For half a century, Paul McCartney was the man who “split The Beatles“. When he announced the release of his first, self-titled solo album in April 1970, the world was shocked to hear that the Fab Four were no more. But, he maintains to this day, he was not the one who quit – it was John Lennon.
History still painted McCartney as the bad guy. He told the BBC in October 2021: “I had to live with that because that was what people saw. All I could do is say, ‘no’.”
Peter Jackson‘s documentary Get Back tells the story of The Beatles trying to rehearse for a live TV show that was meant to take place in the January of 1969 – with frustrating results. The TV show never happened, the “Get Back” sessions remained on the shelf for over a year… and the division within The Beatles grew and grew.
So why did Paul McCartney get the blame for splitting up the biggest band of all time? And why is he still keen on setting the record straight 50 years later?
Radio X looks at all the different theories behind why The Beatles broke up…
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The Beatles were already drifting apart
The seeds of the Beatles split were sown the minute they stopped being a performing band in August 1966. While this signalled the peak of their musical career in Sgt Pepper, it meant that they weren’t in each other’s pockets as much as the Beatlemania years and consequently all four developed other interests – and forged new and lasting relationships outside the group.
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Did Yoko Ono split The Beatles?
The most famous of these relationships was between John Lennon and the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, who had got together in May 1968. The introduction of “a Yoko” into a band dynamic has become a rock cliche – and it’s always been the prime piece of evidence when it came to why the Beatles split up.
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The trauma endured by John and Yoko in late 1968 and early 1969 (drug addiction, a miscarriage and the horribly racist attitudes of the British towards Ono) made their bond tighter, but as Peter Jackson’s film shows, the other Beatles weren’t surprised by this turn of events.
“They‘re going overboard about it,“ Paul McCartney says at one point during sessions in January 1969. “But John always does. It’s going to be such an incredible, comical thing, like in 50 years‘ time, for people to say, ‘They broke up ‘cos Yoko sat on an amp’.“ So, even during the actual events, the four members themselves felt that there was more to the split than Yoko turning up.