The moment John Lennon knew The Beatles were over
In April 1970, The Beatles finally split up, leaving the music world to mourn the divorce of rock’s most influential luminaries. For some fans, this news came as a shock. In retrospect, we know tensions were reaching a boiling point in the late 1960s, but at the time, public word of such friction was limited and subject to conjecture. When the news was made official, teens sobbed in their bedrooms beneath posters and worldwide, hippies stepped gingerly into the new decade with heads to the ground.
While the severance was made official in the spring of ’70, the break-up was an inevitability that The Beatles could sense on the horizon long before. No one event led to the ultimate dissolution of the band; if one over-arching reason must be given, it was simply a case of four creative birds overcrowding a small nest; the Beatles needed to spread their wings and find space for solitude.
As seen in Peter Jackson’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Beatles: Get Back released in 2021, relations between the foursome became particularly frosty during the studio sessions for Abbey Road and Let It Be.
Paul McCartney had assumed a managerial position while George Harrison struggled to squeeze compositions onto the tracklists. Meanwhile, John Lennon became increasingly withdrawn as he channelled attention towards his omnipresent wife, Yoko Ono. In one of the documentary’s most poignant and telling moments, Harrison stormed out of the studio. “See you ’round the clubs,” he said as he temporarily quit the band.
Amid the frost was a stoic Ringo Starr, waiting for the bickering to pause so he could lay down some beats. However, about a year before Peter Jackson’s archival study picked up on the group, Starr, too, had walked out on the band to leave McCartney on drumming duties for the final two songs put down for the record commonly referred to as The White Album.
Any observer might have deemed one of these exits the final straw – the moment the Beatles entered terminal velocity in their descent to fate. However, in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Lennon placed the marker back to August 27th, 1967, the day of manager Brian Epstein’s death.
From their early rise to global success, Epstein had been the glue that held the Beatles together. He was a close friend of all and a central comfort amid the chaos of rock and roll superstardom. Without this vital link, intra-band relations could become white-hot without a control rod.
The Beatles were visiting Wales for a spiritual retreat with the Maharishi when they caught wind of Epstein’s fatal overdose. As Lennon recalled, the spiritual leader tried to encourage the group to focus on positive thoughts to pull through the difficult period, but this was easier said than done.
“I was stunned,” he told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. “I don’t know whether you’ve had it, but I’ve had a lot of people die around me, and the other feeling is, ‘What can I do?’”
“I knew that we were in trouble then,” he added. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve fuckin’ had it.’” Soon after, The White Album would confirm Lennon’s anxieties. “We broke up then,” he concluded of Epstein’s passing.
With Epstein out of the picture, McCartney seemed to fill the void with his managerial instincts, much to the frustration of his peers. “Paul took over and supposedly led us,” Lennon told Rolling Stone. “But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? That was the disintegration.”
Listen to The Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye’, the first release following the death of Brian Epstein, below.
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