Petty rockstars and their petty feuds

The Who’s singer Roger Daltrey must have had some irritation with The Rolling Stones festering for more than 50 years. Decades after the era that made both bands world-famous, Daltrey has taken a pop at the Stones. In an interview, he declared: “You cannot take away the fact that Mick Jagger is still the No 1 rock ’n’ roll showman up front. But as a band, if you were outside a pub and you heard that music coming out of a pub some night, you’d think, well, that’s a mediocre pub band!”

Pub band would have been bad enough. But it’s the insertion of the word “mediocre” which shows a craftsman at work. And when the 77-year-old rocker added, “No disrespect” that too was the ultimate bitchy sign-off.

No disrespect either from Sir Paul McCartney, who also in recent weeks had his own pop at the Stones, calling them a “blues cover band” and claiming that The Beatles’ net was cast “wider than theirs”.

What have The Rolling Stones done to offend their old sparring partners after all these years and start a septuagenarian slanging match? Probably nothing. And there is nothing new in the rich, dishonourable history of rock gods connecting with their bitchy side. Indeed, rock history is littered with some wonderful examples.

In fact, one such came as a barb towards Daltrey from bandmate Pete Townshend in an interview with me for The Independent in 1994. I spoke to both gentlemen separately and in different places, as it was a time when they were not getting on so well. Daltrey told me that one of his regrets was that Townshend hadn't allowed him a share in the writing in the past.

“You see Pete writing all this stuff and you think 'I can write songs, too'. I get frustrated that we didn't try to collaborate at the end [of The Who’s first incarnation] when Pete was going through a dry period. I wrote a lot of lyrics on my last album which I played Pete, and he said 'Great'. We might have written better stuff than Pete wrote on his own.”

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Pete responded with a bit of bitchery of his own. He said: “'I should think he is frustrated. It is frustrating not being able to write songs.”

Twenty-six years later and the two legends get along fine.

The Rolling Stones themselves were pretty good at the bitchy gesture. Very early on in their career, they were touring with the short-term pop sensation Craig Douglas. Douglas, as was common with pop stars in those days, had found the big time after unpromising beginnings – in his case as a milkman. When Mick and Keith learned this, they went out, bought a couple of bottles of milk, and left them outside Douglas’s hotel bedroom. When he found them in the morning, he failed to find the joke funny.

Bob Dylan also had a fine line in wordless bitchery. When he and Joni Mitchell were both signed to David Geffen’s record label, Asylum, in the seventies, Geffen held a playback for both of them of their latest albums. During Joni’s exquisite album Court and Spark, Dylan fell asleep (or perhaps feigned to be asleep).

Revenge is a dish best served cold. And it took four decades for Joni Mitchell to get hers. Asked about Dylan in an interview in 2014 with The Sunday Times, she said she disliked comparisons as “I am much more original musically, and a much more original thinker”.

Don’t hold back, Joni! And she didn’t. In another interview, she added for good measure: “Musically, Dylan’s not very gifted; he’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs … it’s a mask of sorts.”

But then, Dylan was also not one for holding back. He and Neil Diamond were both on the bill for The Band’s farewell concert, filmed by Martin Scorsese as The Last Waltz. What didn’t make the film was the conversation backstage between Dylan and Diamond. Neil Diamond, chuffed with his own performance, came offstage and said to Dylan: “Follow that!” “What do I do?” asked Dylan, “go onstage and fall asleep?”

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Bitchiness doesn’t just occur between stars who have a vague acquaintance with each other. On the contrary, it can be most marked between stars who were once inseparable. Simon and Garfunkel were the most successful duo of the sixties, but at the start of the seventies and shortly after the global success of the Bridge Over Troubled Water album, Paul Simon went his own way to forge a remarkable solo career. Art Garfunkel was none too pleased and this must have festered for 45 years until he suddenly let rip in a 2015 interview with The Telegraph, saying rhetorically: ““How can you walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, Paul? What’s going on with you, you idiot? How could you let that go, jerk?”

Not bad, but really that’s more invective than bitchiness. But if you read further down that interview there is much more accomplished bitchery. Garfunkel agrees with the interviewer that Simon, who is 5ft three inches possibly suffers from a Napoleon complex, adding that he initially offered his friendship to Simon in 1953 because he felt sorry for his lack of height. “And that compensation gesture has created a monster.”

