McCartney Considered Leaving Music After Beatles Split

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To casual observers at the time, it seemed as if Sir Paul McCartney transitioned from The Beatles into a solo career and then his new band Wings rather seamlessly. Not so, he has just confessed, on the BBC Radio 4 interview program Mastertapes.

“How do you follow that?” he told host John Wilson of the break-up of The Beatles in 1970. “It was very depressing, because you were breaking from your lifelong friends. We used to liken it to the army, where you’d been army buddies for a few years. And now you weren’t going to see them again.”

In addition to losing his friends, bandmates and creative partners, “there was all the business stuff still going on” – McCartney had sued his fellow bandmates – “and not knowing whether I was going to continue in music…. The thing was, well, how’re you going to do it? If you’re going to do it, you can’t play all the instruments yourself onstage.”

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His first response to being so depressed? “I took to the bevvies. I took to a wee dram,” he told Wilson before a live audience that included Brad Pitt, Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher as well as some 100 fans at BBC’s historic Maida Vale studios, where many live Beatles performances were taped in the 1960s. “It was great at first. But after a while… I was a bit far gone. Suddenly I wasn’t having a good time. It wasn’t working.”

At the time Macca was living in relative seclusion in Scotland with his wife Linda and their children. “It was Linda who sort of said, ‘You’ve got to get it together. We’ve got to do something.’ So we ended up forming Wings,” says McCartney, who just finished touring South America and now heads to Europe before returning to North America later this year on his One to One tour and to play the Desert Trip festival in October .