News Mick Jagger on the worst band he’s “ever fucking heard”
The Rolling Stones aren’t far off being the inventors of slagging off your rival artists. They see the pastime as a form of counterculture PR. While Mick Jagger might have also heaped praise upon the likes of Jimi Hendrix and even The Strokes and The Hives, for the most part, he has been a growling denigrator of those who dared to step on his patch.
This became particularly apparent when punk roared to the forefront and threatened to throttle the existing classic rock coterie. For years, The Rolling Stones had been carefully honing their image as the most aggressive band around. “No matter what Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious do, they can’t be more disgusting than The Rolling Stones are in an orgy of biting,” a 34-year-old Mick Jagger told Interview like a kid in a playground caught up in a daft ‘my dad is harder than your dad’ contest.
He was riled. In fact, he was so riled that he would actually catch the wrong end of the incendiary stick that was beating the mainstream and say things that he would later regret, like his unfortunate NBC News comment: “The next [album] is going to be more racist and more sexist and a whole bunch better.”
Punk wasn’t merely about vitriol and violence, but that is where Jagger was willing to meet them. Regarding their run-ins, the gyrating frontman scolded: “They’ve stopped short at violence. I think even Sid Vicious is basically a nice guy, but Johnny Rotten keeps talking bad about me.” And then came the threat: “He’ll get his rotten teeth kicked in one day.”
However, at least he half credited the music of the Sex Pistols, with Keith Richards even recalling that a rattled Jagger said that they should look to imitate them in some way to retain relevance. That is more than can be said than his thoughts on The Stranglers. Ironically, the band were one of the few punk rock acts with genuinely first-rate musicianship in their ranks, and with it, they created both masterpieces aplenty and thrilling live shows.
Nevertheless, Jagger wasn’t having it. In 1977, the angered frontman decreed, “Don’t you think the Stranglers are the worst thing you’ve ever fucking heard? I do. They’re hideous, rubbishy,” he said. Continuing his cutting diatribe in the NME by adding: “So bloody stupid. Fucking nauseating, they are.”
All the same, this simply served as fuel for the band. Jean-Jacques Burnel said that the band “thrived on being disliked.” He told Radio Times that being in the band meant that “if gigs didn’t end in a riot, or we weren’t booed off stage, it wasn’t good”.
And with this mindset, they managed to make one hell of an impact. The fact that an incarnation of the band are still constantly touring is proof of their perennial appeal, but perhaps a more surprising measure of their magnitude comes from the fact that they managed to sell 40 million records in their pomp.
With this sizable victory against their name, Burnel even manages to hurl a bit of vengeance back in the direction of Jagger. “[40million is] more than the Clash or the Sex Pistols, which is respectable for an edgy band. It’s less than U2, but they’re boring and smug. The Rolling Stones were fantastic for their first ten years, but haven’t done much since… I’m trying to be sentient and valid, not living in the past.”
