Mick Jagger says The Rolling Stones’ biggest rival would ‘kill’ their confidence despite the ‘friendly’ scene

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An unlikely band served as the lead rival to The Rolling Stones‘ rise up the charts in the 1960s.

While the band shared a competitive streak with The Beatles, the Wild Horses hitmaker Mick Jagger believes the Fab Four were more a friendly rival than an active threat to their work as a group. Speaking about the similarities between the two bands, The Rolling Stones’ frontman would go on to suggest it was, in fact, a lesser-known group that served up the band’s most heated rivalry. Speaking to Rolling Stone Magazine founder Jann Wenner, Jagger shared that a “top of the bill” band in the United States had enraged The Rolling Stones. A Manchester-based band which had employed Jimmy Page as a session musician were hot on the tracks of The Rolling Stones for a brief time.

Jagger shared: “Super, highly competitive – but friendly. Because when you’re very young, it’s very hard. Looking back, thinking of all that competition, I hate it. But I suppose it’s all right, because I won out.

“But it wasn’t only between us and the Beatles but us and all the other bands. I remember one time playing in Philadelphia, and Herman’s Hermits were top of the bill, and we were second, and there was some argument about the dressing rooms. [Peter Noone] was complaining because he was top of the bill and his dressing room wasn’t good enough.

“Anyway, there we were, and he was top of the bill because the Herman’s Hermits were huge. And one of the most impossible things was going out to have a hamburger, and some guy would go, ‘Are you Herman’s Hermits?’ It would kill you. So you go, ‘Fuck you. Herman’s Hermits is shit.’”

Drummer Barry Whitman remains the only original member still in the band, which is still active at the time of writing. Lead singer Peter Noone left the group in 1971, though he briefly rejoined in 1973.

Herman’s Hermits had their chart debut with a cover of I’m Into Something Good but never quite made it to the same level of quality as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Though there was friendly competition between the two groups, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were keen to help the band out and gave them a song which would become their first hit.

Paul McCartney recalled the friendly relationship, and a taxi ride which led to one of The Rolling Stones’ earliest hits.

He said: “John and I were walking down Charing Cross Road in London, in the early sixties, and two guys were going past in a taxi and shouted ‘Oi! Oi!’ and it was Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] of The Stones, and they were going along this way. So we said ‘ey, give us a lift’ you know, so we bunked into their taxi and Mick was saying ‘oh we’ve got a recording contract, you know, we’re with Decca now.’

“We said ‘ah great, congratulations,’ because it was a very friendly scene. There’s not a lot of rivalry, actually, you know, it now seems like there was this bitter feud, The Stones were the dirty, you know, horrible longhairs, and we were the cute, real nice guys, but it wasn’t like that at all.

“We were very similar in tastes and in clothes and everything. So Mick said, ‘Have you got a song?’ and I said, ‘Have we got a song? There’s this Ringo song,’ and I knew they were into Bo Diddley, Not Fade Away and stuff like that, we knew they did that stuff.

“So I said, ‘I know a song, we’ve got this Ringo song off of the album and it’s not going to be a single for us, but maybe you guys could take it.’ So that’s what they did, and it was their first single I think.” The song in question was I Wanna Be Your Man, which Lennon and McCartney wrote for The Beatles’ With The Beatles album.