The Rolling Stones have announced a global tour and laughed off suggestions that it will be their last.

"We never say this is going to be our last tour. We never think about it. We take each tour as it comes," Mick Jagger, 61, told a press conference in New York.

"I think that's a trap to try and get people to buy your tickets and say, 'Well, I'll never see them again."

Reminding the cheering crowd that not only are they far from elderly, the Stones played Start Me Up, Brown Sugar and a new song Jagger called Oh No, Not You Again.

It was a relatively low-key launch for a band that once landed in a blimp in a city park to kick off a world tour in 2002.

"This is one of the earliest concerts we've been to in a while, actually," Jagger said of the midday event. "We're calling it the cornflakes concert."

The Stones, who burst onto the rock scene in the early '60s in England, are putting together a new album, still untitled, that is "85 per cent" finished, Jagger said.

"We tried to make it very wide-ranging and we tried to make it very hard-hitting, but it's got its sensitive moments," he said. "It kicks some ass," guitarist Keith Richards added.

The tour travels to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Japan and "hopefully" China before heading to Europe in summer 2006, he said.

"There's a lot of other fantastic bands and a lot of old rubbish out there, and we hope it's going to be a wonderful summer of rock 'n' roll and we're going to be right in there," Jagger said.

"May God have mercy on your soul," Richards added.