That legendary encounter unfolded at the Crawdaddy Club within the Station Hotel in Richmond, England, on April 14, 1963.

The Beatles had already secured two No. 1 U.K. smashes—“Please Please Me” and “From Me to You”—whereas the Stones were still 14 months out from their initial climb to the peak of the rankings with “It’s All Over Now,” as Bill Wyman mentioned:

“Midway through the performance, we essentially peered up, and there were four silhouetted leather-jacketed individuals positioned right before the stage amid all these youngsters who were dancing and messing about,” he remarked, observing that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were “being completely overlooked by the crowd.” “I spun around to Charlie [Watts], and I whispered, ‘It’s the Beatles!’ They’d scored two or three massive No. 1 records and were effectively the sensation of Britain during that era. So once we wrapped up our set, we began socializing with them and grabbed some brews, and they remained for the second half. Afterward, we all headed back to the apartment in Chelsea, where Mick [Jagger], Keith [Richards], and Brian [Jones] resided, stayed up all night spinning blues tracks, just chatting about tunes and became close pals.”

Regardless of media efforts to depict a rivalry between the two groups, it was actually Harrison who suggested that Decca Records—which notoriously turned down the Beatles—should ink a deal with the Stones, helping pave their road to stardom.

“We first went to see the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond and then at another place in London. They were run by a different guy then, Giorgio Gomelsky. When we started hanging around London, the Stones were up and coming in the clubs, and we knew Giorgio through Epstein. We went down and saw them and became good friends.I remember Brian Jones came up and said, ‘Are you playing a harmonica or a harp on ‘Love Me Do’?’

because he knew I’d got this bottom note. I said, ‘A harmonica with a button,’ which wasn’t really funky-blues enough; but you couldn’t get Hey! Baby licks on a blues harp and we were also doing Hey! Baby by Bruce Channel”. – John Lennon

“Mick tells the tale of seeing us there with long suede coats that we’d picked up in Hamburg, coats that no one could get in England. He thought, ‘Right – I want to be in the music business; I want one of those coats.” – Paul McCartney