Credit: Far Out / Universal Music Group

The “seed” that made John Lennon want to leave The Beatles

Tue 7 October 2025 16:00, UK

While there are many reasons and countless rumours, the actual truth of why The Beatles split can only ever be fully known to its members. But even then, it’s subjective as the Fab Four themselves seemed to change answers like the wind, evolving year on year each time they were asked and seemingly depending on how they felt that day.

In the early days, right after the split, their answers came back in a strange middle ground. Sometimes they’d deliver the clinical line that it was simply time for the band to part ways to focus on other projects, but then, as things like McCartney suing his bandmates or sending angry letters to their producer Phil Spector hit the press, that line became much harder.

It became harder again when their solo projects came out and George Harrison was busy singing, “You’ve got me wondering how I lost your friendship,” making it clear throughout All Things Must Pass that the breakup was a personal one too.

“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,” McCartney told the BBC, placing the reason for the split on Lennon and Ono’s relationship. That’s a classic reason, and one a lot of fans have hooked onto for a long time, as they blame the wives for the end of the band.

But in Lennon’s eyes, it had nothing to do with that. “People have blamed Yoko for wrenching you away from the band and destroying The Beatles. How did it really end?”, Newsweek asked Lennon in 1980, to which he answered straight up, “I was always waiting for a reason to get out of The Beatles from the day I filmed How I Won The War. I just didn’t have the guts to do it.”

Given that Lennon made that film in 1966, his unhappiness in the group seemed to be long-running and had less to do with marriage and more to do with missing a sense of freedom. To him, it all came down to feeling stuck.

“The seed was planted when The Beatles stopped touring and I couldn’t deal with not being onstage,” he said, bringing it all back to the band’s decision to stop playing live in 1965. For Lennon, coming up on the stages of Liverpool alongside the band, he was never ready to leave that behind, and couldn’t get over the weirdness that forced him to. It wasn’t just that the band were sick of touring, it was that it had got dark and scary with the hordes of screaming fans and then the levelling up of political tension surrounding them.

“But I was too frightened to step out of the palace,” Lennon said about his decision to hang on for years after that. It seemed he got comfortable in what he perceived as a cage, bringing it all back to an extended metaphor about another star as he said, “That’s what killed (Elvis) Presley. The king is always killed by his courtiers. He is overfed, overindulged, overdrunk to keep him tied to his throne.”

“Most people in the position never wake up,” he said, but to him, he did – and leaving the band was proof.