John Lennon told me he’d rather work with Yoko than Macca!
From the writer who knew The Beatles so well, a startling revelation as he reviews a new book about why the band split
You had to have been there in April 1970 to fully understand the global dismay when Paul McCartney let the cat out of the bag that the Beatles had broken up.
only the Queen abdicating could have been a bigger shock. Because the Beatles weren’t just a pop group. At that moment, their music defined cultural Britain on the world stage. they were at the peak of their creativity and popularity.
the fans knew they’d been falling out among themselves, that Paul hated Yoko ono, John Lennon’s new girlfriend, now attending Beatles’ recording sessions. they knew, too, that John and Paul hadn’t been writing together since her arrival, and that Paul was refusing to join his three colleagues in having the dodgy American businessman Allen Klein as the group’s new manager.
over seven extraordinary years the Beatles had become a national institution. that one day they might not exist was unthinkable.
then the unthinkable happened. And Paul, who loved the Beatles more than any of the other three, was now seen as their executioner. Which he wasn’t. Four months earlier, John had told me a secret. ‘i’ve left the Beatles,’ he’d said while i was with him in Canada. ‘But don’t write it yet.’
i was a young journalist and i knew this was the biggest scoop i would ever get. But John, then probably the most famous man in the world, was telling me as a friend. so i didn’t write the story. i’d made a promise and kept it.
THErE were other reasons for that though. John had a habit of changing his mind when a new craze came along. Could i be sure he wouldn’t have second thoughts about destroying the most loved musical ensemble the world had ever known? i didn’t know.
But there was something else. i was a huge Beatles fan myself. i thought John was crazy for even thinking about breaking them up, and was simply being daft when he asked me: ‘Why should i work with Paul McCartney when i can work with Yoko ono?’
there was no polite way i could have answered that, so i never did. But it does, i believe, illustrate an internal problem in the band. John had found a new chum and was happy to abandon his family of Beatles to accommodate her.
Which is a theme repeated by several other insiders in this excellent series of interviews that Peter Brown (once the chief operating officer of the Beatles company, Apple) and writer steven Gaines originally compiled 40 years ago. Why did the Beatles split up? the answer, seen from 40 different viewpoints, including those of three of the band, is that the Beatles ship foundered in a perfect storm on the rock of rivalry, colliding egos, loss of leadership, greed, boredom, tax debts, business innocence, and vaunting personal ambition when Yoko became involved.
the Beatles were terrible judges of character, which led to them being won over by the infamous rock ’n’ roll wheeler-dealer, Klein, about whom Brown writes: ‘if he’d been in a cartoon there would have been flies buzzing around his head’.
not all of the interviewees agree with each other, with George Harrison being quite sharp about John, as is filmmaker David Puttnam. Hardly any of the others agree with Klein’s reading of events, while Yoko’s suggestion that she’d known John for 18 months before he made a move on her only shows what a prolonged campaign of pestering can do for a girl.
What becomes most clear is that nothing was ever planned by the Beatles. it all just happened by chance, because, of course, they were supremely talented.
For me, the best parts in this book are the snippets of information that were not widely reported at the time, such as Paul’s insistence that Beatles’ tours were ‘ not in the least celibate’ affairs.
then there’s the story of how
the Apple record label confused the president of Capitol Records in America when the artwork for it was sent to him. ‘I know you guys are very avant garde, but you shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. Done what, they wondered, until they took a closer look at the artwork.
John and Paul had been unable to agree on what the label should be, so the artist had simply cut an apple in half. The A- side, Hey Jude, would be the first Beatles’ single on their own label, and would show the apple. While the flip side, Revolution, would show the inside of the apple when it had been halved.
It was a brilliant idea. But, unfortunately, the B- side looked to Americans like female genitalia. It had never occurred to the artist or The Beatles. Presumably, the design was altered slightly before the record went on sale.
Brown was with The Beatles from when the group’s first manager, Brian Epstein, took him from managing a record shop in Liverpool to being his assistant.
Less than a decade later, he was the man in charge of the Georgian house at No 3, Savile Row, London W1, in the heart of Mayfair, where, rumour has it, Nelson’s lover Lady Hamilton, once lived.
I must have gone there dozens of times in the late 1960s and never knew that. But it somehow seems friskily and historically appropriate that The Beatles should have ended there. Would Lady Hamilton have fitted in with the hordes of young fans who laid siege and wept outside that front door in 1970 on the news that The Beatles were no more?
I like to think she might — just another piece in the jigsaw of British history.