Sir Mick Jagger admitted the Rolling Stones "provoked a lot of people" in response to controversial hit 'Brown Sugar' being axed from their setlists.

The 78-year-old frontman has discussed the backlash the iconic group faced after the 1971 song was dropped from their performances last year, due to racist and sexist connotations of slavery.

And the music legend admitted they were good at causing "shock and awe" back in the day, but he accepts that things need to "change".

Speaking on Swedish radio station P4, he said: "The early days were the days of shock and awe, things can't stay like that forever."

"When you start out, I mean popular music is always in need of shaking up. We were quite good at that."

The 'Satisfaction' rocker feels a lot of people overreacted to their provoking.

He added: "We had our own style and our own way of approaching things and we had a different way of behaving. And it provoked a lot of people.

"I thought a lot of it was super over-reaction but it became a bit of a cliché.

"It served us well in some ways ... we got noticed."

Guitarist Keith Richards, also 78, addressed the backlash at the time and insisted the song was about "the horrors of slavery" and he couldn't get his head around why it's so controversial.

He said: "You picked up on that, huh?

"I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is.

Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this."

However, some believe it depicts non-consensual sex between a slave and slave owner.