As one of the most successful musical acts of all time, The Beatles are truly an icon in music. They hold many musical records that have yet to be shattered almost 51 years after their eventual break-up. The details and inner workings of how the world’s first iconic pop stars came to such a sudden halt trumps fans to this day. Sir Paul McCartney has made it clear late fellow Beatles member John Lennon and musician Yoko Ono played a part in the band breakup. New revelations come out that it was in fact John Lennon’s idea to split. The news comes on the heels of Paul McCartney’s new interview with Vanity Fair.
“Stop right there. I am not the person who instigated the split. Oh no, no, no,” McCartney told John Wilson, the host of BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life. “John walked into the room one day and said, ‘I am leaving the Beatles.’ And he said, ‘It’s quite thrilling. It’s rather like a divorce.’”
It seems early rumors about Paul McCartney being at the center of the split were wrong. The person who received most of the hate was probably Yoko Ono. To this day, many Beatles fans refuse to speak her name in meetings or communities. Once John Lennon began his infamous love affair with Yoko Ono, the rest of the Beatles could sense Lennon’s drifting ways. Interests in art projects outside the band caused the rift.
“The point of it really was that John was making a new life with Yoko, and he wanted to go in a bag and lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam, for peace,” he said, referring to the couple’s anti-war art project Bed-ins for Peace from 1969. “And you couldn’t argue with that.”
Paul McCartney talked about the emotional toll the breakup took on him and the band. “It was the most difficult period of my life,” he said. “The Beatles were breaking up, and this was my band, this was my job, this was my life. I wanted it to continue, and I thought we were doing some pretty good stuff—Abbey Road, Let It Be, not bad—and I thought we could continue.”
In the months that followed the band’s breakup, rumors swirled about the end. According to Beatles manager Allen Klein, McCartney had “personal problems” that were leading to a rift within the group. McCartney destroys that claim. It led Paul McCartney to sue his former bandmates to end their contractual agreement. After news broke out about the lawsuit, rumors and threats against McCartney only increased. Years later, Paul McCartney still has to defend himself against the tide of rumors.
