TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE: Rolling Stones Call Off 2026 Tour.

The Rolling Stones have called off plans for a 2026 stadium tour of the United Kingdom and Europe, a source close to the band confirms to Variety, following reports that guitarist Keith Richards was unable to “commit” to it.

While never officially announced, the group’s touring pianist Chuck Leavell and a spokesperson recently told press in the U.K. that the band has nearly completed a new album — their second with 35-year-old producer Andrew Watt — and planned on touring the U.K. and Europe. However, Richards, who turns 82 on Thursday, is said to be unable to commit to the rigors of another tour. Live dates in recent years have shown that he has faced challenges due to a long battle with arthritis, which he has called “benign” and said has forced him to change his style of playing.

Perhaps even more so than the death of Charlie Watts in 2021, this feels like the beginning of the end of the group (or the birth of its holographic touring version). In decades past, Keith was the Stones’ touring obsessive; even when the band was off the road, he toured with Ronnie Woods as part of the New Barbarians in 1979 and with his own X-Pensive Winos group in 1988 and 1993. And in 1986, when Mick Jagger decided tour to promote his own solo album rather than head out on the road with the Stones, Richards was quoted as saying, “If [Mick] was to [tour] without the Stones? I mean, it would be one thing to say he don’t want to go out on the road, but if he was to say he don’t want to go out with the Stones and goes out with Schmuck and Balls band instead?… I’ll slit his f***in’ throat.” So to read that Keith Richards “is said to be unable to commit to the rigors of another tour,” it sounds like time has finally caught up with the man who in his younger days, could “not be killed by conventional weapons:”