How The BEATLES split up BEFORE Abbey Road

Fifty years on, a remix of the classic album is set to be No 1 AGAIN. Here, one of the band’s confidants reveals how Lennon told him the Fab Four were over before it came out... so why didn’t he scoop the world?

Whoever could have imagined it? Fifty years after its initial release The Beatles’ last album, Abbey road, is set to top the charts again today. remixed and repackaged, and coming with various forms of deluxe offerings, including a couple of extra Paul McCartney demo recordings of songs he gave away to other artists at a time when he just couldn’t stop writing hits, it’s an astonishing milestone of popular music.

Back in the Sixties, virtually everyone accepted without question that The Beatles were exceptional, and that some of their songs would have a long life.

But, in truth, none of us could have predicted the tribes of tourists who walked across that famous zebra crossing in London’s St John’s Wood on the album’s re-release last Friday — as thousands have been doing this past half century.

It’s pointless to ask whether any of today’s rock stars will be so recognised in another 50 years’ time. Some of their songs might possibly still be sung. But they won’t have the historic clout which the four left behind on the stripes of that crossing the day that album cover photograph was taken.

Because the extraordinary thing is that even before Abbey road was released on September 26, 1969, John Lennon had already told the other three Beatles that he wanted a divorce from them; that for him, The Beatles were already dead. It was a huge secret at the time — and would remain so for many months.

The occasion for his outburst had come several days’ earlier, during a Beatles’ board meeting at their multi- media corporation Apple headquarters in London, when Allen Klein, their new American manager, needed their signatures on a recording contract that he’d only just negotiated.

Before they got the pens out, however, Paul McCartney, buoyed by knowing how well the group had worked on making Abbey road, began talking about how The Beatles should start playing live again — they had given up touring in 1966.

Paul suggested it might be an idea for them to play surprise onenight stands at unlikely places, ‘by just letting a few hundred fans into the village hall’ and then closing the door. Then he asked John and ringo what they thought — George being away in Liverpool, visiting his sick mother, at the time.

only John replied. ‘I think you’re daft,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving The Beatles. I want a divorce’… like, he added, the one he’d had from his first wife, Cynthia, the previous year.

Paul was distraught. he and John were not nearly as close as they’d been before Yoko ono’s arrival, but they’d got along well enough in the studio that summer. A few weeks earlier they’d even been talking about doing another album and putting out a new single at Christmas.

John, however, had had second thoughts, mulling about life without The Beatles when he’d suddenly been asked to fly to Canada one weekend to play at a rock and roll peace festival. he’d taken eric Clapton with him.

The Beatles had become a straitjacket for him, the others even having refused to record his new song Cold Turkey as a single — which was hardly surprising. It was about his heroin addiction.

he hadn’t, he later told me, gone to Apple that day intending to blurt out his decision. But Paul’s enthusiasm for a Beatles future had been the trigger. And, once he said that he was leaving, it couldn’t be unsaid — although Paul, who was in shock, hoped it could.

It was a huge worry for manager Klein, too. And, fearing that news of the split might be commercially disastrous for Abbey road, which was due to go on sale, as well as the film and album of Let It Be, which had been made earlier that