Keith Richards has slammed The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' album.

The 71-year-old rocker has blasted the band's acclaimed 1967 album - which was previously named Rolling Stone magazine's number one album of all time - dismissing it as ''a load of s**t'' and suggesting they didn't care about the LP.

He said: ''Some people think it's a genius album, but I think it's a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like - 'Oh, if you can make a load of s**t, so can we'.''

The Rolling Stones musician continued to badmouth the album by saying while the band - featuring Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon - were ''great'' with their earlier releases such as 'Please Please Me', 'Revolver' and 'A Hard Day's Night', they got ''carried away'' with the album, which was released three years before their split in 1970.

He told Esquire magazine: ''The 
Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles. But there's not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you're the Beatles in the '60s, you just get carried away - you forget what it is you wanted to do.''