It was 54 years ago today when Paul McCartney put out a press release saying he was no longer working with The Beatles.
Despite this, Macca claimed it was John Lennon who broke up the band in 1970.
Speaking previously with BBC Radio 4, the 81-year-old said: “I’m not the person who instigated the split.
“John walked into the room one day and said, ‘I’m leaving The Beatles’ and he said, ‘It’s quite thrilling, it’s like a divorce.’
“And then we were there to pick up the pieces. I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny, coming in one day and saying I’m leaving the group.”
Hunter Davies, who wrote The Beatles’ only authorised biography during their career, backs up McCartney’s claim. According to The Times, he previously said: “Between 1966 and 1968, when I was hanging around them, it was clear that John had had enough. Of everything really: of his wife, Cynthia, of life, of the whole damn thing.”
Davies claimed Lennon would sit around idle for days, half-stoned and staring into space in total silence. Having become rich and famous, the restless star felt it was all the same and lacked meaning and purpose. But Lennon would find that in Yoko Ono. The biographer said: “The Beatles were dead. Yoko was his future. She mesmerised him and encouraged his dafter, wilder, madder projects.”
In contrast, the author claimed that McCartney “was distraught” upon Lennon saying he was leaving and that Macca “was still in love with everything to do with the Beatles: loved making the albums, loved writing, loved performing, although the Beatles had stopped their public concerts by then.”
Davies remembered McCartney saying to him: “When the Beatles split up, I felt on the rocks. I was accused of walking out on them, which I never did. I think we were all pretty weird at the time because of the court cases. I’d ring John and he would say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ I rang George and he came out with effing and blinding, not at all Hare Krishna.”