The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones: a rock music rivalry that refuses to die

The Beatles vs 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. Next Saturday, the Stones will play to 65,000 people in London’s Hyde Park, while Paul McCartney headlines the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival some 120 miles to the south-west. 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 were 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 UK number one 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. Which camp were you in? Because in the broiling swirl of Sixties counterculture (and beyond), you couldn’t – still can’t – be in both.

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 as the pop market exploded in the 1960s? The answer is a mixture of the two: The Beatles vs 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 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 in their relationship.) The bands’ early rivalry was genuine – and it was a shadow play of the real-life drama playing out between their managers.

The Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham had worked with The 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. The credo, Richards said, was to “do everything wrong, at least from a showbiz, Fleet Street point of view”. As the guitarist 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.

Then, there was the music itself. 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 band’s music, which he and his bandmates saw as more vaudevillian. In 2021 – in an indication of how the rivalry is still playing out – McCartney dubbed the Stones “a blues covers band”. He told The New Yorker that “our net was cast a bit wider than theirs” when it came to music.

The Beatles also regularly complained that the Stones copied them. Being slightly behind on the career curve meant that the Stones could observe and then mimic The Beatles’ success, went the argument. In a 1970 Rolling Stone interview, a clearly riled John Lennon accused 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------ album. Every f------ 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. In the Let it Be track Dig A Pony, Lennon appears to reference this. “I roll a stoney / Well, you can imitate everyone you know,” he sang.

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 Village Voice journalist Howard Smith that they over-shared. “They publicise everything they do,” Jagger said. “They always have – that’s their big hang-up.” The Stones singer also lambasted his rivals for the nastiness that characterised their break-up. Asked if the Stones would ever split, Jagger said, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.”

So the battle-lines between The Beatles and the Stones appear to be pretty well-drawn. But despite all this, 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 (the record label that famously turned down The Beatles in 1962). Further, Lennon and McCartney wrote the Stones’ second single, I Wanna Be Your Man. It was to be the Stones’ first Top 20 hit (although Lennon, pointedly, later said that the pair knocked the song out in minutes, adding, “Well, we weren’t gonna give them anything great, right?”).

This aside, 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.

Today, the bands share the same producer for the legacy reissues of old albums. Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George, who has worked on an array of Beatles box-sets, also recently worked on the re-release of the Stones’ Goats Head Soup.

The fact is that The Beatles and The Stones moved (and still move) in a similar orbit, and it’s an orbit that’s fairly sparsely populated. They are and always have been members of rock ’n’ roll’s one per cent club: then as hip young things, and now as multimillionaire elder statesmen. They needed each other to bounce off, to compete against, and to set each other new challenges. Jagger summed up the bands’ relationship in the speech he gave at the 1988 Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “We went through some pretty strange times,” he said of The Beatles. “We had a sort of a lot of rivalry in those early years, and a little bit of friction, but we always ended up friends.”

Both camps are, of course, sadly depleted. Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last year, and McCartney is one of only two surviving Beatles. McCartney is 80 as of yesterday, and Jagger and Richards are both 78. In an era when many of their contemporaries have retired or died – and at a time when the younger Abba are turning to computer-generated versions of themselves to entertain audiences – we should make the most of them. Next Saturday, whether you’re planning to Paint It Black in Hyde Park or Let It Be in Somerset, I’d really just cheer the fact that these icons of music are still going at all.

Rolling Stones tickets: bst-hydepark.com. Glastonbury is sold out