John Lennon initiated the Beatles' split, Paul McCartney emphasizes in an upcoming BBC interview.
"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. Is that instigating the split, or not?,” Paul tells John Wilson on This Cultural Life, which airs later this month on Radio 4.
According to an advance look at the show published in The Guardian:
Confusion about who caused the break-up arose because the group’s new manager, Allen Klein, told them to keep quiet about the split while he concluded some business deals. “So for a few months we had to pretend,” McCartney tells Wilson. “It was weird because we all knew it was the end of the Beatles but we couldn’t just walk away.” Eventually, McCartney became unhappy with the subterfuge and “let the cat out of the bag” because “I was fed up of hiding it.”
Remembering the unpleasant atmosphere at the time and the “dodgy” influence of Klein, McCartney said: “Around about that time we were having little meetings and it was horrible. It was the opposite of what we were. We were musicians not meeting people,” he said. The split became inevitable, he believes, because John “wanted to go in a bag and lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. And you couldn’t argue with that.” Yet he does not hold Yoko responsible, he adds. “They were a great couple. There was huge strength there.”
The lawyers, he claims, were brought in to protect the Beatles legacy: “I had to fight and the only way I could fight was in suing the other Beatles, because they were going with Klein. And they thanked me for it years later. But I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny coming in one day and saying ‘I’m leaving the group’.”
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