(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Apple Corps LTD)
Thu 21 August 2025 19:00, UK
Keith Richards has never been shy about sharing his opinions.
From his throne as one of rock’s most revered and respected figures, he casts his opinions down onto the public with no worries about ruffled feathers. But sometimes, he goes it hard on a take that simply feels wrong.
“I think The Beatles had passed their performing peak even before they were famous,” Richards once said, and instantly, eyebrows were raised. The Rolling Stones came up just after the band. Richards and Mick Jagger were essentially John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s juniors, following just behind in their footsteps for the British invasion, so with all of The Stones’ comments about the band, there is a slight tone of a put-out or bratty younger sibling.
The Beatles played into that too, as Lennon once even tried to claim that he and McCartney were the only reason the two even wrote songs, that they basically intimidated the Glimmer Twins into getting to work. Despite the friendship between them, the relationship was brotherly and so often volatile. The Beatles took credit for The Stones, and in turn, The Stones often lashed out with stroppy comments like ‘They weren’t even that good anyway’.
However, Richards’ claim that The Beatles peaked before they even made it is downright wrong. He’s suggesting that if we scratched all their albums and evolution post 1963 from the record that they’d have a better legacy, and that’s laughable.
Specifically, though, he zones in on one chapter. “I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re The Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt Pepper,” he said, adding, “Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish.”
His opinion of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is somewhat besides the point here. There are plenty of people who think that album is overrated or simply not as strong in terms of hits or songs as some of the other records. But what Richards fundamentally misunderstood in his reading of it was the purpose of the album.
The point of the 1967 record was to get, in his words, “carried away”. After also stating “the live thing? They were never quite there”, claiming that the band never were that good as a live act, he fails to understand that an album like Sgt Pepper’s was the ultimate antidote to that.
After making the decision to stop touring, they shrugged off all responsibility as a typical rock and roll band. Instead, they squirrelled away in the studio and got weird. They gave themselves zero time constraints, or they just played around, with an experimental, albeit silly, record like this being the result. It’s rebellious in the fact that it could not be played live by the group. It was the ultimate statement of starting something new, and certainly not, as Richards reads it, them forgetting what they wanted to do.
I think that Richards just couldn’t relate. From the start through to today, The Stones have wanted to be a live band and thrived on being a live band. They’re a rock and roll act through and through, where Jagger wants to be the star frontman and Richards wants to step into the spotlight. They want the energy from the crowd and clearly are still excited by that. The Beatles weren’t, and in the mid-60s, finally admitted that and refocused.
Sgt Pepper’s represents that, rather than Richards’ misreading of it being a “rubbish” album that sees the band lose their way.
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