‘Don’t take the missus to work’: rock stars reflect on the day the Beatles broke up

On December 31 1970, a young bassist took to the High Court to resolve his band’s acrimonious disputes. Relationships between bandmembers had fractured, growing financial problems pervaded their business affairs, and the appointment of a contentious new manager fuelled resentment. Paul McCartney saw only one, unpalatable but necessary, solution.

He filed a lawsuit for the dissolution of the Beatles’ contractual partnership, officially breaking up the band 50 years ago today.

Rumours of the band’s impending split had become hard to ignore by that time. Each Beatle had been operating individually for years, and their business disputes had turned publicly bitter since the death of their long-time manager Brian Epstein. Tabloids had been eager to declare the end of the Beatles back in April when McCartney suggested his songwriting partnership with John Lennon had come to an end and no future Beatles albums were planned.

Vague, palliative comments from bandmembers in the intervening months provided some hope that a future still existed for the foursome. George Harrison suggested he’d be ready to get back with the others after finishing his debut solo record, and Lennon hinted this period of disputes might result in the “rebirth” of the Beatles rather than its death.

But the lawsuit made certain what everyone fearfully knew. There was no time for reconciliation. The Beatles project was over, and the magnitude of the moment was not lost on the world.

“In a way, the fact that one of the four should go to law against the others symbolised the end of an innocent pop age,” wrote the New York Times. “Not only did they have tremendous impact musically, rendering to ecstasy and mania millions of fans, but they made a deep social mark upon the youth of the world,” responded the Liverpool Echo. Time branded the whole affair ‘Beatled?mmerung’, comparing it to the world-shattering Ragnar?k of Norse Mythology.

After an eight-year career that redefined pop music and created an unrivalled cultural legacy, the end of the Fab Four was felt the world over. Remembered as songwriting legends and enduring pop icons, members of Black Sabbath, The Supremes, Jefferson Airplane, Status Quo and more reflect on the break up of the biggest band the world has ever known.

Rod Argent, The Zombies

When the Beatles first went to America in ’64, the Bible at the time for a lot of young people was Melody Maker. And each week there would be some other triumph – in America, this hallowed place where UK bands weren’t supposed to be able to make any impact at all. It was like England winning the World Cup every week. It made everyone feel incredibly good about the country, and about how things were just expanding and growing after the depression and the austerity of the war. All that was a fantastic part of our youth.

And then, suddenly – we’d obviously been aware, since we followed everything completely avidly with what was going on with the band – when it finally became clear that they were going to split up, it just seemed, well, unbelievable. You couldn’t imagine a life at that point without the Beatles. They were such a fulcrum of youth. Music was so important to young people; it was so much the centre, and everything radiated from that. So suddenly, a world without the Beatles seemed unimaginable.

Of course, like everything, all things must pass. But it was hugely shocking. To all of us.

Graham Gouldman, 10cc

It was like losing a family member. It was awful. I remember John saying: “Well, we’re only a rock and roll band”, but it’s like, no, you’re not just a rock and roll band. For God’s sake, man. Maybe he was just trying to make light of it, but it always stuck in my mind that I wish he hadn’t had said that. I hope he didn’t really think that.

They were a revolution; they changed the whole musical landscape. And to this day they affect me. They’re my benchmark still. If I get stuck writing a song, I go: “I wonder what McCartney would do here.” I’m very influenced by everything they’ve done and a lot of their solo work as well after they split up. I suppose that’s the one consolation – they did produce some fantastic stuff after they split. George certainly, but all the boys did in their solo careers. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Alan White, Plastic Ono Band and Yes

I was only 20 years old, going through the stages in London and growing up in the music business. And here I was, playing with the Beatles. At the time, it didn’t really mean that much to me for some reason. Only years later I turned around and looked: “Did I really do all that stuff?”.

It was hard to tell they would split in the moment because I seemed to be in the middle of it. Certainly, when John recorded Instant Karma it was pretty obvious that John was going to take his own direction. But I don’t think I ever heard a final decision that they weren’t going to play together again. It was something that they kept private. It was never being broadcasted about town.

I really think the Beatles became too big to exist anymore. They became so big they just couldn’t work together. One thing I realised from being around the Beatles was when you’re in a room with one Beatle, the whole room revolves around that Beatle. When you’re in a room with two Beatles, it’s even more crazy. And when I was in a room with three Beatles at one time, it’s like you might as well not exist!

