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Fri 5 September 2025 6:00, UK
Does anybody honestly pay any attention to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame anymore?
Much like the Grammys or the Academy Awards in recent years, such lofty institutes feel increasingly like glitzy, self-congratulatory marvels best served as purely industry events over pop-cultural seizures of the entertainment news cycle. As the bottom-up alienation grows fiercer in the febrile contemporary political landscape, the RRHF and its ilk feel ever more anachronistic and lost in a bloated oblivion.
Still, on the RRHF goes, The White Stripes, Outkast, Joe Cocker, and Cyndi Lauper all joining the supposedly coveted halls of rock royalty in 2025. While still holding cache in the biz, many of music’s biggest names have publicly lambasted the RRHOF Foundation. The Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker dubbed the jamboree “Hall of Lame” despite her former band’s induction, Liam Gallagher characteristically dubbed the ceremony “all a load of bollox” on X, and Mark Knopfler didn’t even bother to turn up when his Dire Straits were called up in 2018.
Another notable absence over the years was Paul McCartney. With their first year of eligibility hit in 1988, The Beatles were bestowed with the figurative framing on rock and roll’s gilded Valhalla hall. 18 years on from their final album Let It Be, Mick Jagger took to the stage to induct the old British invasion competition, thanking them for their early-penned ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, gifted to The Rolling Stones in 1963.
“We had a lot of rivalry in those early years, and a little bit of friction, but we always ended up friends,” Jagger confessed, “I like to think we still are, ’cause they were some of the greatest times of our lives, and I’m really proud to be the one that leads them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
Two of the remaining Beatles took to the stage with their respective families, and Yoko Ono joined, representing John Lennon, who’d been assassinated eight years earlier. Yet, McCartney was nowhere to be seen.
Legal troubles had plagued the Fabs for years following their official dissolution in 1974. Caught up in a lengthy dispute over alleged royalty discrepancies, feelings between McCartney and virtually everyone else were sour, prompting a statement at the time from the Wings captain: “After 20 years, The Beatles still have some business differences, which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.”
Fair enough. It marked a jarring induction, however, to The Beatles’ glowing Hall of Fame, missing one of the essential songsmiths that brought about their lauded legacy. Ever the magnanimous type, George Harrison offered a goodwill gesture to their old partner: “Anyway, we all know why John can’t be here, and I’m damn sure he would be. It’s hard to stand here, supposedly representing The Beatles. It’s what’s left, I’m afraid. But we all loved him so much, and we all love Paul very much.”
Legal woes would pass, the three getting together for the acclaimed Anthology album and TV series, and McCartney made clear water was under the bridge when respectively inducting Lennon and Ringo Starr to the “load of bollox” in 1994 and 2015.
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