The rock veteran has previously been outspoken in his lack of regard for the Fab Four's music, criticising their live performance and he even famously called their iconic 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a, "mishmash of rubbish".
However, Richards confessed that without The Beatles making it big in America in the mid-1960s, the Stones wouldn't have become the phenomenon they are today.
"There's no getting away from it ," he told The Sun newspaper. "Without The Beatles, I doubt there'd have been The Rolling Stones as such. They had that wonderful all-round appeal, something we certainly weren't working on.
"We didn't have to put up with being the Mop Tops or the Fab Four. Before The Beatles, hardly any British acts had broken America but they opened the door and I guess we kicked it in," he added.
The Beatles split up in 1970 and Keith said that he puts their early demise down to the scrutiny they were under.
"They got off the bus just before it really got moving, you know," explained Richards. "The pressure they were under being The Beatles is maybe one of the reasons why we're still around."
For Keith Richards, their differences come down to one major factor.
The Beatles are Liverpool’s favourite sons, all coming from working-class northern backgrounds, singing about the landscape around them and proving that great things can come from humble beginnings. On the flip side, The Stones are southern and, realistically, pretty posh.
But to Richards, the line was drawn by only one thing: the music. Even though they were coming up at the same time, he didn’t compare the two groups as he thought that, at their core, they were built of different stuff.
“Everyone in The Beatles could sing,” Richards said to Louder Sound. While it could be argued that Ringo Starr isn’t much of a singer, the fact remains the same. After the split of the band, all four members went solo, taking on the role of the frontman with their own songs and their own artistic identity.
To the Stones guitarist, that’s the major difference between them as, for a lot of their band, that wouldn’t be possible.
“We were more of a music band. We only had one frontman,” Richards claimed. It’s true. The Stones have always been led by Mick Jagger, with the group falling around him like a traditional set-up of guitarists, bass players and drummers who do their job and do their job well.
