The Beatles project Paul McCartney said was bound to fail: “Your vision is different from mine”
By the time The Beatles split, it looked like Paul McCartney was dangerously close to becoming the casualty of the band.
He didn’t want to lose his best friends, but after falling out over business, you could tell that he was genuinely hurt and not sure of where to go after spending years of his life being in one of the biggest bands in the world. But even if he had to go through hell to get Wings off the ground, he knew better than to try to milk The Beatles’ legacy for all it was worth when he first started performing.
After all, the Fab Four was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and even if he reminded everyone of the heights that he set with his old band, he didn’t want to live his life based on what happened in only one decade of it. He had a lot more to say, but there was a hard chance that any of the members of the band were going to be able to outrun their old selves when they first started making records.
Ringo Starr might have been the most open to the idea of the band reuniting, but considering John Lennon said that he didn’t believe in the Beatles at the end of Plastic Ono Band, it felt like the world stopped collectively holding its breath. The dream was officially over, and they were left to pick up the pieces and see what the rest of the band members were going to do in their solo careers. And if they couldn’t get it with the main members of the group, they could always go elsewhere.
Let’s face it: there was no shortage of people who were trying to copy what The Beatles did, and even when looking at the other signings on Apple, Badfinger seemed to capture the same kind of power-pop sound that the Fab Four had done back in the day. The rest of the world had moved on to the likes of Led Zeppelin, but even if McCartney was proud of his musical history, he knew that a movie like Sgt Peppers was bound to fail before it even hit theatres in the late 1970s.
Which is a shame considering the pedigree of talent on display. It’s not like Aerosmith, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Billy Preston give horrible performances, but when you look at the expectations, it was never going to match what The Beatles did. Sgt Peppers was meant to be a journey inside the listener’s mind, and when you look at the massive amount of kitschy disco schlock that they threw into the movie, McCartney knew that the whole thing was going to be treated like a farce.
It’s one thing to love The Beatles, but Sgt Peppers represented what happened when Beatlemania went too far as far as Macca was concerned, saying, “What I love is you get your own picture. This is why when they came to film Sgt. Pepper with the Bee Gees, I said ‘This is never going to work’ because everyone has their own image from Sgt. Pepper, the album. And so, if you select one image, that’s never going to be enough. Because your vision is different from mine.”
And if you want the real definitive Beatles-themed movie, The Rutles are still the gold standard. None of the Fab Four wanted to be treated like gods, and one massive mockumentary that took the piss out of every single thing that they did was everything they could have asked for, with John Lennon refusing to give the complimentary tape he received back and George Harrison making a cameo appearance in the movie.
Because when the dust from the breakup had settled, The Beatles were among the only ones that could see the funny side of the whole thing. They never claimed to be better or greater than any other musician in the world, so it wasn’t a surprise when they saw that music as nothing but kitsch when the Gibb brothers decided to turn songs like ‘Oh! Darling’ into syrupy muzak a decade after the fact.
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