The Beatles and The Rolling Stones have long been linked as two of the defining bands of the 1960s. But while their legacies often intersect, their mutual admiration didn’t always extend to every aspect of each other’s work.
Mick Jagger, frontman of The Rolling Stones, had high praise for The Beatles’ influence on music, but didn’t think much of their live performance abilities.
In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger was asked whether The Beatles deserved their reputation as the greatest band of all time, and said: “They certainly were not a great live band. Maybe they were in the days of The Cavern, when they were coming up as a club band.”
“I’m sure they were hilariously funny and all that”, he added. “And they did have this really good onstage persona. But as far as the modern-day world, they were not a great performing band.”
Still, Jagger recognised the enormous impact The Beatles had on the music industry and popular culture. “Do they deserve the fantastic reputation?” he asked rhetorically. “They were The Beatles. They were this forerunning, breakthrough item, and that’s hard to overestimate.”
He went on to describe how their emergence changed the game for every British group that followed – including his own.
The Beatles’ 1962 debut single ‘Love Me Do’ had, Jagger said, a bluesy sound that felt uncomfortably close to the Stones’ own style.
“It upset me a bit,” he later admitted in a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame speech, “because we were supposed to be the R&B group.”
Despite any competitive tension, Jagger credited Lennon and McCartney with helping The Rolling Stones early in their career. The Beatles famously gave the Stones one of their early hits – ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’.
At the Beatles’ 1988 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Jagger reflected on the pre-Beatles era of British pop music, calling it “embarrassing”: “They wrote great songs, and they changed everything. They were the first to do so many things that people now take for granted.”
Jagger’s most personal comments, however, were reserved for John Lennon, whose passing he spoke with great emotion about: “I just felt very sad for the loss of someone that I loved very much”.