John Cooper Clarke

I think the rot set in when they stopped wearing the group uniform, when they sort of foreswore their corporate identity. I blame two things: The Summer of Love and Yoko Ono. They’d still be doing gigs today if it wasn’t for those two phenomena.

You could put the Beatles on a stamp. The hippie thing was the end of that. Their house style was anything but hippie: it was hard work, it was a perfect mix of business and pleasure. They could have had nervous breakdowns, but no, not them, because they had that corporate sense of humour. They all seemed to know each other inside out.

And everybody gets a girlfriend, as you would expect - they’re flesh-and-blood people. Everybody falls in love and that changes the whole dynamic. What I’m saying is this: Maureen [Starkey, Ringo’s first wife] didn’t go to work with them. Yoko Ono: don’t take the missus to work. That’s my advice. It never ends well.

Richard Hewson, RAH Band

When it came to [orchestrate] The Long and Winding Road, I approached it without a lot of knowledge of the Beatles. I was called in the day before the session, booked an orchestra for which Phil Spector kept ringing up and saying, “I want more”, so kept adding instruments until it got quite large. I enjoyed myself making the music and had no concept Paul McCartney didn’t even know that it was going on. He wanted it left bare naked as piano and voice, so when he heard that there was a great big orchestra on there, he went quite mad.

I heard one thing that slightly amused me, if nothing else: that I was part of the reason the Beatles broke up. When Paul went to the High Court to try and get the whole thing sorted out, I read somewhere that he cited The Long and Winding Road arrangement – in other words, me – as the straw that broke the camel’s back. So my claim to fame, ladies and gentleman, is that I broke up the Beatles.

Francis Rossi, Status Quo

I was gutted. It was like it was wrong. They were tearing away the dream. We’d had some success by then, but it was whether it was the end of it all. And it’s always been a fear of all of us, my generation in the ’60s, that it would end real soon. It felt like the end. Helped me understand what people see about various other bands that split up or don’t get on. It was breaking that dream that McCartney and Lennon were just fucking such good mukkas.

It’s funny, people have no problem with the idea that I might get divorced, or have various girlfriends, and fall out with others. And the same with all of us. But not with the blokes in the band, surely? That’s not acceptable! It becomes sacred, and so it was sacred to me. Surely the Beatles are not stopping!

Chris Difford, Squeeze

It seemed to me part of the family had split up. I could sense the anger whenever I saw pictures of Paul looking pissed off. It was almost like a cousin had had some kind of row that you didn’t quite know much about.

It made me investigate their music a little deeper, particularly Abbey Road. History tells you they weren’t getting along for quite a time and they were recording things separately. And you can tell it when you listen to the diversity of the music: the softness of Paul McCartney’s songs but the sort of rustic ambient sound of Mr Lennon. You could hear their definite separation.

Geezer Butler, Black Sabbath

There were bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Hendrix. And then Zeppelin came out and it completely changed into the heavier stuff. The Beatles were more of a vocal band, while a lot of the newer bands were more into instrumental stuff – guitar solos, and great drummers, and great bass players, and all that. So the vocal bands were sort of passé by then. The harmonising singing stuff seemed to be old-fashioned.

I’d seen them in 1965 at the Birmingham Odeon. But the trouble was you couldn’t hear a bloody thing that they were doing because all the girls were screaming. And most of the boys as well. If they’d have reunited, I would’ve liked to have gone and seen them and actually listen to what they were doing rather than just being deafened by the screaming girls and boys. It would have been nice to see one good tour of the original line-up. I’m still the number one fan.

Mary Wilson, The Supremes

During the time Diana Ross was leaving the group, we were in England doing something. I don’t know if Paul called me, I think he did, but we ended up having a telephone call. He was asking me: why is Diana leaving the group, you guys are so popular – that type of thing. I didn’t realise, but I guess the reason he wanted to know why Diana was leaving probably had to do with a lot of what was going on with their group at the time.

It was pretty much the same thing. When you’re that popular and you become that famous, people start pulling different people from the group, saying: “You should go by yourself”. Or you meet someone and start singing your own kind of music. You want to do your own kind of music and not the same thing you started out doing. So I think the same things were happening within the two groups: The Supremes and the Beatles.

Chris Huston, The Undertakers

Everyone knew the discontent was there, like George couldn’t get a song on an album unless he twisted arms. So I wasn’t surprised. But they set the bar so high: how were they going to get over that? John’s stuff wasn’t as good as the stuff he wrote when he was with Paul. Even Paul was in a niche which he didn’t often get out of. Individually they were great – but the two of them together were magic. I did hope that all four could get together again. I would have loved them to do another Sgt. Pepper.

