Street Fighting Man: The Beggars Banquet Track the BBC Couldn't Handle

The song is “Street Fighting Man”, the opener on The Rolling Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Mick Jagger read about growing student protests in London and Paris and saw a headline that basically screamed “street fighting man” at him. He wrote the lyrics as a response to the volatility of that year.

The BBC banned the single because they thought it was a call to riot. Jagger always insisted it was more observational than instructional — a snapshot of the era’s tension rather than a Molotov cocktail. The irony is that the song’s jangly, acoustic-based groove (thanks to Keith Richards’ open-G tuning) sounds more like a folk singalong than a battle cry.