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Paul McCartney Blames John Lennon For Breaking Up The Beatles

The Beatles
Eric Koch / Anefo [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
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LONDON (CelebrityAccess) — Sir Paul McCartney has officially laid the blame for the dissolution of The Beatles, one of the most beloved bands in history, squarely at the feet of his late bandmate John Lennon.

In a forthcoming interview with the BBC, McCartney says that he was on ‘break’ from the band at the time and it was Lennon who instigated the permanent split.

“I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny,” he told interviewer John Wilson. “I am not the person who instigated the split.

“Oh no, no, no. John walked into a room one day and said I am leaving the Beatles. And he said, ‘It’s quite thrilling, it’s rather like a divorce.’ And then we were left to pick up the pieces.”

Wilson then asked McCartney if the band could have continued if Lennon hadn’t walked away from his former colleagues.

“It could have,” McCartney replied, according to the BBC.

“The point of it really was that John was making a new life with Yoko and he wanted… to lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. You couldn’t argue with that. It was the most difficult period of my life.”

“This was my band, this was my job, this was my life,” he added. “I wanted it to continue. I thought we were doing some pretty good stuff – Abbey Road, Let It Be, not bad – and I thought we could continue.”

McCartney went on to note that the confusion about the band’s dissolution was in part because of the band’s manager Allen Klein, who asked the members of the group to downplay the split while he wound down the band’s business.


“So for a few months we had to pretend,” McCartney told Wilson. “It was weird because we all knew it was the end of the Beatles but we couldn’t just walk away.”

The full interview, part of BBC Radio 4’s new series This Cultural Life, will air on October 23rd.

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