THE BEST OF FRENEMIES

Beatles versus Rolling Stones — a rock rivalry for the ages

The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones is the most famous battle of the bands in music history. They're pop-cultural icons who have divided fans since the early 1960s — and six decades on, they're still competing for our attention. On Saturday, the Stones will play to 65,000 people in London's Hyde Park, while Paul McCartney headlines the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival. It's the rock 'n' roll rivalry that refuses to go away.

The narrative goes something like this: The Beatles were the wholesome boys next door while the Stones were the edgy bad boys. The Beatles were pop, the Stones were rock. The former were wholesome mop-tops, the latter dangerous rebels. John Lennon famously said that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” while the Stones had Sympathy for the Devil. The Beatles had 16 U.K. No. 1 albums, and the Stones had 13. This rivalry was felt between the bands too, a mutual animosity borne of a disrespect for the other's music.

It all makes for a cracking, headline-grabbing juxtaposition. But to what extent is it actually true? Did the groups really dislike each other? Or was theirs a battle that was cooked up to create headlines? The answer: The Beatles versus the Stones is 80 per cent marketing construct and 20 per cent truth.

The bands were almost exact contemporaries. The Beatles released their debut single Love Me Do in October 1962, while The Rolling Stones released theirs, Come On, in June 1963. (The “almost” is crucial here — there was always an element of a younger brother looking up to his older sibling.) The bands' early rivalry was genuine — and it was a shadow play of the real-life drama playing out between their managers.

Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham had worked with Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Together, they'd helped shape the Liverpudlians' image, but Epstein had fired Oldham after an argument.

“We were the instrument of (Oldham's) revenge on Epstein,” wrote Keith Richards in his autobiography Life.

Oldham didn't get it right immediately. He tried to beat The Beatles at their own game by putting the Stones in suits similar to the Fab Four's. But the band hated them, so he took the opposite tack: be the anti-Beatles. As Richards said about the Stones' own image: “You've got The Beatles, mums love them and dads love them, but would you let your daughter marry this?” The Stones cultivated a raggedy look, never smiling in photos, never dressing the same and never getting matching haircuts.

In a 2015 interview with Esquire magazine, Richards called the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album “a mishmash of rubbish” and argued that there was “not a lot of roots” in The Beatles' music, which the Stones saw as vaudevillian. In 2021, McCartney dubbed the Stones “a blues covers band.” He told The New Yorker: “Our (musical) net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”

In a 1970 Rolling Stone interview, a riled John Lennon accused Mick Jagger and the boys of regularly doing what The Beatles had just done. He was particularly scathing about the Stones' psychedelic 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, which was released shortly after Sgt. Pepper.

“I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every f---ing album. Every f---ing thing we did, Mick does exactly the same — he imitates us ... Satanic Majesties is Pepper,” Lennon said. He added that the Stones were, “not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise,” as The Beatles.

For his part, Jagger once complained that The Beatles were too willing to give their fans a running commentary on their career. When the band were experiencing money problems in their Apple business in 1969, Jagger told The Village Voice that they over-shared.

“They publicize everything they do,” Jagger said. “They always have — that's their big hang-up.” The Stones singer also lambasted his rivals for the rancour that characterized their breakup. Asked if the Stones would ever split, Jagger said, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn't be so bitchy about it.”

There is a similar mountain of evidence that points to the bands being fellow travellers and friends. George Harrison is said to have recommended the Stones to Decca. Further, Lennon and McCartney wrote the Stones' second single, I Wanna Be Your Man. The song went on to become the Stones' first Top 20 hit (even if Lennon did later say that the pair knocked the song out in minutes: “Well, we weren't gonna give them anything great, right?”).

Band members continued to collaborate through the years. Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones' 1967 song We Love You, and Jagger and Richards both took part in the live TV satellite broadcast of All You Need Is Love in the same year. Meanwhile, Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared in the Stones' 1968 concert show, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.