With Mick Jagger’s to-the-barricades lyrics and Keith Richards’ throbbing beat, Street Fighting Man is to the sizzling ’60s generation of young radicals what La Marseillaise is to the French Revolution or The Internationale is to socialism.
Initially banned by many American and British radio stations, the Rolling Stones song is rock’s revolutionary anthem. But how did this ode to insurrection come about? And who inspired Jagger to pen this raucous rabblerouser?
Street Fighting Man debuted on the Rolling Stones’ most politically-charged album, Beggars Banquet, in 1968, a year of profound global upheaval.
In February 1968, Vietnamese guerrillas launched the bold Tet Offensive in southern Vietnam, brashly storming the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The May French student-worker uprising seized universities and factories in a mass strike that nearly toppled Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s regime. The “Prague Spring” of Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face” movement challenged Stalinist rule until Soviet tanks invaded in August.
Days later, in an America already roiled by Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, demonstrators fought police during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Already a flower-power icon, Mick Jagger was more than a mere observer of these tumultuous events shaking the world.
Tariq Ali & Actress/Activist Vanessa Redgrave. March 1968 Demonstration; London
Antiwar activist Tariq Ali tells Rock Cellar Magazine “Mick Jagger used to be on our Vietnam marches.” In particular, one fierce London rally against the Indochina war inflamed the Stones’ front man to write Street Fighting Man:
He was on the one demonstration that I led outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square in March 1968. It turned violent and we fought back against the mounted police — Tariq Ali
In a March 9, 2008 40th anniversary story about the Grosvenor Square riot in London’s The Independent, documentary filmmaker Leo Burley wrote:
“Michael Philip Jagger, a 24-year-old man of wealth, taste and immaculate timing… strides towards the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square on Sunday 17 March 1968…”
“It is a protest against the Vietnam War that those who gather outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square are attempting to stage. They have arrived there in their thousands from a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. It swiftly descends into chaos. Mounted police charge the demonstrators, smoke-bombs explode, rocks are thrown and hundreds are arrested.”
The jarring experience deeply affected Jagger. “He was there because he felt angry and rebellious but he had no way of formulating this, of giving it any kind of structure, and in a sense he was looking for anything to rebel against,” says Barry Miles, the journalist and author who met Jagger on the march.
Photo: Michael Cooper; Raj Prem Collection
“I don’t think he had a carefully worked-out policy against Vietnam; I mean, he had a moral outrage against the war and that was about it.”
“He didn’t have a political reading of it,” claims Miles, who interviewed the rocker shortly after the Grosvenor Square events and similar global upheavals ignited Jagger’s aesthetic imagination. “He had a much more artistic reading. This was something that got his adrenalin going, that enabled him to create. To him, it was just perfect, it was a shot of adrenalin and the subject matter for a song.”
Jagger, in a 1995 Rolling Stone interview said about the uprising in Paris:
It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions. I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. It was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet…
After the mounted police attacked protesters at Grosvenor Square, “The British press went berserk sand singled me out as the organizer and leader, though I was not alone in the leadership of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign,” Tariq Ali tells Rock Cellar Magazine.
“For months afterwards I was vilified and attacked. Then May 1968 erupted in France and we were planning a huge new demonstration in October 1968. The press -The Times – said we were planning a revolution.
“It was then that Mick wrote Street Fighting Man. It was banned by the BBC, and his handwritten version of the song arrived with a note. Which was chucked in the bin; we didn’t keep such things in those days! The song we photographed, the handwritten note said something like:
Hi Tariq. For you. The BBC have banned it. Could you put it in the paper? — Mick

Tariq Ali: The paper I edited was The Black Dwarf and we published the song. The cover said ‘Fred Engels** and Mick Jagger on Streetfighting’, and that was that.”
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