Mick Jagger responds to Paul McCartney's claims that The Beatles were "better" than The Rolling Stones | NME
Mick Jagger has responded to Paul McCartney‘s recent comments that The Beatles were a superior band to The Rolling Stones.
McCartney made the comments in an interview with Howard Stern earlier this month, when he agreed with the host’s assertion that The Beatles were better.
“[The Stones] are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences,” McCartney said. “There’s a lot of differences, and I love the Stones, but I’m with you. The Beatles were better.”
Now, in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Jagger was asked what he made of the comments. You can watch a clip below, with the full interview available at 5pm BST tonight (April 24).
“That’s so funny. He’s a sweetheart. There’s obviously no competition,” Jagger said, laughing when asked for his response.
“The big difference, though, is and sort of slightly seriously, is that The Rolling Stones is a big concert band in other decades and other areas when The Beatles never even did an arena tour, Madison Square Garden with a decent sound system. They broke up before that business started, the touring business for real.”
He continued: “So that business started in 1969 and the Beatles never experienced that. They did a great gig, and I was there, at Shea stadium. They did that stadium gig. But the Stones went on, we started doing stadium gigs in the ’70s and [are] still doing them now. That’s the real big difference between these two bands. One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums and then the other band doesn’t exist.”
Jagger was speaking to Lowe to promote The Rolling Stones’ new single ‘Living In A Ghost Town’, a track NME‘s Mark Beaumont reviewed as “a rushed and half-baked comment on our current predicament.”
Meanwhile, both McCartney and The Rolling Stones were among the high-profile artists to contribute to the ‘One World: Together At Home’ benefit concert organised by Lady Gaga. the former Beatles man played ‘Lady Madonna’, while the Stones took on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.
