Trying to pin The Beatles’ breakup on one person is pointless. Yes, many people wrongly believe that the common culprit was Yoko Ono entering the studio and taking up John Lennon’s focus. Peeling back the layers of their demise, though, only four people had the choice of whether to call things off or stay in it for the long haul. Paul McCartney may have been the last person who wanted to bring the Fab Four down, but with his debut record, we saw the formal breakup in writing for the first time.
Then again, McCartney is the kind of album that isn’t supposed to exist. If anything, this feels like a demo session that McCartney put together at his home that just happened to feature the massive single ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ on it. In many cases, a lot of the songs were made just to fill time in between Beatles records, so it’s not like McCartney was looking to outdo Abbey Road or anything.
Despite its ramshackle approach, this might have been the closest to that back-to-basics mentality of Let It Be fully realised, with Macca playing every single note on the record and delivering a homespun feel to every tune. No matter how rudimentary the setup is, hearing him croon his way through ‘Every Night’ is still one of the most comforting sleeper hits of his solo catalogue.
It’s not like McCartney was the first to put out his own album independent of The Beatles. John Lennon and George Harrison had released their experimental records, and Ringo Starr’s attempt to be a crooner on Sentimental Journey was still in stores when McCartney first released his album, but the change came when McCartney decided to do promotion for the record.
He had no intention of making the usual PR rounds, so he chose the next best thing by including some answers to questions with the album, saying, “Pete Brown said, ‘You’ll have to do publicity’. There was now way that I could sit around and do a press conference, but I recognised the need for some publicity. I said, ‘Why don’t you do some questions for me, and I’ll do a Q&A?’”
While McCartney was just looking to contextualise the album, his single response of ‘No’ when asked about working with any new Beatles projects in the future was enough to break any casual Fab fan’s heart. Their last album, Let It Be, didn’t even have time to build momentum, but most of the public already knew that the beloved moptops were officially done.
Despite their artistic differences, this was the crucial moment where Lennon and McCartney’s relationship started to go sour. After all, Lennon was the one who started the group all the way back in the late 1950s, and yet here was his partner in crime claiming to end everything just because he wanted to release his album a bit early.
Then again, it’s hard to ignore the truth about any of these circumstances. No matter how long fans held out hope, The Beatles were to be left in the 1960s, and anything they did after their breakup was just a reflection of how the dream of The Fab Four going on forever was impossible.