Petula Clark

It was an end of innocence in a way. Although of course they had changed, they had grown up, they’d got a bit naughty, but still there was a kind of innocence to them. And when they split, that was gone.

I certainly felt it. I was spending a lot of time in the States and that’s where the Beatles were total idols. I could sense the feeling of sadness, almost of grief actually, when they broke up.

Kenney Jones, The Small Faces and The Faces

You’ve got to look at the infrastructure around them. They were earning such obscene amounts of money in those days it was coming out of their earholes, and lawyers were latching onto it, managers were latching onto it. All of a sudden, they found themselves in the business world. I’ve been forced into a business attitude when all you want to do is make music and don’t want anything to interfere with that. But I’ve got to say, the red tape of business does interfere with it.

Watching strangers, management, agents and all that, reaping the rewards of your creation, I still fight it to this day. And the same thing was happening with the Beatles. Because they were earning money, [everyone] around them were all looking at the bigger picture and just wanted to get as much money as they could. So you can imagine with their split-up, in my opinion, knowing a lot about the music industry, is that it didn’t bloody help matters.

Rick Wakeman, Yes

I wasn’t at all surprised. I felt that as a band they had achieved everything they could possibly have hoped and there was no clear route as to where to go next. The solo albums and work that followed showed to me that they had made the right decision, and it also showed how each of their individual talents had influenced the band throughout its existence.

They continued influencing musicians with their solo work and the Beatles music lived on. It never had a date stamped on it, which still stands true today.

John McLaughlin, Mahavishnu Orchestra

I was absolutely devastated when they broke up. I was so unhappy. Because they were my band, my favourite band. Nothing to do with jazz, but that had no bearing on the matter whatsoever. I was as upset when I lost John Coltrane in 1967, when I lost Miles [Davis] in 1991. These musicians, these human beings, they were very dear to me. Part of my family really. A musical family, OK, but I had a strong emotional connection to them because of their music and because of their songs.

I think the split-up had its own dimension because I experienced a similar thing at the end of Mahavishnu Orchestra. That was absolutely not what I wanted, but I can understand. When you live together, you travel together, play together, but everybody has their own way of life, sometimes this, by itself, creates a kind of friction. There’s nothing you can do.

Joey Molland, Badfinger

When I worked with them in the studio a little bit, I was really struck how ordinary they were as people. I was a working-class kid from Liverpool, and to see the biggest rock stars in the world drive themselves into the car park, go round to the trunk of their car, get their guitar and amp out, bring it in and plug themselves into it: all the normal things that musos do as part of their routine. They’d look at you when you were playing their songs and you’d get the feeling they wanted to go: “This is great, man!”. These were all things that contributed to our love for them, and made it more disappointing that there [weren’t] going to be any more Beatles albums.

I never really thought of them getting back together. The disputes between them got to be really difficult, and their personal opinions of each other seemed to change. The things they said about each other. We were musicians, so we’d hear things in the music world – just little bits and pieces. The atmosphere around the band changed, and people got a little bit different. It’s a natural thing, but we didn’t want it to end.

John Etheridge, Soft Machine

Everybody knew they were drifting apart. The Beatles disappearing wasn’t an invalidation of their music, but an obvious corollary of four incredibly creative people existing in a sort of adolescent congregation.

When we look back on it, we see it as an end of an era. The death of Hendrix, the Beatles packing up. But I don’t think their packing up was anything but inevitable, and anything but fairly drawn out. It’s like somebody dying after a fairly prolonged illness – you know it’s coming.

Steve Hackett, Genesis

It would be wrong to say that the rest of us in the musical fraternity were breathing a sigh of relief thinking the competition will never be as stiff again. But what is humbling is when you walk into Abbey Road Studios, in reception you see a gold album on the wall. It’s the Beatles. You think: “Oh, this will be for a million sales”. But no, it’s not. It said for a million-million sales. I don’t know whether that’s an apocryphal statement, but it might as well be true. By the time you put together all the bootlegs, who can argue with that? A million-million sales.

Jack Casady, Jefferson Airplane

From my viewpoint, I just expected them to do what they all did. They went off and worked on their own projects. I expected they had passion about what they did and maybe it would lead to even greater things. Don’t forget we were all still really young then. We were all still in our twenties.

And don’t forget what a group represents. It represents people coming together, getting along, and getting something done. When there’s so much talent and direction in one group, it’s hard to contain. And that’s how I see it with the Beatles breaking up: less of an end of something, but more of a beginning