[In] their early recorded period between 1963 and '66 [the Stones] looked to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, who had fierce, raucous styles, and then increasingly to the more polished, urban soul sounds of Tamla Motown (Marvin Gaye) and Stax (Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding)….

The basis of their music, therefore, was strongly blues and black rock and roll, with Jagger and Keith Richard originally inclining towards Diddley and Berry….

The blues, which heavily relied on implicit sexual themes, was well-suited to the Stones … because they were able to emphasise sex as a weapon in a deliberate stance of anti-authoritarianism….

The fortunes of the Stones were closely tied in with a need among young audiences in the Sixties for ever more extreme symbols of their liberation from parental control and rejection of authority, and therefore they functioned as a kind of reaction against what the Beatles had come...