Music
Rex Features
According to The New Yorker, the Irish singer-songwriter made the comment when someone in the city described skiffle legend Lonnie Donegan as one of a number of "pre-Beatles rock and roll" artists.
He is quoted as saying: "That's a cliché. I don’t think 'pre-Beatles' means anything, because there was stuff before them.
"Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don't think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it's their mythology.
"The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn't really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless."
He added that he preferred the "real" Little Richard, Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent to the music of Elvis Presley.
Morrison is currently playing a worldwide tour of his 1968 album Astral Weeks, which includes two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall on April 18 and 19.
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