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For years he has been the black sheep blamed for the end of The Beatles. But Paul McCartney is now changing that. “It was John who wanted to split,” he says in an interview that will be broadcast next month.
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Guy StevensSource: the guardian
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Dozens of books have been written about the end of The Beatles. With invariably the central question: why on earth did the legendary group from Liverpool disband in 1970, after irrevocably changing the music world? Not Ringo Starr, not George Harrison and not John Lennon got the black pete for that, but Paul McCartney. He would have been the man who split the band and ultimately pulled the plug, many music historians have said. Legend has it that McCartney made that decision on his own when he replied to a journalist’s question that The Beatles no longer existed. He was also criticized for subsequently hiring lawyers to resolve disputes between the group members.
Parting
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McCartney has finally responded to that, and is shining a whole different light on the Beatles’ ending. “I didn’t initiate that split,” McCartney said in a lengthy interview to be aired later this month. “That was our Johnny (John Lennon, nvdr). One day he stepped into the studio and said he was getting out of the group. Is that starting the split or not?”
Lennon described that decision as “fairly difficult” and “like a divorce,” McCartney said. It was the other group members who had to arrange everything else, it still sounds. And the manager who had just come on board, Allen Klein, asked them all to keep quiet about the split so he could close a few more business deals. “So we had to pretend for a few months. That was very strange, because we knew it was over but we couldn’t really stop.” In the end, McCartney said it himself in that famous interview “because I was tired of hiding it”.
Eight years
The bassist, who also had great successes solo and with Wings after The Beatles and will turn 80 next summer, calls that period the most difficult of his life. “I wanted the group to continue, especially since we were only eight years old and were still making good music. Abbey Road, Let It Be, not all bad… This was my group, my job, my life. So I wanted to continue.”
So it was John Lennon who decided to quit The Beatles. Had he not done so, according to McCartney, “a beautiful musical journey” would certainly have followed. “It could have been. But John was creating a new life with Yoko. John has always had the desire to tear himself away from society. He was raised by his aunt Mimi, who was quite repressive, so he always wanted to break out.”
That people have put the blame on him all these decades has hurt McCartney, he says. “I had to live with that, because that was what people saw. I could only say no.”
The full interview on BBC Radio 4 will be broadcast on October 23.
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