Paul wanted Fab Four to get back to where they once belonged
50 YEARS ON, THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE BEATLES SPLIT
IN just four despondent words Paul McCartney broke the hearts of millions of pop fans all over the world.
Asked if his break with The Beatles to make an album was temporary or permanent, Macca replied: “I don’t really know.”
The bombshell came 50 years ago this week in a Q&A from the group’s Apple label, on the eve of Paul’s debut solo LP, McCartney.
The press release sent fans into meltdown, many believing Macca was about to walk out.
Their fears were confirmed by the Daily Mirror, which also had the inside story of explosive rows over the band’s management. On April 10, 1970, the front page read: “Paul is quitting The Beatles.”
The story was true, but the writer who knows Macca best says the star had desperately wanted the band to get back to their early days and tour again.
Bestselling author Philip Norman, who wrote McCartney’s biography, said to be approved by the star, says it was unfair that Paul was blamed by fans for ending The Beatles.
“It was completely unjust,” says Norman. “McCartney had done more than any of them to keep The Beatles together.”
In the Q&A, Macca was also asked if the decision to record alone was “due to personal differences or musical ones”. His answer was another nail in the coffin for Fab Four fanatics.
“Personal differences, business differences, musical differences,” he said. “But most of all, I have a better time with my family.”
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When asked further about whether he was embarking on a solo career, Macca planted more depressing uncertainty.
“Time will tell,” he said. Norman points out that Macca’s songwriting partner John Lennon had in effect already left The Beatles. “John was tired of being in the band years before,” he says. “He hated the hysteria, the pressure to pretend to be nice was something he really hated.
“And only when John met Yoko in 1966 did someone show him a way out. By 1968, John is recording with Yoko, appearing with Yoko and apparently detached from The Beatles, although not officially saying the band are over.
“Also, by that time, both Ringo and George had temporarily walked out. And when they returned, it was Paul against the other three and the unity they once had gone out the window.”
The band were embroiled in a row over who would replace Brian Epstein as their manager, after his death in 1967.
John wanted US businessman Allen Klein, even though Mick Jagger had advised The Beatles against him after he managed the
Rolling
Stones, according to Norman. Paul wanted Lee Eastman – father of then wife-to-be Linda – a showbiz lawyer in New York with many music clients.
And Norman says: “John got the other two against Paul.”
It was this conflict that eventually led to Paul walking out of
Apple, devastated that the closeness between the four men had disappeared. He headed to his farm in Scotland with Linda after marrying her in 1969 and made the solo album with her, using very basic equipment.
“It took him much longer than the others to establish a solo
career,” says Norman. “People had huge disapproval of him because they thought they lost The Beatles because of him, which is not true.”
Norman says to this day Paul still wants to dispel the myths and Macca had been up for a reunion later in the 70s. “He really tried,” he says. “He was the one who believed in them as performers, he basked in what he got from an audience and felt they shouldn’t have lost that.
“He always believed they should have been a proper band and continued. And in the 70s they got such a huge offer that they were ready to re-form and do perhaps one or two reunion concerts, but the whole thing fell apart because they couldn’t agree on album rights and film rights.”
Let It Be, the last Beatles album, had been released in March 1970 but the group did not officially break up until the management row finally resulted in Paul’s lawsuit to dissolve the business partnership at the end of 1970.
A court case in 1971 was the final act of their career. “The press said they had broken up,” says Norman. “But they never officially announced it. All through the 70s everyone was waiting for them to come back again.
“But they themselves spent most of the decade completely as veterans of some awful war they could not talk about.” But Norman says Macca still has huge regard for Lennon.
“He wrote a song about John on an early Wing’s album called Dear Friend that John never knew about,” he says.
“And it was a lovely song, a tribute to him and if he had heard it he would never have written that horrible song How Do You Sleep? about Paul.
“It was ridiculous, as he had nothing to lose sleep about at all, but these myths do die very hard.” sarah.robertson@
reachplc.com