The moment Paul McCartney called the “final straw” for The Beatles
It was a surprise to everyone when The Beatles split up, and the world kept turning, but here we are, decades later, still going on about it.
The truth is, The Beatles were a ticking time bomb by the time the end of the 1960s began approaching, for there were personal problems within the band, relationships were starting to become precarious, and the differences in opinion when it came to engaging with creativity were really starting to drive a wedge between the Fab Four.
While they all initially started making music with the same intention in mind, you have to remember that they were also young. As they got famous and the world opened itself up to them, their tastes changed, and each band member wanted to take The Beatles in different directions. There’s a reason why classics such as The White Album, regardless of how much we love them, sound so disjointed, and it’s because the band was disjointed in their vision.
A good example is the song ‘Hello, Goodbye’, released in 1967, which was written by Paul McCartney, and the different ways that he and John Lennon view the song pretty evidently highlight how different their opinions of music were. While McCartney believes the song resonates on multiple deep levels, Lennon saw it as a blatant attempt for a single that wasn’t worth the listener’s time.
“’Hello, Goodbye’ was one of my songs,” said McCartney when discussing the track, “There are German influences here, I think: the twins. It’s such a deep theme in the universe, duality, man woman, black white, ebony ivory, high low, right wrong, up down, hello goodbye, that it was a very easy song to write. It’s just a song of duality, with me advocating the more positive. You say goodbye, I say hello. You say stop, I say go. I was advocating the more positive side of the duality, and I still do to this day.”
Lennon didn’t quite agree with his band members’ assessment, saying, “That’s another McCartney. Smells a mile away, doesn’t it? An attempt to write a single. It wasn’t a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano.”
Despite the growing tension within the group, The Beatles continued trying to work with each other as effectively as they possibly could, and they managed to for some time, but each member had their own triggering moment which made them realise enough was enough.
For McCartney, that moment came when he wrote ‘Let It Be’ and was forced to amend it by adding strings and backing singers. “We made ‘Let It Be’ but, because of all the fraught personal relationships, the final straw was Allen Klein coming in,” said Macca, “It was his decision that ‘Let It Be’ wasn’t good enough and that it needed strings, needed tarting up. So he brought in Phil Spector. Poor old Phil, it’s not really his fault. He had to tart it up, literally, put tarts on it. [He’s using ‘tarts’ in the Scouse sense, meaning girls of any description.] And a few strings.”
He felt that the interference with his music crossed a line at this point, and he knew his time with the Fabs was coming to an end, and so it tragically did as they all went their own ways.
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