Mick Jagger praised the Beatles‘ role in the Rolling Stones‘ history and music history as a whole in an interview that aired on SiriusXM’s Classic Vinyl channel on Thursday. He also discussed how Paul McCartney had joined the Stones to record two songs, Hackney Diamonds’ “Bite Your Head Off” and “Covered in You,” which will appear on the band’s new album, Foreign Tongues, out tomorrow.
“They were the most prolific songwriters of that time,” Jagger said of the Beatles. “They wrote all these songs for themselves, which are all huge hits that were coming out all the time. Plus they were writing and giving songs that they made as demos for all these disparate people, like Cilla Black and this one and that one — all had huge hits with songs which the Beatles wrote, including us, so we were all really happy to get them and it just made them into this huge writing machine, you know, that they were amazingly prolific.”
McCartney and John Lennon gave the Stones “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which became the Stones’ second single, in 1963. It was a Number 12 hit for the group in the U.K. The Beatles recorded their own version of the song, which Ringo Starr sang, for With the Beatles that same year. Cilla Black recorded the Lennon-McCartney compositions, “Love of the Loved,” “It’s for You,” and “Step Inside Love.”
In the SiriusXM interview, Jagger shrugged off any supposed rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones, saying it was in their interest to give them a song like “I Wanna Be Your Man.” “When they’re giving you the song, they’re also making money,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Jagger responded to a question about the possibility of a Stones tour, reiterating his love for performing live, and referred to Keith Richards’ recent comment about preferring residencies in one city at a time. “I’d love to do shows, and I’d love to tour and all that,” Jagger said. “Keith said he would be wanting to tour, but he wanted to do more in one place and that sort of thing. I don’t know what’s going to really happen. I mean, I understand, but you know, I’d like to do shows however we do it. I like to do shows.”
Jagger did play a new Stones song, “Ringing Hollow,” live recently, though without Richards. Instead, Jagger and Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood performed the song with keyboardist Matt Clifford at an event in London. Other Foreign Tongues songs that have come out ahead of the album’s release include “Jealous Lover,” “Divine Intervention,” “In the Stars,” and “Rough and Twisted.” In addition to McCartney, the album features contributions from the Cure’s Robert Smith, Steve Winwood, and Bruno Mars, among others.
