By Mark Savage
BBC Music Correspondent
For almost 50 years, Sir Paul McCartney has shouldered the blame for breaking up the Beatles.
The supposed evidence was a press release for his 1970 solo album, McCartney, where he revealed he was on a “break” from rock’s biggest band.
Interviewing himself, Sir Paul said he could not “foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again”.
But in a new BBC interview, he has said the split was prompted by John Lennon.
“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.”
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Wilson asked whether the band would have continued if Lennon hadn’t walked away.
“It could have,” Sir Paul replied.
“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.”
Paul McCartney says John Lennon ‘instigated’ the Beatles’ break-up – BBC News
