Paul McCartney was the first member of The Beatles to announce that The Beatles were breaking up officially. However, the choice to split had already been made before he said anything. The band would keep it secret for a while, but McCartney let the cat out of the bag first, shocking the world in the process.
Paul McCartney didn’t want the break up of The Beatles to be a secret
McCartney announced the end of The Beatles on April 10, 1970, in a press statement before the release of his first solo album, McCartney. The announcement was a shock to Beatles fans around the world but not to the band themselves. During a 1969 meeting with Allen Klein, John Lennon had already told the band he’d be leaving.
Instead of keeping the band going with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they decided to call it quits. However, Klein wanted the band to keep it a secret. McCartney never liked Klein and thought keeping this news hidden from the public was wrong. In an interview on This Cultural Life podcast, McCartney explained why he revealed music’s biggest secret.
“What actually happened was we were being told to keep it quiet by Klein. ‘Don’t say anything. I’m doing deals.’ And I was like really frustrated by that,” McCartney admitted. “I thought, ‘You know, guys, if were going to split up, let’s just split up.’ But in the end, I was putting out my first solo album, and there was a questionnaire with the guy from the office put in it, ad there was a thing about ‘Are The Beatles still together?’ or something.”
“And I just sort of let the cat out of the bag,” he continued. “I was fed up of hiding this, and I just said, ‘No, there are no Beatles’ or whatever. And so that was the instigating the split, but it had happened months and months before.”
McCartney doesn’t regret spilling the beans, but it did create rumors that he was the one who instigated The Beatles’ breakup. Every newspaper made it seem like McCartney was quitting The Beatles when the band had already split long before that.
McCartney holds no resentment toward Lennon for leaving the band
When John Lennon announced he was leaving The Beatles, that’s when the other members knew the break up was imminent. It wasn’t a complete shock, as Lennon appeared disinterested in The Beatles and more focused on his solo work with Yoko Ono. She had a shared passion for avant-garde music that entranced Lennon, and her presence at the Let It Be sessions proved how involved Lennon wanted her to be in his creative process.
While many blame Ono as one of the main instigators of The Beatles break up, Paul McCartney holds no ill will toward her or Lennon. He knew they were in love, and it was what Lennon wanted to pursue.
“John was making a new life with Yoko,” McCartney explained. “John had always wanted to, sort of, break loose from society. He was brought up by his Aunt Mimi, who was quite repressive. And John was always the one who was looking to break loose. So, we’d done pretty much everything we needed to do with The Beatles, and now he was with Yoko, and he wanted to go in a bag, and he wanted to lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. And you couldn’t argue with that. We were grown men. And he wanted to do that.”
The Beatles released their final album, Let It Be, on May 8, 1970, only a few weeks after they officially split.
