PAUL: TRY TO SEE IT MY WAY!
'John left Beatles'
He’s not going to let it be. Paul McCartney is insisting it was John Lennon who decided the Beatles couldn’t “work it out” in 1970 — and not him, as has been widely reported for five decades.
“I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny coming in one day and saying, ‘I’m leaving the group,’ ” McCartney reportedly told BBC Radio 4 in an interview when asked about his April 1970 comments pronouncing the end of the band’s long and winding road.
“I am not the person who instigated the split. Oh, no, no, no,” he said, according to a preview of the interview in The Guardian on Sunday. “John walked into a room one day and said, ‘I am leaving the Beatles.’ Is that instigating the split or not?”
McCartney said that the group’s new manager, Allen Klein, advised them to keep quiet about the split as he negotiated deals for them but that the now-79-year-old bassist got impatient and “let the cat out of the bag” — making him the face of the iconic band’s separation.
“I was fed up of hiding it,” McCartney said in the interview, set to air this month.
McCartney said Lennon’s pursuit of new projects with wife Yoko Ono — such as their “bed-ins for peace” in Montreal and Amsterdam in 1969 — was incompatible with the band continuing on together.
Lennon “wanted to go in a bag and lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. And you couldn’t argue with that,” McCartney said.
“The point of it really was that John was making a new life with Yoko,” he said. “John had always wanted to sort of break loose from society because, you know, he was brought up by his Aunt Mimi, who was quite repressive.”
He said Lennon called the decision to leave “quite thrilling.” Still, McCartney called Lennon and Ono “a great couple.”
“This was my band, this was my job, this was my life, so I wanted it to continue,” he said.
The BBC interview is set to air on Oct. 24, a month before the premiere of director Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary series about the band’s final days, “The Beatles: Get Back.”