Tea or coffee, sweet or savoury, The Beatles or The Stones? Regardless of where you stand on that question, it’s a sign of the respective group’s impact on culture that pitching them against each other has entered common parlance. However, you can always trust Lemmy to turn it from a pithy platitude into a battle that ends up with one of the behemoths well-and-truly beheaded.
Keith Richards might have said that David Bowie’s act was “all fucking posing”, but that much was obvious; he had a lightning bolt on the side of his head and was pretending to be a space messiah. However, Lemmy thinks that The Rolling Stones were guilty of a spot of posing themselves, the type that bellies their rock ‘n’ roll image and implies a lack of sincerity.
It’s well-regarded that Mick Jagger went to The London School of Economics, but for the most part, aside from his Tory-leaning politics, the band have managed to rouse a rebellious stance. Lemmy wasn’t having any of this and figured it was rude to even compare them to Fab Four. “The Beatles were hard men,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir White Line Fever.
“Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia – a hard, sea-farin’ town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo’s from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx,” he continued.
In contrast, he thought The Stones simply put on a façade of blue-collar hardship to sharpen their image. “The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys,” the Motorhead rocker continued, “They were all college students from the outskirts of London,” he said. “They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
He clearly felt that this artifice also symbolised the lack of true roots in their actual music that bled into every facet of their act. His cutting remarks continue: “I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles – not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.”
He even says he gave them a chance too. “I went to go see the Rolling Stones in the park and they were awful, completely out of tune. Jagger wore a frock,” he recalled of their famed London Hyde Park show in 1968. He may have also said that they’ve written some “great records”, and he even covered ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but when it comes to the battle with The Beatles, he thinks it’s a slur to even put them in the same sentence.
“The Beatles changed the world,” he believed, “They really did. I mean, the generation that was with them, which includes me, we believed that we can make the world better and we failed because the world is so full of shit. Because the way that money works you can’t fight money, you can steal it”. And with Paul McCartney as one of his favourite bassists, he always remembered their influence.
