(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 15 February 2026 18:15, UK
It doesn’t take much for Keith Richards to start tearing apart any musician that he doesn’t like.
He can only be honest in interviews, and while he has nothing but love for the friends and the heroes that he has met along the way, there are more than a few new kids on the block that didn’t exactly resonate the same way with him as the rest of the world. But even if the next generation wasn’t giving him much to work with, Keef wasn’t exactly in love with everyone that he met in his prime, either.
I mean, just look at how he got treated by someone like Chuck Berry. Richards has forever been known as one of the single coolest guitarists in the world, and while he’s more than happy to go with the flow on anything, the footage of him nearly coming to blows with one of his heroes is more than a little bit painful to watch. But meeting heroes wasn’t what Richards was in the business for whenever he played.
His musical teachers were the ones reminding him that music was the most important thing in the world, and chances are, he would have had as much fun playing a stadium show with the band as he would strumming away with Gram Parsons back in the day. Then again, there was always going to be that one four-headed monster in the background of his story every single time he made a new song.
And while it’s not exactly fair to compare The Stones to The Beatles all the time, it’s hard to really ignore their lineage. Mick Jagger and Richards wouldn’t have been able to be a songwriting team were it not for John Lennon and Paul McCartney helping them get their foot in the door. They were more than happy to help them push forward, but by the time that the Fab Four had called it a day, Lennon was a lot less diplomatic with the people that he met once he reached the top.
It’s not like The Stones were bitter enemies by any stretch, but Lennon felt that they had asked for his help way too much. For all he knew, Jagger and Richards were a bunch of kids trying to ride their coattails, and given the fact that they eventually made genre pivots directly after The Beatles did, it’s not like that’s an unfounded idea. Both bands were putting out great music, but Richards’s rebuttal to Lennon was a bit more brutal.
The Fabs had gone their separate ways, and Lennon was trying to sort out his damaged mind, but Richards felt that there was no need for him to tear down The Stones as his career was crumbling, saying in 1971, “John has just been bitter and always has been. He could never take another band coming up and doing things better than him, maybe. I mean, they could do things better than we could, and we can do things better than they can. John Lennon is probably past his golden period unless he does something soon. Musically, he hasn’t done anything even approaching what he did.”
From a commercial perspective, that was probably true, but that doesn’t mean that everything Lennon did was terrible by any stretch. He had peaks and valleys throughout his career, sure, but Plastic Ono Band is the kind of album that you need to sit with for a while. Not everyone was ready for him to say ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’ on a song like ‘God’, but over time, that statement was one of the most important lyrics that he ever wrote after he went in his own direction.
That might not have been the same direction The Stones were moving in, but it wasn’t like Lennon cared either way. He had already reached the top of the musical mountain, and he was going to spend the rest of his career quoting his own heart and seeing what else he could get away with on record.