Tea or coffee, sweet or savory, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? Regardless of your position on the issue, pitting the two groups against each other is a sign of their cultural influence. However, you can always count on Lemmy to turn it from a pithy platitude into a battle. The battle ends with one of the behemoths being beheaded.
Keith Richards may have said that David Bowie’s performance was “all fucking posing“. But that much was obvious. He wore a lightning bolt on the side of his head and pretended to be a space messiah. Lemmy believes that The Rolling Stones were guilty of posing themselves. They undermined their rock’n’roll image and implied a lack of sincerity.
Mick Jagger attended The London School of Economics. But aside from his Tory politics, the band has managed to elicit a rebellious stance. Lemmy was having none of this and thought it was impolite to even compare them to the 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 far from sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is similar to Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia – a hard, sailing town with a constant presence of dockers and sailors. They would beat the piss out of you if you even winked at them. Ringo is from Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx,” he added.
In contrast, he believed The Stones were simply putting on a show of blue-collar hardship to bolster their image. “The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys,” the Motorhead rocker added. “They were all college students from the outskirts of London.” “They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
He felt that this artifice also represented a lack of true roots in their actual music, which permeated every aspect of their performance. His cutting remarks continue: “I liked the Stones. But they were never on par with the Beatles in terms of humor, originality, songs, or 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. “I went to see the Rolling Stones in the park, and they were terrible—completely out of tune. “Jagger wore a frock,” he said of their famous London Hyde Park show in 1968. He may have also stated that they’ve written some “great records” and even covered ‘Sympathy for the Devil‘. But when it comes to the battle with The Beatles, he considers it a slur to even mention them.
“The Beatles changed the world,” he believed. “They truly did. I mean, the generation that was with them included me. I believed that we could improve the world, but we failed because the world is 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 favorite bassists, he always remembered their influence.
