The Rolling Stones first played this song live on a TV special, 'Pop Go The Sixties', on 31 December 1969.
On the recording of the album, Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone,
"Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War.
Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it
in the conventional sense..." On the song itself, he concluded,
"That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that."