Speaking to the podcast George Ezra & Friends on May 7, John shared his opinion on a number of hardships that celebrities have to deal with.
The living music icon complained that today, hits stay on the charts for too long and that this hinders artists' motivation to write more songs.
"I think that impairs an artist," he said, according to Digital Spy, "‘cause you get someone like Ed Sheeran, who wants to make records like we did — two a year — and it's harder to do that now because records stay in the charts and on the radio for too long."
According to John, one of Sheeran's ditties topped the charts for so long he got sick of hearing it all the time.
"On the [American radio] chart, which is the middle-of-the-road chart, Ed Sheeran is still number one and 'Shape of You' is still in the chart. It's like, 'Why?' How many times do you want to listen to this?" the musician said.
Sheeran is a close friend of John's and the latter even acted as Sheeran's mentor during his rise to stardom.
Continuing to discuss Sheeran, John warned that for every musician, there's a period of great creativity and recognition and then one has to prepare for an eventual loss of popularity.
"You have a heyday and then you have the rest, and the heyday can never be replaced," he said. "From '70 to '76, that was the heyday [for me]. And then after that I had the common sense to know I'm not going to have a number one [hit] every time straight away."
"I knew someone else would take over," he continued. "It's cyclical… Ed will go through that and I've talked to him about it. I've said, 'There'll come a time where this won't happen every time and you have to accept that.'"
The singer also said he actually hates the word "celebrity."
"I hate the word celebrity. You have to work for it, the people who don't work for it and get it instantaneously are the ones who go…[pfft], like that," Daily Mail quoted him as saying.
He also complained about the spread of mobile phones, saying they kill privacy for celebrities, as celebrities can no longer behave "extraordinarily badly" in public and get away with it.
"I hate mobile phones, camera phones. I don't go out anymore. There's no privacy anymore. When I started out there were no mobile phones, no kind of paparazzi, we had it so easy," he explained.
"You can afford to be out of your mind and behave extraordinarily badly in public and no one would be able to take a photograph, which I did many times! Unfortunately that's all changed with the advent of technology. Going out now is an effort," the singer opined.