Legendary singer Paul McCartney has confessed that he found it hurtful when he was blamed for The Beatles parting ways. “I suppose that when The Beatles broke up, perhaps there was a misconception that we all sort of hated each other,” the 78-yearold spoke with British GQ about the band, which also included John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. McCartney said he realises now that, the band was a family, it was a gang, and families argue, reports dailymail.co.uk.
“Families have disputes, and some people want to do this and some people want to do that. So I think what came about after that… the only way for me to save The Beatles and Apple—and to release ‘Get Back’ by Peter Jackson and which allowed us to release Anthology and all these great remasters of all the great Beatles records—was to sue the band. If I hadn’t done that, it would have all belonged to Allen Klein (manager). The only way I was given to get us out of that was to do what I did. I said ‘Well, I’ll sue Allen Klein’, and I wasn’t told I couldn’t because he wasn’t party to it. “You’ve got to sue the Beatles’.” McCartney’s decision led to tension between the former members, with Lennon even writing his song “How do you sleep?” which referenced his former bandmate, creating even more “hurtful” misconceptions.
“I remember reading an article, an interview with Yoko, who, okay, she was a big John supporter, I get that, but in this article she goes, ‘Paul did nothing. All he ever did was book studio’,” McCartney said. “And I’m going, ‘Err? No…’ And then John does this famous song, ‘How do you sleep?’, and he’s going, “All you ever did was ‘Yesterday’… And I’m going, ‘No, man’.”
“But then you hear the stories from various angles and apparently people who were in the room when John was writing that, he was getting suggestions for the lyrics off Allen Klein. So, you see the atmosphere of ‘Let’s get Paul. Let’s nail him in a song…’ And those things were pretty hurtful.”