Sgt. Pepper? It was rubbish, says Keith Richards

THE rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones goes back to their charttopping days of the 1960s.

And even though the Beatles are long gone and the Rolling Stones haven’t released an album for a decade, that rivalry has never really gone away.

But just in case anyone thought it had, Keith Richards has declared that one of the most important albums of the Fab Four’s career was a ‘mishmash … a load of s***’. The verdict of the Stones guitarist on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967 and viewed as one of the most influential albums in rock, will infuriate Beatles fans.

Richards, 71, added insult to injury by comparing Sgt. Pepper to the Stones’ own poorly received attempt at psychedelic music from the same year, Their Satanic Majesties Request. ‘The Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles,’ said Richards in an interview with Esquire magazine. ‘But there’s not a lot of roots in that music.’

He said the Beatles lost the plot when they started to experiment with psychedelic sounds. ‘I think they got carried away,’ he said. ‘Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the Sixties, you just get carried away – you forget what it is you wanted to do.

‘You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties: “Oh, if you can make a load of s***, so can we”.’

Richards said that despite the Beatles having a more saintly image than The Stones, Paul McCartney and John Lennon slept around just as they did and were so worn out they quit touring. He said: ‘Those chicks wore those guys out. They stopped touring in 1966 – they were done already. They were ready to go to India and s***’.

In September Richards releases his first solo album in two decades, Crosseyed Heart.