Music

Paul McCartney takes a dig at the Rolling Stones, calls them a 'blues cover band'

Ahead of the new Beatles documentary Get Back, the legendary singer-songwriter put down the rival rock band led by Mick Jagger in a new interview.

By

Christian Holub

Published on October 13, 2021 04:44PM EDT

The Beatles are back in the news again.

With Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back documentary on the horizon, Paul McCartney gave a long, in-depth interview to The New Yorker editor David Remnick. While looking back at his career with the Beatles and beyond, McCartney couldn't help but take a swipe at his longtime rivals, the Rolling Stones.

"I'm not sure I should say it, but they're a blues cover band, that's sort of what the Stones are," McCartney, 79, told Remnick. "I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs."

Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have an ongoing rivalry. Richard Young/Shutterstock

Representatives for the Rolling Stones didn't immediately respond to EW's request for comment, but this rivalry is nothing new. Just last year, McCartney told Howard Stern that the Beatles were "better" than the Stones. Frontman Mick Jagger, 78, got the chance to respond to that claim during an appearance on The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music.

"There's obviously no competition. The Rolling Stones [are] a big concert band in other decades and other eras, when the Beatles never even did an arena tour, Madison Square Garden with a decent sound system," Jagger said last April. "[The Stones] started doing stadium gigs in the '70s and [are] still doing them now. That's the real big difference between these two bands. One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums, and then the other band doesn't exist."

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Paul McCartney takes a dig at the Rolling Stones, calls them a 'blues cover band'

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