Recommendations of the Editorial team
The first meeting of the two most important bands of their time, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, took place on April 14, 1963 in the Crawdaddy Club in the station hotel in Richmond, England.
The Beatles had already conquered the charts with “Please Please Me” and “From Me To You”, the Rolling Stones were just about to develop their audience. Bill Wyman, the former Bassist of the Stones, now remembered this encounter in an interview on the radio show “Ultimate Classic Rock Nights”.
Accordingly, he saw the Fab Four by chance standing in the audience after some played songs. “After half of the set we somehow looked up, and there were four people dressed in leather things right in front of the stage in the middle of all these children who all danced and played around,” he said. “I turned to Charlie (Watts) and said, ‘They are the Beatles! They had two or three large No. 1 hits.”
Then there was beer and the bands celebrated the night
Wyman noticed that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not observed by the audience at all. He added: “When we ended our set, we talked to them and drank beer together. They stayed for the second set. And then we all went back to an apartment in Chelsea, where Mick (Jagger), Keith (Richards) and Brian (Jones) lived, hung around all night, played blues music, talked a lot about music and immediately became great friends.”
For years, press representatives of the Beatles and Rolling Stones sealed a violent, sometimes also toxic competition. Of course everything just myth, even if the great friendship indicated by Wyman was more of a professional buddy under giants.