The Rolling Stones Sing the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” in a Hotel Room (1965)

Today we set the Wayback Machine to Ireland, 1965, where we find a young Mick Jagger and a shockingly restored Keith Richards staving off the downtime boredom of a two-day tour with a not-entirely-reverential Beatles singalong. Despite the drabness of the room in which documentarian Peter Whitehead caught the lads clowning, it’s clear that Jagger was feeling his oats. Go ahead and read those famous lips when he wraps them around the chorus of Eight Days a Week.

This priceless private moment is culled from the just released, not-entirely-finished documentary, The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965. Former Stones’ producer Andrew Loog Oldham recently chalked the near-50-year delay to the massive explosion of the band’s popularity. Padding things out to a proper feature length would have required additional filming. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction had shot to the top of the American charts just two months earlier,  from which point on, the lads’ dance card was filled.

Lucky thing, that. What might in its day have amounted to a fun peek behind the scenes feels far more compelling as a just-cracked time capsule. The sad spectacle of Brian Jones musing about his future options is offset by the youthful larking about of rock’s most celebrated senior citizens.

See the trailer for The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965 right below.

- Ayun Halliday briefly mentioned Mick Jagger’s lips vis-à-vis Lauren Bacall in her memoir, Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste.