WE ALWAYS WROTE A SONG FOR RINGO ON EACH ALBUM, because he was very popular with the fans, and as Keith Richards once said to me, ‘You had four singers in your group. We only had one.’ And it’s true. Ringo wasn’t the best vocalist in the group, but there’s no doubt he could hold a song. He’d always done a song called ‘Boys’, which was originally sung by The Shirelles.

The gay audience must have been very happy to hear The Beatles’ drummer singing about boys, but we never really thought about that. And to people who fussed over lyrics we used to say, ‘Nobody listens to the words. It’s just the sound of the song.’

Now I’m not so sure about that. I think times have changed. But in the early days we didn’t always worry too much about the words or their nuances. ‘I wanna be your lover, baby / I wanna be your man / I wanna be your lover, baby / I wanna be your man’. Pretty basic, but it was a cool enough little song, and Ringo did it really well.

One day, around the time we moved down to London from Liverpool in the summer of 1963, John and I were in Charing Cross Road, which was guitar central. We would get a taxi and go down there, just to look at the guitars. The whole place in the early sixties was guitar shops, and we’d just go there and gaze longingly all afternoon at guitars we could not afford.

Besides, Dick James’s office was there. He was our publisher then. That was probably the real reason for going. Anyhow, we were looking at the guitars one day when a black London cab went by and we noticed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in it. So we yelled, ‘Hey!’ They saw us waving, so they pulled over. We ran up and said, ‘Hey, give us a lift.’ ‘Yeah, alright. Where are you going?’ ‘We’re going to north London.’

So, we were just chatting in the car about what we were doing. ‘Oh, we’ve got a recording contract,’ Mick told us. We knew that already, because George Harrison had got it for them. Dick Rowe was the guy who turned down The Beatles and didn’t want us for Decca, and I have to say, if you listen to our audition tape, it wasn’t brilliant, but there was something there. So George was at a cocktail party, and Dick Rowe said, ‘Do you know any good groups? I made one mistake, and I’m looking to sign someone good.’ George said, ‘Yeah, they’re called The Rolling Stones. You should try and sign them.’ He told Rowe the Stones were at the Station Hotel in Richmond, where they often played, and Rowe went along to see them and signed them pretty much on the spot.

So there we were in the taxi, talking, and Mick said, ‘The only trouble is, we haven’t got a new single.’ They asked us if we had any songs, and I said, ‘Well, there’s a song that we’ve done on our latest record, With The Beatles, but it’s an album track. It hasn’t been a single, and it won’t be, because it’s Ringo doing it. But I think it would work great for you guys.’ So we sent ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ over to them, and they recorded it. Our version was a bit more of a Bo Diddley shuffle; theirs is quite raw and distorted, almost punk-like, and it was their first big hit.

The Beatles on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Birmingham, 1964

After that we would hang out with each other; we would talk about what music they were making. I would go hang at Keith’s flat, so we were quite friendly. John and I sang on one of their songs – ‘We Love You’ – in 1967, so we had a lot of interaction. But the idea that we were rivals was just something started by the media, and then people started to ask, ‘Who do you like, The Beatles or the Stones?’ And it became an either/or thing. It wasn’t framed like that for the first couple of years, but it got built up by the press as we became more successful. And it just wasn’t true. Mick used to come over to my house in London so that I could play him all the new American records while all this was being written.

So, that was the kind of relationship we had. But with the press, you need them and they need you, as we would discover throughout our careers, but things are said that can stick. For instance, they called what we did ‘Mersey Beat’ – which took its name from a local entertainment paper – and we thought, ‘Well, bloody hell. That’s so corny.’ We never thought of ourselves as Mersey, we thought of ourselves as Liverpool, and it’s an important difference if you come from there. But ‘Mersey Beat’ and ‘Mop Tops’ – all these catchphrases stuck and were quite annoying. You’d do something you wouldn’t even think about, but then it would be a huge story.

Stones, Beatles – we were big buddies, forever and ever, but the fans started to believe there was some truth in the manufactured rivalry. There never was.