There are few more polarising questions in cultural history than The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones. At least, that’s when you preface it as a purely musical proposition. Oddly enough, if you pitch it as a genuine battle, then the music world has always picked only one winner, and it’s the group that were once touted as the cutesy inverse to the vulgar vagabonds from the south.
One of rock ‘n’ roll’s hardest geezers, the late Lemmy Kilmister of Mötorhead, was perhaps the firmest voice in this very on-brand debate. “The Beatles were hard men,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir White Line Fever. 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 went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
Although Lemmy might’ve figured that “Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption”, he felt that there was always a rough and ready dockside spirit to the Fab Four. This shone through in Hamburg, and though it might have been shunned when commercial success beckoned, the narrative in many music circles is that The Beatles led the way in the rough and tumble ranks, and others followed.
With John Lennon standing out as the most daring member of the gang, Ian Anderson figured that Mick Jagger tried to imitate him. However, as Lemmy opined before him, The London School of Economics graduate could never quite pull it off. “With hindsight, you could say Hamburg was The Beatles’ punk period, their edgy and dangerous days that were hard to square away with the almost chocolate-box pop proposition they became,“ Anderson said, reflecting on the Fab Four’s gritty, working-class roots.
As a lad from a similar background, he soon singled out Lennon as his hero. “John had attitude, a sense of disdain when it came to being groomed and made to dress in matching suits,“ he told Louder Sound. “The first time I saw pictures of The Beatles in Hamburg, it struck me that here was Lennon in his natural habitat; leather-clad, greasy of quiff and with an air of menace.“ These “iconic“ images struck a chord with many would-be musicians, most notably The Rolling Stones, who were hoping to make the leap from the once lofty goal of being London’s premiere blues nightclub band to an international force now that The Beatles had shown it was possible.
As Jethro Tull’s very own flute-playing frontman, Anderson asserted, every gang of “bad boys“ needs a leader, and for The Beatles, he felt that “Lennon was probably the only one who’d be handy in a fight.“ Jagger recognised this too and looked to take up the tough man mantle for The Rolling Stones. Alas, Anderson reckons he was always a little to Dartford about the whole thing to ever convincingly pull it off.
“Mick Jagger always looked too self-conscious to be considered a tough guy; he looked like he’d fall over if you blew on him,“ Anderson brutally added. As Lemmy would comically quip in support, The Beatles were hard, whereas ”Jagger wore a frock”.
As dated and infantile as this debate may seem, there is an undeniable beauty to the shortsighted Lennon being dubbed the hardest man in the whole Beatles vs Stones debate by a jury of his peers.