The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones: Is rock’s greatest rivalry finally over?

Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, photographed in 2011. Photo / Getty Images

After decades of insults and back-biting, Paul McCartney is making music with his former foes. But how much did they really hate each other?

The greatest rivalry in rock has come to a shuddering halt. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones have reportedly buried the hatchet after 60 years of feuding to make new music together. According to Variety, Paul McCartney has recorded bass parts for a forthcoming Rolling Stones album. Ringo Starr, the only other surviving Beatle, is also “slated to play” on the yet-to-be-announced record, Variety said.

The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones is the most famous battle of the bands in music history. As pop-cultural icons, they’ve divided fans since the early 1960s. No longer. “Beatles and Stones ‘Come Together’ for new Rolling Stones album,” was a typical follow-up headline to the Variety story. “The surviving Beatles and the surviving Stones are coming together to kick your ass. Begin running,” wrote US blogger Noah Pasternak on Twitter.

But before speculation about The Rolling Beatles – as the supergroup will inevitably be dubbed – reaches fever pitch, everyone needs to calm down little a bit. My mole behind the mixing desk in Los Angeles, where the tie-up took place, tells me that while talk of a collaboration is true, it’s limited in scope. McCartney has indeed recorded with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. It was spontaneous. They bumped into each other in the same studio in recent weeks and started jamming on a song. Talk of Starr’s involvement, however, is wide of the mark.

“It’s only one track. And no Ringo. Paul and the Stones were sharing the same studio in LA, they had a bit of a jam and Paul ended up on one track,” says my man with the headphones. The song (name unknown) is likely to appear later this year, possibly on a new Stones album which is very much not the Beatles-Stones mash-up that some folk are predicting. It is thought that late Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, will appear on a couple of tracks. The rest of the drumming will be carried out by Watts’s fantastic successor Steve Jordan, who has replaced Watts’s jazz-influenced drumming with a slightly more propulsive sound.

Starr’s lack of involvement is perhaps no bad thing: it would distract from Watts’s swansong with the Stones. (A spokesman for the band declined to comment). What will the McCartney-Stones track sound like? Heaven knows, but it’ll be a treat to hear the melodic and articulate bass-lines from Macca’s trademark Höfner mesh with Richards’ gnarly open chords and Wood’s fluid blues lines.

Pop royalty: Paul McCartney performs at the O2 Arena in December 2018. Photo / Getty Images

According to reports, the new Stones album is set to be produced by 32-year-old Grammy-winning Andrew Watt, who’s the go-to person for senior rock stars looking to add contemporary zing to their sound. Watt worked on recent critically-acclaimed albums by Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne (he also produced last year’s less critically-lauded tie-up between Elton John and Britney Spears, Hold Me Closer). Intriguingly, McCartney revealed at the end of last year that he’d been working with Watt.

“I’ve been recording with a couple of people, so I’m looking forward to doing even more. I’ve started working with this producer called Andrew Watt, and he’s very interesting — we’ve had some fun,” McCartney said. Given that his comments apparently pre-date his studio session with the Stones, it seems that McCartney has been recording with Watt independently of the collaboration. Which is fascinating in itself.

But however limited the Beatles-Stones tie-up, it’s still a big deal given the musicians’ history. 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.

But to what extent was the rivalry 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.

Jagger with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards at Anfield stadium in Liverpool earlier this month as part of The Rolling Stones’ Sixty tour. Photo / Getty Images

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”, which was a bit harsh. He 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 was 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. Ouch.

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. It’s also worth noting that arguably the two best Stones albums – Sticky Fingers in 1971 and Exile on Main St. the following year – were actually released after The Beatles broke up, so they weren’t exact contemporaries after all.

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, Andrew Watt aside, 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.”

So this new collaboration should be welcomed, however limited its scope. 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. We should cheer the fact that these icons are still making music together in real life. Their mystery song should be magical.