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The proof that such on-target bitchery can really hurt came in the 2017 biography of Paul Simon. Simon told the author Robert Hilman: “I remember during a photo session and Artie said, ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.’ Did that hurt? I guess it hurt enough for me to remember 60 years later.”

Heartfelt bitchiness can indeed hurt. Less heartfelt and less hurtful, I suspect, is the manufactured bitchiness that a canny PR will urge bands to employ to sell records. The supreme example of this was the Britpop war between Blur and Oasis in 1995. True, the two bands were poles apart and none too keen on each other at the time, with Oasis referring to Blur as “art school wankers”, but when Noel Gallagher said of Damon Albarn “I hope he catches Aids”, you sensed that bands had long since lost the real art of bitchiness and replaced it with downright nastiness, which isn’t the same thing at all.

The Gallaghers have over the years attracted more than their fair share (ok, exactly their fair share) of bitchiness, much of it missing the point of genuine bitchery, though I did quite like Mark Lanegan’s pokes at Liam, saying first: “This clown had accidentally stumbled into the high life, courtesy of his talented older brother,” then refining it in his memoir, writing “the limelight of popularity Liam basked in had evidently uncaged a monster, one without teeth and claws, but a small irritating monster nonetheless. Maybe he’d been a bedwetter, shit his pants at school or been cut from football squad as a youngster and never gotten over it.”

Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen had a go at Liam Gallagher, when the latter was fronting the band Beady Eye. McCulloch said of Liam’s songwriting ability: “He should have bided his time and thought a little bit more about lyrics that might be worth writing.”

Liam responded in more concise fashion, writing on Twitter: “Ian McCulloch you wanna watch what [you’re] saying about my lyrics or I will come and tattoo them on your forehead.”

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Better. But for class and a cutting edge, seek out the absolute master, John Lennon. Back in the days when rock stars used to have arguments via the pages of publications such as Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, and fans believed both the arguments and publications were important, the American singer and rock’n’roll Hall of Famer Todd Rundgren had some gripe with Lennon. He told Melody Maker in 1974: “All he [Lennon] really wants to do is get attention for himself, and if revolution gets him that attention, he’ll get attention through revolution. Hitting a waitress in the Troubador. What kind of revolution is that?”

In my view, Lennon answered it perfectly in his letter to Melody Maker by referring to Todd as Godd. Point made. In fact the point was made in a number of Lennonesque ways. He also referred to him at one point as Turd Runtgreen, and titled his open letter “An Opened Lettuce to Sodd Runtlestuntle.”

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And for a purer bitchery he countered Rundgren’s astonishing assertion “like the Beatles had no style other than being the Beatles” by retorting: “Which gets me to the Beatles, ‘who had no other style than being the Beatles’! That covers a lot of style man, including your own, TO DATE…..”

Foolish to mess with the master, Todd. Then, of course, there was the bitchiness in song lyrics by both Lennon and McCartney in 1971 as part of the post-Beatles fallout. In his song ‘Too Many People’, Paul wrote the chorus: “That was your first mistake, you took your lucky break and broke it in two.” Lennon, who on hearing it muttered “so meeting him was my lucky break!” countered with the infamous “How Do You Sleep?” Among the many lines of vitriol was a couplet: “You live with straights who tell you you was king/Jump when your momma tell you anything.” One could argue that that was a bit rich coming from Lennon. And it was the line “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’ which Paul was still voicing anger about in his interviews this month around his new book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (though he admitted it was a reasonable pun).

And to Lennon goes the award for the funniest and best example of bitchiness in rock history. Or does it? The story goes that Lennon was asked if he thought Ringo was the best drummer in the world. “The best drummer in the world?” he replied. “He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.”

A classic. But the plot thickens. Ringo maintains to this day that John never said it. And there is no record of it. Indeed, it is now thought that the line derived from a comedy sketch written by Geoffrey Perkins on the BBC TV programme Radio Active in 1981. Nevertheless, in rock mythology it will always be attributed to Lennon. And if the master of rock bitchery didn’t actually say it, well, he should have done.