Five musicians The Beatles hated
As the most successful band of all time, The Beatles had everything required to change the world. While their musical talent was undoubtedly the most significant aspect of their story, it is certain that they would not have embarked on such a pioneering journey without attitude. This outspoken nature and desire to bring down the barricades of the past would see them push themselves into untapped areas and facilitate the growth of popular music.
Although they might not have known it when they were just another gang of unruly, shaggy-haired upstarts cutting their teeth in Hamburg, it wouldn’t be too long following the arrival of drummer Ringo Starr that the quartet would push the limits of rock ‘n’ roll. Things moved quickly for the group, and thanks to the proliferation of the countercultural spirit, drugs, and the influence of some of their most prominent peers, their odyssey would become the stuff of legend, with the world a markedly different place by the time they all went their separate ways in 1970.
As they were true innovators and unafraid to cast off musical tradition, it was only fitting that the Fab Four were also more outspoken than musicians had ever been. In their time together and as solo entities, the band members provided many moments of critiquing other artists by making their disdain for them and their work known, a profoundly countercultural standpoint, despite how offensive they sometimes were.
Entirely unafraid to speak their mind, it wasn’t all John Lennon claiming the band were “more popular than Jesus”. The group were artistic realists, and it was this that carried them throughout their career, in the high points and the lows, and what made the immediate aftermath of their acrimonious split particularly fascinating.
So, without further ado, find five musicians The Beatles hated below.
Five musicians The Beatles hated:
The Hollies
Hailing from the same region of England didn’t stop George Harrison from hating The Hollies. It all started when the Manchester group covered his composition ‘If I Needed Someone’, which arrived the same day it arrived on 1965’s stoned classic, Rubber Soul.
Speaking to the NME in December of that year, the month both works arrived, Harrison didn’t waste time in letting his thoughts about The Hollies and their rendition of his song be known. He called it “rubbish”, with reporter Alan Smith writing: “George was getting ready for the first house performance, and I asked him about songwriting. ‘I see you’ve written one for The Hollies.’ George turned sharply away from the mirror. ‘Tell people that I didn’t write it for The Hollies,’ he said bluntly.”
He continued: “It’s called ‘If I Needed Someone’, and they’ve done it as their new single, but their version is not my kind of music. I think it’s rubbish the way they’ve done it! They’ve spoilt it. The Hollies are all right musically, but the way they do their records, they sound like session men who’ve just got together in a studio without ever seeing each other before. Technically good, yes. But that’s all.’”
Famously, Harrison’s comments started an intense feud with The Hollies. Only a week after the interview hit the shelves, Graham Nash, the leader of The Hollies, dared to fall out of line and aired an opinion that many were thinking at this point. He said he was “sick and tired” of everything The Beatles did being listened to with religious attention to detail.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Even though John Lennon was in many ways the ultimate chart artist, earning many accolades with The Beatles and as a solo act, in the years following the demise of his old band, he would maintain that he rarely listened to the top ten.
“Only when I’m recording or about to bring something out will I listen [to the Top Ten],” he told Rolling Stone in 1971. “Just before I record, I go buy a few albums to see what people are doing. Whether they have improved any, or whether anything happened. And nothing’s really happened”.
This meant that when Jann S. Wenner asked him if he liked anything found at the top of the charts, the opinionated rocker would flip the question and cite an outfit he didn’t like. This time, it just so happened to be New York jazz-rock outfit Blood, Sweat & Tears, who he had in his crosshairs.
“I don’t like the Blood, Sweat & Tears shit. I think all that is bullshit,” Lennon said. “Rock ‘n’ roll is going like jazz, as far as I can see, and the bullshitters are going off into that excellentness which I never believed in and others going off.”
Some have even suggested that Lennon’s ire for the ‘And When I Die’ group was due to their self-titled album winning a Grammy Award over The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Regardless, the great innovator appeared to regard the group as the antithesis of the “avant-garde of rock’ n’ roll”, whatever that might be.
Neil Young
While George Harrison might have been known as ‘The Quite One’, like the rest of his bandmates, he wasn’t afraid to make it known when he didn’t like an artist. One man he weirdly hated the work of was Neil Young, a countercultural peer and fellow guitar hero.
In footage taken during a 1992 studio session, Bob Geldof discusses the work of the ‘Old Man’ songwriter with the scouse icon and, at one point, asks him if he had heard the track ‘Around the World’. In response, Harrison revealed his hatred for the Canadian and his guitar playing.
“I’m not a Neil Young fan,” he asserted. As Geldof then praised Young’s guitar playing further, the former Beatle interrupted him: “I hate it, yeah I can’t stand it”.
Not done with the vitriol, Harrison also mimicked Young’s approach to the six-string: “It’s good for a laugh. We did this show with him, I saw it from the other side of the stage and looked around. I looked at Eric and said, ‘What’s going on?’ He did the solo in the middle then he kind of looked at me like – ‘don’t look at me, it’s not me’.”
Elvis Presley
Although John Lennon decried many musicians in his time, one of the most significant was his takedown of ‘The King of Rock and Roll’, Elvis Presley, a man who greatly inspired him when he was young. However, after growing up and developing as an artist, Lennon came to abhor everything the Tupelo native stood for and his music.
When asked about the hit ‘Devil in Disguise’ in 1963, Lennon said that he felt Presley had started to wither. He told Juke Box Jury: “I used to go mad on Elvis, like all the groups, but not now. I don’t like this. And I hate songs with ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in it — you know, those lyrics. She walks, she talks. I don’t like that. And I don’t like the double beat: doom-cha doom-cha, that bit. It’s awful. Poor ol’ Elvis”.
Despite galvanising his imagination when just a child, like many of his generation, Lennon had grown out of Elvis Presley by that point: “Well, I’ve got all his early records, and I keep playing them. He mustn’t make another like this. But somebody said today he sounds like Bing Crosby now, and he does. I don’t like him anymore”.
Lennon would later take another dig at Presley by describing the time of filming the 1965 movie Help! as his “fat Elvis period”.
Phil Collins
Paul McCartney might be a doe-eyed angel when he wants to be, but like the rest of his bandmates, he has a thorny side and one that has been more offensive to those who have experienced it due to his supposedly nice-guy image. One man who felt the sting of McCartney’s snide side was Genesis man Phil Collins, someone who grew up loving The Beatles.
A big fan of the ‘Fab Four’, Collins’ opinion of McCartney would change after an incident at Buckingham Palace in 2002, with their relationship reportedly still frosty over 20 years later. When he found out that the ‘Yesterday’ songwriter would be at the event, he came prepared, but unfortunately for him, the former Beatle was not the kind-hearted soul he thought he would be, and he was left angered by his treatment. Clearly, McCartney didn’t think much of him or his music at all.
In 2016, Collins told The Sunday Times: “I met him when I was working at the Buckingham Palace party back in 2002. McCartney came up with Heather Mills and I had a first edition of The Beatles, by Hunter Davies, and I said, ‘Hey, Paul, do you mind signing this for me?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Heather, our little Phil’s a bit of a Beatles fan’. And I thought, ‘You fuck, you fuck’. Never forgot it.”
He added: “He has this thing when he’s talking to you, where he makes you feel [like], ‘I know this must be hard for you because I’m a Beatle. I’m Paul McCartney and it must be very hard for you to actually be holding a conversation with me.’”
