Mick Jagger Refuses to Take Back His Brutal Beatles Remark, Even While Admitting the Fab Four Changed Music Forever in a Confession That Still Sparks Debate Decades Later

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Mick Jagger Won't Take Back Calling the Beatles 'Blasé and Big-headed' Even as He Admits They 'Blazed a Lot of Trails': 'Sometimes I Do Speak the Truth'
Mick Jagger said that The Rolling Stones’ 1963 debut single “was pretty bad,” and praised The Beatles for blazing “a lot of trails” despite calling them “blasé and big-headed” in the past.As a band that helped lay the foundations of rock ‘n’ roll and then went on to be one of the most popular (and enduring) rock bands in the world (with even artists like David Bowie “nicking” their sound, as Mick Jagger recently suggested), The Rolling Stones are the very definition of a prodigious musical collective.While The Rolling Stones clearly still have what it takes and the drive to do it, while overcoming challenges such as Ketih Richards’s arthritis — The Guardian called their latest studio outing, “Foreign Tongues,” another “late triumph,” while NME praised their second collaboration with the producer Andrew Watt as a “fresh and fluent follow-up” to 2023’s “Hackney Diamods” — Mick Jagger believes that the band’s earliest outings were far less glamurous.

Mick Jagger Isn’t Overjoyed With Earliest Stones Material As He Calls Their Debut Single ‘Pretty Bad’

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“It was pretty bad,” Mick Jagger told NME in a June 30 interview of The Rolling Stones’ 1963 cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On” (embedded below), which served as the band’s debut single, after being quizzed about calling it “shit” in previous interviews.

Jagger went on to recall a vicarious encounter with his band’s other early material that left him equally unimpressed (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):

“I was in a changing room, and someone next door was putting on a sort of a horrible imitation [of] early ’60s record player with vinyl, and they’ve got an ancient Rolling Stones album, someone put it on, and the speaker was so bad, and some of these tracks sound really appalling… It’s just the sound of them.”

“I mean, I can’t really tell if they’re any good. If you play them on a stereo, they might sound better. But on this machine, they sound awful.”

Mick Jagger Praises The Beatles For Blazing ‘a Lot of Trails,’ But Doesn’t Regret Calling Them ‘Blasé’

In the same interview, Mick Jagger was also reminded of calling The Beatles “blasé and big-headed.” Jagger, whose band once again collaborated with Paul McCartney on “Foreign Tongues” after their debut collab on 2023’s “Hackney Diamonds,” responded:

“That’s them! Done for! … [laughs] Sometimes I do speak the truth. I mean, they did a lot of great things, and they blazed a lot of trails. I mean, you can’t gainsay that. They did. Because no other band had been famous in America. America was a closed shop, and when you think about it, they blazed all those trails and showed that it was possible. Before that, it was not possible.”

You can watch the entire interview below:

If Paul McCartney was ever indeed “blasé,” he certainly wasn’t so while jamming with The Stones on “Foreign Tongues.” In a separate interview with NME from May this year, the legendary Beatle said:

“You start playing, and they show you the song, and I start thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ And I’m well chuffed! You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way… I was glad I wasn’t blasé about it. It’s really exciting. Not everyone plays with The Stones!”