Paul McCartney leaves the Beatles

10 April 1970: Number 21 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of rock music

Rock groups had split before, and no one bar their fans really cared. But the parting of the Beatles? This was the first time four musicians deciding to work separately became worldwide news, treated almost as a death.

The end itself, though, was distinctly anticlimactic. George Harrison was actually the first of the Fab Four to walk, back in 1968. He was coaxed back into the fold, only for John Lennon to quit in the autumn of 1969. A pact of stony silence in the face of the public was agreed, allowing for the release of the Beatles' Abbey Road album in September 1969 and the continuation of other works in progress. The four individual Beatles drifted yet further apart, with an increasingly estranged McCartney retreating as far as rural Scotland.

The White Album, released in November 1968, had already felt like the work of four distinct creatives, rather than the world's most unassailable musical force. The gold-plated songwriting partnership of Lennon/McCartney had become unworkable, as the influence of new romantic partners, inchoate business affairs, power struggles and the turn of the decade all came to bear on a Liverpudlian quartet who had turned rock music from a frivolous teenage pursuit into serious cultural capital.

It fell to McCartney to wield the axe almost accidentally in the spring of 1970. The other three had requested that McCartney delay the release of his debut solo album, to avoid a clash with Let It Be, the Beatles' forthcoming album and film. Incensed, McCartney issued a snarky Q&A communique whose negative content about the Beatles' future made the front page of the Daily Mirror on Friday 10 April, 1970. "Paul quits the Beatles," the Mirror concluded.

McCartney's parting shot was heard around the world. The Beatles were no more, banjaxed by the usual worldly ills of ego and greed. The demise of the Beatles – the band that were arguably as big as Jesus – was felt as a global loss. And their parting offered proof of one of rock's great inalienable truths: the whole of a group is greater than the sum of its parts.

McCartney was instantly vilified. His solo album and its follow-up, Ram (1971), were viciously panned by critics, who only began to soften their stance with the arrival of Wings's Band On the Run in 1973. To this day, McCartney remains a zealous defender of his post-Beatles oeuvre. Having arguably instigated the restlessness that was the undoing of the Beatles, John Lennon needed therapy to recover from the end of his teenage band. The ensuing album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, dealt in challenging and unambiguous terms with Lennon's troubled childhood. Unlike McCartney's efforts, it was embraced by fans and critics alike. In Imagine (1971), he created one of the few post-Beatles songs that endures in the same way as the band's own songs do. And the only rock news bigger and more final than the end of the Beatles was, of course, the death of Lennon in 1980. Ringo Starr, meanwhile, settled into the role of rock's court jester, drinking in LA with Keith Moon, before sobering up to become the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine.

In the 40 years since McCartney's act of high dudgeon, it's perhaps George Harrison who has emerged from the Beatles with the most gravitas. Harrison's triple album of 1970, All Things Must Pass, made good on the promise of his burgeoning songwriting on the White Album and Abbey Road; it functioned as a kind of repository for grief as mourners bought it in their thousands. Of all the Beatles, he had been the most receptive to the sounds and ideas of the Indian subcontinent, fusing them with sounds of the US deep south: Krishna in league with the sweet Lord. His Concert For Bangla Desh in 1971 was the forerunner of Live Aid and every major rock tin rattle since.

The end of the Beatles had, in some way, codified the failure of the dream of an entire generation – that music and its fans could wrest control away from the ancien regime and set a new agenda. The band who had sung All You Need Is Love to a global TV audience of an estimated 400 million people had, when push came to shove, feet of clay. A team from CBS News, arriving at the Beatles' Apple HQ at the time of McCartney's departure in 1970, said the Beatles' split was "an event so momentous that historians may one day view it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire". It was more important than that.

Contributor

Kitty Empire

The GuardianTramp

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