Which revolution inspired The Rolling Stones song ‘Street Fighting Man’?
In August 1968, The Rolling Stones finally nailed their colours to the mast. Throughout their time in the spotlight, the band had assumed an implicitly anti-establishment image. Renowned as bad boys who invented the archetypal rock and roll lifestyle, the Stones had never come straight out and said it—until now.
“Think the time is right for palace revolution,” Mick Jagger asserts in ‘Street Fighting Man’, over a pulsing Keith Richards bassline that feels like the collectively quickening heartbeat of a mass protest. Indeed, the song had been inspired by exactly that phenomenon, which Jagger felt for the first time during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in which thousands amassed in front of the American embassy in London earlier that year.
Imagine his disappointment, then, that the revolution in Britain never quite arrived. If it had, perhaps he wouldn’t have prostrated himself before the Queen and been knighted later in life. “Where I live the game to play is compromise solution,” he bemoans. What could he do except sing for a rock and roll band? Well, cast his eyes further afield than “sleepy London Town”, in search of a political situation that was pushing the status quo much closer to the brink.
He didn’t have to look too far to find it in a country where they really did “kill the king” centuries ago during the process of an actual palace revolution. Then, in May 1968, the country’s young people were out in the streets again, ready to overthrow the existing order.
So, which country inspired Jagger?
“It was a very strange time in France,” the Stones singer later recalled. “There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government,” he added. “De Gaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive.”
Jagger was amazed that these events were taking place across the English Channel from him and his band. What had started as student protests and occupations focused on Vietnam culminated within weeks in an all-out general strike involving ten million French workers, with “Gouvernement populaire!” [“People’s government!”] the main slogan on the street.
“Yeah, it was a direct inspiration,” he admitted, “Because by contrast, London was very quiet.” Quiet enough for him and Richards to work out a chord progression for the melody and lyrics his newfound political radicalism had just given rise to. Brian Jones added the background drone of an Indian sitar and tambura, which unexpectedly mimicked the background hum of simmering revolutionary fervour.
The Rolling Stones would never get as political again. But ‘Street Fighting Man’ continues to serve as an anti-establishment anthem for new generations of radicals.
