The period of The Beatles Paul McCartney called the “very worst”
When discussing legends as towering as The Beatles, it’s easy to forget that beneath the legacy, there are real people. When the band first started, they were just teenagers—four friends from Liverpool who got incredibly lucky as their talent propelled them into the spotlight. Even today, despite being one of the most revered figures in music, Paul McCartney is still just a man moving through life. So when he reflects on the worst period in the band’s history, it’s not merely an anecdote from their careers—it’s a deeply personal recollection of a difficult time.
In particular, when we talk about the split of The Beatles as an inevitable thing, we fail to recognise how painful it was for those involved. We could spell it out like a maths equation, chalking it all up to the simple fact that it is almost impossible for a group of people to grow together for that long or flipping through the various reasons why the band fell apart as if they’re mere variables in a science experiment. We could analyse things like George Harrison feeling under-appreciated or John Lennon falling deeper into drug use and further away from his bandmates, but we rarely give them the credit for being deeply personal details and involving the feelings of real people rather than just being the facts of a well-known music history tale.
That’s what truly shines through when Paul McCartney reflects on the end of The Beatles and the most painful period in their history. When he says worst, he’s not making an objective statement or assessing the quality of their music—he’s speaking from a place of deep personal loss. He’s describing the moment he looked around at his best friends and realised that something had fatally come between them.
That thing was Allen Klein, the music manager who truly felt like a kind of 1960s rock and roll supervillain. He stole from the Stones, forcing them to go into exile, and then he moved on to The Beatles—but McCartney didn’t fall for it.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, that period was the weirdest time in my life. Allen Klein had come in and was about to take over The Beatles just as he’d taken over the Stones,” McCartney said to Uncut. Mick Jagger had tried to warn the band about Klein, but only the bassist seemed to hear it as suddenly it was three against one, with the rest of the band wanting to sign on the dotted line to do business with him.
“I felt like I was being ambushed. If the other three wanted to be taken over, that was up to them. But I didn’t want to be taken over by this guy,” he explained as the group’s long rule of democracy, where each decision came down to a vote including all members, suddenly turned against him.
But it wasn’t just McCartney’s personal longing to not work with Klein; it was bigger than that. The more he heard about the manager’s previous business dealings, the more McCartney felt like he had to protect the band, their music and their legacy from his hands. When he realised how he could do that and how he’d have to do it, that’s when it really, really hurt.
“The very worst of it was when I realised that the only way I could get rid of Allen Klein was to sue The Beatles. I didn’t want to do it. But the more powerful Klein got, the more inevitable it became,” he said.
This is one of those moments that music history talks about as a cold, analytical thing to be picked apart and considered. But at its core, this was a devastating moment for McCartney when he realised how he’d have to hurt his friends in order to save them in some way. “It was like suing your family or suing your best mates. You can imagine how that felt,” he continued, imploring people to think about it with their feelings instead of their minds as the worst moment for the Beatles was the worst moment for McCartney as a person, as a man and as a friend.
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