Songfacts®:

• "Divine Intervention" is a fast, raucous rock song about staring down apocalypse, decadence, and political decay and deciding to live hard anyway, with the title used ironically for a world where no rescue seems to be coming.
• Mick Jagger moves through the verses like a man compiling a catalog of modern collapse. He consults a Hollywood psychic who promptly vomits, billionaires sprint for their private sky bunkers as if the problem with the world is altitude, and governments reduce human worth to "dystopian metrics" that sound suspiciously like they were designed by someone who has never met a human being.
  
  The chorus refuses despair outright: if everything is going to burn, Jagger suggests, you might as well go up in a flare of your own choosing rather than politely dimming down first. It's optimism, but of the flammable variety.
• The title "Divine Intervention" is heavily ironic: Jagger invokes the idea of some higher power stepping in, but the verses present a world where no such intervention arrives, only human folly, bad bets, and a gambler's attitude toward fate.
• "Divine Intervention" fits into a long Stones tradition of songs that treat catastrophe and decadence with a wry grin, echoing the fatalistic swagger of tracks like "Gimme Shelter" and "Doom and Gloom," though with a more playful, Chuck Berry‑driven musical backbone.
• "Divine Intervention" is a track from The Rolling Stones' 25th album, Foreign Tongues, which was laid down at Metropolis Studios in West London with producer Andrew Watt. Jagger told Today the band laid down "10 tracks in four weeks," for the album, a timeline that suggests a mutual agreement not to overthink anything.
• The "life is a gambling game" Jagger sings here aligns the song thematically with "In The Stars" and other Foreign Tongues tracks that treat fate and chance as central motifs.
• The Cure's Robert Smith played guitar on this one. Jagger recalled arriving at the studio to find "this bloke... with his back to me and this long gown on... covered in lipstick," which turned out to be Smith. Jagger issued an invitation on the spot: "While you're here, we better go and do something," he said. Smith took him up on it, contributing to two tracks on the album.