Despite the media-goaded Beatles vs. Stones legend, the two totemic bands that shaped the 1960s were, on the whole, always on fairly amicable terms.
Yes, there was the odd bit of wry jibing - and the respectful admiration for each other's work could often spill over into jealousy - yet the two pillars of British pop remained socially intertwined regularly throughout the 1960s.
It was a relationship first cemented when John Lennon and Paul McCartney first penned I Wanna Be Your Man back in 1963, and handed it to Dartford’s finest - then on the rise.
But, there was one semi-mythical night, back in the summer of 1968, where the Fab Four got deep under Mick Jagger’s skin…
It was the night that Paul McCartney sneakily debuted the Beatles’ yet to be-released single, Hey Jude - and its incendiary B-side, Revolution - during a Rolling Stones-helmed club launch in central London.
The short-lived Vesuvio Club was then a brand new Moroccan-themed club owned by Tony Sanchez - a close confidante of the Stones (and often referred to as ‘Spanish Tony’).
It was an exclusive night with three aims - to mark the club’s opening, to celebrate Jagger’s recent milestone 25th birthday, and, most excitingly of all, to give the lucky attendees the first chance to hear the freshly completed ‘Stones record, Beggars Banquet.
It was, as far as anyone in attendance was concerned, the Rolling Stones’ night.
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Amongst the bubble of swinging London’s cognosecnti that August evening, absorbing the many delights of the Stones’ seventh LP, were a rather worse for wear (by all accounts) John Lennon accompanied by Yoko Ono and, eventually, Paul McCartney.
A fashionably late McCartney sauntered in as Banquet was nearing the end of its first spin. Paul surreptitiously sidled over to Tony, who was presiding over the record player. He handed over a freshly-minted acetate of the Beatles’ upcoming new single.
Sanchez later recalled (in The Beatles: Off the Record) how Paul covertly slid over to the booth; “As Paul walked in, everybody was leaping around to Beggars Banquet, which was far and away the best album of The Stones’ career,” Sanchez recalled. “Paul discreetly handed me a record and said, ‘See what you think of it, Tony. It’s our new one’”
As the final strains of Salt of the Earth wrapped-up Beggars Banquet, Sanchez eyed-up McCartney’s flimsy record - it read ‘Hey Jude'. That impressive single would be released later in the month (on August 26th) and become a spirit-raising classic almost overnight.
But, that night, there it was, for the first time. Backed by Lennon’s fiery, distortion-soaked, politically-charged flip-side.
Tony didn't realise it at the time, but he’d just been handed one of the first ever pressings of a song that would quickly enter the firmament of pop history - and becoming the singalong-invoking anthem for the ages.
Despite its now-legendary status, at that moment in time - nobody, bar the band (and Abbey Road studio staff) had heard Hey Jude, or Revolution.
And so, without consulting Jagger or anyone else in the Stones’ circle, Tony gave it a spin…
“I stuck the record on the sound system and the slow thundering build-up of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club,” Sanchez remembered in The Beatles: Off the Record. “I turned the record over, and we all heard John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out Revolution. When it was over, I noticed that Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him.”
A slightly more upbeat variation of the story was recounted by the late Marianne Faithfull, who shared her recollection in a 2007 Guardian interview:
“So there we all were, having a wonderful time, and in strolls Paul McCartney - a little smile on his lips, hands behind his back. What have you got, Paul?’ we cried out. ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. [He then] put on Hey Jude. It was the first time anyone had heard it and we were all blown away.”
All save an increasingly fuming Jagger…
Faithfull also recalled that although the night’s revelry was somewhat inspired by the presence of numerous substances, the memory of that collective euphoria that summer night seemed to encapsulate the era’s verdant creative fruitfulness;
“Vesuvio closed a couple of weeks later, but the feeling in the room that night was 'aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive?’”
Over in the Beatles’ corner, PR officer Tony Barrow smugly recalled that “It was a wicked piece of promotional one-upmanship.”
Jagger might have been cowed by the obvious merit of the Beatles' song (s) that night, but he would absorb the influence of Hey Jude's embracing arrangement with 1969’s You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
Like Hey Jude, it too featured a lengthy outro and orchestral ornamentation.
"I liked the way the Beatles did that with Hey Jude,” Jagger stated prior to its recording. “The orchestra was not just to cover everything up - it was something extra. We may do something like that on the next album."
Despite a few more spats that occurred between the Stones and the former Beatles over the next few years, (usually manifesting themselves in the pages of the music press) Jagger’s attitude became more warm as the decades rolled on. Particularly when he inducted the Beatles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.
A few years later, Jagger reflected in Rolling Stone in 1995 that, “The Beatles were so big that it’s hard for people not alive at the time to realise just how big they were. There isn’t a real comparison with anyone now.”
Jagger continued, “They were so big that to be competitive with them was impossible. They were huge…they were the Beatles. They were this forerunning, breakthrough item, and that’s hard to overestimate.”
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