Paul McCartney calls out The Rolling Stones for being "a Blues cover band"

Paul McCartney used some bold words to describe The Rolling Stones during a new interview with The New Yorker.

When discussing the ways The Beatles seemed to redefine themselves on every album and remarking on their inventiveness, the writer noted that though he waved "away such high-flown talk," Macca wasn't "above suggesting that the Beatles worked from a broader range of musical languages than their peers—not least 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,” he confessed. “I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”

This isn't the first time McCartney's given the Stones a hard time. In another interview he declared that "The Beatles were better.”

That comment caught the ear of Mick Jagger, who replied with a cheeky comment of his own.

“That’s so funny. He’s a sweetheart. There’s obviously no competition,” he said at the time. “The big difference, though, is and sort of slightly seriously, is that The Rolling Stones is a big concert band in other decades and other areas when The Beatles never even did an arena tour, Madison Square Garden with a decent sound system. They broke up before that business started, the touring business for real.”

“So that business started in 1969 and the Beatles never experienced that," he continued. "They did a great gig, and I was there, at Shea stadium. They did that stadium gig. But the Stones went on, we 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.”