much effort to attract well-known artists to the project either. It brought together the likes of former Who guitarist Pete Townshend, English legend Jeff Beck (who plays on six tracks), Herbie Hancock and Nile Rodgers. The latter also produced the album alongside Bill Laswell. Rodgers and Laswell worked with David Bowie and Laurie Anderson respectively, but like Jagger, they just wanted to make a simple rock record.

When asked why many musicians were involved rather than a single backup band, which Townshend did by recruiting the Fabulous Thunderbirds from Texas for his next album, Jagger replied: “Well, I didn’t thought for this reason: I have another group, you know? I didn’t want to go out and look for another band. That wasn’t my approach. I didn’t want it to be so tight. I mean, Pete Townshend doesn’t have a band at the moment, so he would naturally be a little drawn to that. But I wanted to work with a lot of musicians to see how they would fit together.

“And, hey, I just wanted to have a lot of fun. I didn’t want to join a group and make it number 2 for the Rolling Stones.

Jagger was criticized because the single “Just Another Night” had disco-style electronic effects. “Disco? That reminds me of folk music!” he complains back. “That must be a complaint from a real old purist Stones fan. There are some real innate conservatives in Boston, aren’t they? what not?

Besides the music, Jagger also directed videos for five of the songs, filming them in Brazil and compiling them into a soon-to-be-released video film, tied to a satirical concept about a rock singer. As he puts it: “There’s this character who goes to Brazil to make a feature video. And he’s a heavy drinker and he doesn’t really like music and he’s not really interested in making a video either. At this point in his career, he kind of lost interest.

But Jagger is quick to add that it is not a self-portrait. “The film as a whole is not particularly pretentious. There is not supposed to be any heavy meaning. It’s more on a humorous level. . . And in the end, the guy strips down and gets back to basics.

Back to basics, that’s exactly what the Stones tried to do on their last tour when they played the small 150-capacity Worcester club, Sir Morgan’s Cove, on the band’s only club date. their American tour. “We just couldn’t get any more club dates after that,” Jagger admits. “It was just ridiculous. We were treated like we were the Sex Pistols,” he adds of the famous British punk band from the late ’70s. (Incidentally, the group never played in Boston on this tour by fear for public safety. “It was just one of those things. It was a shame we couldn’t play in Boston,” Jagger says.)

So it looks like the Stones will once again be stuck in stadiums and forced to put on another monstrous show to rival their last one when they used a cherry picker to lift Jagger above the crowd and then climaxed the concert with a fireworks. .

“It’s hard to come up with new ideas for stadiums, isn’t it?” Jagger concludes. “But we will find something.”