John Lennon met Paul McCartney and George Harrison when they were teenagers, and they performed together in The Beatles all through their 20s. When Lennon left The Beatles, he said he did it because he wanted to be able to grow up. He didn’t think it was possible to do this while in the band.
John Lennon said he felt he couldn’t mature in The Beatles
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In 1969, Lennon told his bandmates that he no longer wanted to be in The Beatles. His life had been intertwined with his bandmates’ for so long and he was ready for a break.
“We’re all individuals. And in The Beatles we grew out of it,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “The bag was too small. I can’t impose far-out films or far-out music on George and Paul if they don’t want to do it. Vice versa, Paul can’t impose on me whatever he likes, especially when there’s no common goal anymore. We have to live our own lives separately.”
He felt that he was lost and struggling to mature while with The Beatles.
“I remember at sixteen I still had myself — from sixteen to twenty-nine is when it got lost,” he said. “The struggle to mature, to be a man, to take responsibility … although we were in a cocoon of super-life, we still had to go through the basic maturing that any teenager goes through (whether it’s alone in a room or alone in a big office). Probably thirty is the age you should be just about waking up and realizing that you’re in control of yourself.”
George Martin said The Beatles broke up because they wanted to grow as individuals
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Longtime Beatles producer George Martin also believed that the band craved time apart. He believed that as they aged, they wanted to spend more time with their wives instead of their bandmates.
“They’d always been having to consider the group; so they were always a prisoner of that — and I think they eventually got fed up with it,” Martin said. “They wanted to live life like other people, where your wife is more important than your working partner. As Yoko came along, as eventually Linda came along, they were more important to John and Paul than John and Paul were to each other, and the same went for the other boys too.”
John Lennon never wanted The Beatles to go through a brutal split
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While Lennon felt that the band had reached its natural endpoint, he hadn’t wanted to go through an acrimonious split. It saddened him when they did.
“I always remember the film with those British people who wrote those silly operas, Gilbert and Sullivan,” he said. “I remember watching the film with Robert Morley in and thinking, ‘We’ll never get to that.’ And we did, which really upset me. I really never thought we’d be so stupid, like splitting and arguing. But we were naive enough to let people come between us and that’s what happened. But it was happening anyway.”
Though the split was painful, the former bandmates rebuilt their relationships throughout the 1970s.
