558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)

Parents do not like the Rolling Stones. They do not want their sons to grow up like them. They do not want their daughters to marry them. Never have the middle class virtues of neatness, obedience and punctuality been so conspicuously lacking as they are in the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones are not the people you build empires with.

They are not the people who always remember to wash their hands before lunch. Parents feel cheated. Just when the Beatles had taught them that pop music was respectable, just when they were beginning to understand, what happens? Their children develop a passion beyond the comprehension of anybody for these five young men. So that was Maureen Cleve writing in the London Evening Standard on the 14th of April 1964.

Maureen Cleve, very groovy, kind of Anna Wintor haircut, probably the most influential pop writer of the day, first national newspaper journalist to champion the Beatles. She would go on to do the infamous interview with John Lennon in which he boasted that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. But Dominic, we're not here to talk about the Beatles, are we? We are here to talk about the Rolling Stones.

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