Whether they like to admit it or not, music fans undoubtedly like to create rivalries between bands.
Creating a feud simultaneously creates two camps for fans to exist in, pledging allegiance to their favourite bands in a way that extends beyond a simple sing-along. While we’ve had many over the years, the greatest could have perhaps been between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
“The Beatles got the white hat, so what’s left? The black hat,” Keith Richards once explained of the dynamic, highlighting how the Liverpudlians became the media darlings while The Rolling Stones were left to play the villains.
To some extent, that was true, for The Beatles’ music could in parts be described as something more all-encompassing. Between the lines of their psychedelia did exist a remaining innocence, while The Rolling Stones were unashamedly more rebellious.
In that dynamic, there were simply things one band could do that the other couldn’t. Despite their enigmatic ability, it’s hard to imagine The Beatles writing something quite as grotesque as ‘Brown Sugar’. Of course, that extended the other way. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was about as playful as The Rolling Stones could get in reality, while The Beatles’ colourful approach to creativity meant they could go pretty much anywhere they liked.
On Revolver, they were exercising that right, famously on songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ which saw them harness their child-like curiosity and use a backwards played guitar as its core melody. But their silliness extended elsewhere, namely on the famed track ‘Yellow Submarine’.
“‘Yellow Submarine’ is very simple but very different,” the band’s most playful member, Paul McCartney, explained. “It’s a fun song, a children’s song. Originally, we intended it to be ‘Sparky’, a children’s record. But now it’s the idea of a yellow submarine where all the kids went to have fun. I was just going to sleep one night and thinking if we had a children’s song, it would be nice to be on a yellow submarine where all your friends are with a band.”
Naturally, such a sweet-hearted song caught the attention of The Rolling Stones. But not the jealous type, that must have surely surfaced at some point in the 1960s, but rather the critical sort. The sort that had the band laughing in their cloud of backstage smoke that made them feel innately more rebellious.
Mick Jagger’s former girlfriend Marianne Faithfull confirmed that the song was the source of ridicule from the front man, explaining, “Mick might, very occasionally, put The Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction,” she said. “But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.”
While it would be easy to label Jagger’s dismissal as the byproduct of jealousy, with a song like ‘Yellow Submarine’, it’s somewhat easy to see why he may have felt like that. It was The Beatles at their most playful, but not exactly at their best.
