Songfacts®:

• This song is about political corruption in Central America. The US was supporting Nicaraguan rebels (Contras) amid great controversy. It's a rare political song by The Stones.
• A lot of production went into the track. There is a great deal of echo and phasing on the drums and guitars.
• Mick Jagger wrote almost all of this. He said of the song: "I'm not saying I nicked it, but this song was heavily influenced by William Burroughs' Cities Of The Red Night, a free-wheeling novel about political and sexual repression. It combines a number of different references to what was going down in Argentina and Chile. I think it's really good but it wasn't particularly successful at the time because songs that deal overtly with politics never are that successful, for some reason." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France
• Chuck Leavell, formerly of the Allman Brothers Band, played keyboards. He worked with The Stones throughout the '80s.
• The video portrayed Mick Jagger as a rebel who is shot by Central American forces. This was a huge departure for the Rolling Stones, whose videos to that point consisted of performance footage with heavy preening by Jagger. It was directed by Julien Temple, who had done the Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock And Roll Swindle. He revealed in I Want My MTV by Craig Marks: "I wrote the treatment for 'Undercover of the Night" as a way of not doing the video. I was a punk rocker, and the Stones were regarded as jet-set traitors to the cause. The song was about the death squads then operating in Central America, and I wrote an extreme treatment about being in the middle of an urban revolution, and dramatized the notion of Keith and Mick really not liking each other by having Keith kill Mick in the video. I never thought they would do it. Of course they loved it.
  
  The video aired on MTV, but was turned down by some other outlets because of its violence.
• This was the first single from Undercover.