Why did The Beatles Break Up?

Why did The Beatles break up? On the face of it, that we’re still asking the question more than half a century after the fact might seem a little strange. But this is The Beatles we’re talking about, the most important and picked over band in the history of recorded popular music, of course we want to know why they didn’t last beyond the 18 August 1969, the last day they recorded together.

Or was it 20 September that year when Lennon told his bandmates he wanted a ‘divorce’ (it’s worth remembering that, by this point,  Lennon had already released ‘Give Peace a Chance’ as Plastic Ono band earlier in July and recorded the follow up ‘Cold Turkey’ on 30 September which was number 14 in the charts by November)? Maybe it wasn’t until 10 April 1970 when Paul McCartney issued a statement to the press to say that he had left. It might have been 29 December 1974 when all the legal disputes were finally settled and the dissolution of the band was formalised.

If we can’t even agree on the date they broke up, how are we ever going to get to the bottom of the real reason of why a group of 20-somethings who, despite having already composed and recorded some of the finest songs ever written, still potentially had their best years as a group ahead of them?

At this point, some readers may be thinking, who is this idiot writing this, doesn’t he know that Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles? Well, not according to McCartney, who in a recorded conversation with Let It Be director Michael Lyndsay Hogg in 1969 said, ‘It’s going to be such an incredible comical thing like in fifty years time y’know, “They Broke up because Yoko sat on an amp”. There’s nothing wrong really’. It’s true that McCartney’s comment is far from definitive or unambiguous (you can listen to the quote in context in the video below and make you own mind up) but it does seem to strongly infer that McCartney was willing and able to accommodate Lennon and Ono’s inseparability and continue as a Beatle.

According to McCartney, the real culprit was closer to home. In Paul Du Noyer’s excellent book, Conversations with McCartney, he says, ‘There were the arguments, the business differences and all that. We were sort of coming to an end. Round about that time we made Let It Be, but because of the fraught personal relationships, the final straw that broke the camel’s back was Allen Klein coming in.”

Klein was appointed The Beatle’s manager in February 1969 against McCartney’s wishes, who would have preferred his father-in-law Lee Eastman to have had the job. A combination of Klein forcing the band to accept adding Phil Spector’s string arrangements to the otherwise stripped back Let It Be album and taking a jaw dropping 20 per cent fee from them was all too much for McCartney.

The strain on McCartney’s relationship with the other three who were in favour of Klein and his whopping cut of the profits eventually led to McCartney issuing a press statement.  Accompanying the release of his first solo album McCartney, the Q&A stated among other things that his writing partnership with Lennon was over and that he had no plans to work with the other Beatles in the future. The Daily Mirror ran with the headline, ‘Paul Quits The Beatles’ laying the blame firmly at McCartney’s door, despite Lennon quitting the band a few months earlier, albeit in private.

So did Paul McCartney break up The Beatles? The truth is that major fissures had been apparent as far back as August 1968 when Ringo left during quarrels while they were recording the White Album. As he related in an interview in the Anthology documentary series,

‘I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John…I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ So then I went over to Paul’s … I said the same thing and Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.’

Ringo was back within a matter of weeks, greeted by a studio adorned with flowers, which was enough to reconcile him with his fellow bandmates. But fast forward five months and history nearly repeats itself, although this time the wayward Beatle is not Ringo but Harrison. As seen in Get Back, on 10 January, 1969, while the band were running through the arrangement for ‘Two Of Us’ on the soundstage at Twickenham Film studios, George announced ‘I think I’ll be…I’m leaving…the band now’. Although not recorded, Harrison reportedly told the others he would ‘See you round the clubs’ and walked out of the studio.

Although obviously shellshocked, it’s not long before John was suggesting getting Eric Clapton in as a replacement and ruminating  about Harrison, saying, ‘I’m not sure whether I do want him’, hardly the sign of a stable and happy group situation. After a band meeting at Ringo’s house, Harrison agreed to return if the idea for a big live show, which the filmed rehearsals at Twickenham were moving towards, was dropped and rehearsals were relocated to the basement studio at Apple HQ in Saville Row, both of which the other band members acceded to. That Harrison felt the need to dramatically quit and for his return to be dependent on demands and ultimatums doesn’t exactly scream happy campers.  With the band on such shaky ground, it was inevitable that something or someone would soon turn out to be the final straw and that just happened to be Klein.

But the real reason The Beatles broke up was because they had to. They were like the universe, ever expanding. The moment when John, Paul, George and Ringo were first in a room together was the big bang, a release of creative energy that would eventually pull them apart. To mix metaphors, a Beatles year is the human equivalent of a dog year; what they experienced and achieved in 12 months would take most mere mortal a decade. They were maturing and transforming at an astonishing rate and they only way they could realise their full potential was separately, not together.  As Harrison noted in Anthology, The Beatles  ‘gave us the vehicle to be able to do so much’ but ‘it got to the point when it was stifling us, there was too much restriction. It had to self destruct’.

Maybe the ideal outcome was not a permanent disbandment, but a hiatus every so often so that they could let off steam with solo projects and then come back together to do more Beatles. But, arguably, The Beatles as a unified band ceased to truly exist after Revolver. After that, they were four individuals clinging on to the idea of The Beatles but spinning further away from the reality of what  The Beatles had been; every new release pointing towards a future where The Beatles would no longer exist. In their hearts, The Beatles knew better than anyone that it was time to let it be.