Billy Joel has unexpectedly taken aim at The Beatles, calling one of their albums a ‘collection of half-assed songs’.
In 1968, five years after the release of their debut album Please Please Me, the Liverpudlian band dropped their self-titled album, which also came to become known as the White Album.
The album featured 30 songs, including Blackbird, Helter Skelter and While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Topping record charts in Britain and the United States, the album has since been certified 24× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America and labelled by some as one of the greatest albums of all time.
However nearly 60 years on, one of the band’s contemporaries Billy, 76, has made it clear he is not a fan.
The White Album was written when the band – which included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – attended a Transcendental Meditation course in Rishikesh, India.
Reflecting on the release Billy – best known for his 1973 song Piano Man – didn’t mince his words.
He suggested the Fab Four were ‘too stoned’ or ‘didn’t care anymore’ when recording the string of songs.
‘I hear it as a collection of half-assed songs they didn’t finish writing because they were too stoned, or they didn’t care anymore,’ he said on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, which was released this week.
‘I think they had fragments and they put them on the album.’
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He went on to suggest that Lennon was ‘disassociating at that point’.
‘I think Paul was carrying the weight,’ he said.
‘Sometimes they were more prolific and sometimes they weren’t, and I hear that in some of those things.’
During the recording of the album, the only Western instrument available to the band was an acoustic guitar, with the sound also scaled down and the band breaking with their tradition of incorporating several musical styles in one song.
Lennon – who was killed in 1980 – once famously quipped that ‘the break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album’. The band split two years later.
Meanwhile Sir Paul previously addressed criticism of the album, telling Radio Luxembourg: ‘I’m not a great one for that whole, “Y’know maybe it was too many of that”. What do you mean? It was great, it sold. It’s the bloody Beatles White Album, shut up!’
Before Billy slated one of The Beatle’s most acclaimed releases, earlier this year Sir Paul spoke about his admiration of the singer-songwriter.
Speaking in the Billy Joel: And So It Goes documentary, he spoke about wishing he had penned Billy’s 1997 single Just the Way You Are.
‘When I first heard Billy, it was like “Oh, wait a minute. He’s good. Who’s this?”,’ he recalled.
‘You know, like you do, your ears prick up. The song that really made me know that that was happening was Just the Way You Are.
‘And where I get asked, “Is there a song that you wish you’d written?”. And I always…that’s the one I always say.’
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