Interview for Evening Standard

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This article by Ray Connolly, published in November 1969, offers a clear snapshot of The Beatles’ situation at the time. While Connolly rightly notes that the band’s business ties were too entangled to be easily dissolved, his conclusion that The Beatles would carry on into the 70s ultimately proved incorrect.

PAUL McCARTNEY may not have died in 1966 as the rumours were telling us a couple of weeks ago, but, in a way, the Beatles did. The day they finished touring, the myth that had been so delicately nurtured began to decompose.

The Beatles are now little more than a fond memory: ironically a memory of what now appears to have been a lie in the first place. No one could have been so lovable, so dolly.

We created a quartet of four velvet cuddly toys with dandruff that showered when they sang falsetto, and we grew disillusioned when they grew rich and strong enough to show their own personalities.

True we still write and talk about the Beatles, and we still buy Beatle records—but the title has become a mere label of nostalgia.

The Beatles today are four married men, all approaching 30, who are bound together economically, who, because of practice, have developed a facility for playing and recording popular music of an exceptional standard, and who share one enormous, dazzling and sometimes grotesque, common memory.

They were the Beatles. No one else in the world can possibly know what it was like during the lunacy of Beatlemania. No matter what their differences are now, and there are many, that memory can never be erased. They weren’t just a pop group: together they made up the four most popular and famous people in the world. And it’s that which they have had to live with and live up to these last three years. And now they’ve clearly had enough.

Today the four men who made up that once cuddly quartet could hardly be further apart socially. They aren’t enemies — and most of the time they don’t even dislike each other — but nor are they the close knit unit we always imagined them to be. Each has married into widely different social sets — Ringo to his fan girl friend from Liverpool; George to his beautiful London model; Paul to his homely New York photographer and John to an avant-avant-garde Japanese artist. Can you possibly imagine those four ladies being natural-born bosom pals? It would be difficult to conceive of four more distinctly different women.

As boys and young men the overriding factor binding the Beatles together was their obsession with their music — and their determination to one day make something of themselves. There was no time for other outside activities.

Being Beatles kept them retarded at an adolescent stage. While all their contemporaries were growing up and getting on with their lives John, Paul, George and Ringo were being picked as the four people who were to become the centre of the world’s obsession with a youth culture. That held them together. For four years they were hardly ever out of each other’s sight. They worked, played, travelled and lived together.

Now the only times you can ever see all four Beatles together are for meetings at Apple or the very rare occasions when it’s necessary for them to be in the recording studios at the same time — and due to modern recording techniques this is less frequent than one might expect. The only time, in fact, that the Beatles actually exist in an entity is when they are recording. Their meetings outside of the studios grow more and more infrequent.

But even in the studios there is nothing like the harmony of what we once fondly imagined as a four-headed genius. If Paul has written a song, then he is the producer of the record, and the others tend to act as session musicians. And it’s the same with John or George.

Obviously each has something to offer, and discussion about techniques takes place all the time, but Beatle records today are strictly the product of the imagination of the composer. The other three are there to help get the sound the composer wants.

It’s a common fiction that Lennon and McCartney still write together, since all their songs bear both names, but in fact they haven’t composed a song together for years.

“We tend to write when we’re at home when it’s quiet,” says Paul. “We only wrote together when we were always living together and travelling about in the van together.”

The lull in their public activities since they gave up live appearances left them at first with a vacuum and outsized egos, which now clash frequently. At one point last year Ringo became so tired of the incessant arguing between John and Paul that he left the group and took his family up to Liverpool.

“It’s just not any fun playing with you any more,” he told them. But three days later he was back. The Beatles, which they often speak of as an entirely separate entity from themselves as people, had won.

Then it was George’s turn. He walked out because he didn’t feel he was getting enough of his songs on their albums — a justifiable grouse. He came back too.

Now both Ringo and George are making albums by themselves, and Ringo is building himself a second career as a film actor. The second-class Beatles are going it alone.

Serious

What is more serious is the clash between John and Paul. Both are men of outstandingly tough and forceful personalities. When they fight they can go on for hours, neither side giving an inch. Before the release of their last album they planned to give a party for the Press. Paul wanted a small party “no more than 20 people,” but John insisted that all the underground Press be invited too. They began arguing at four o’clock. At nine they were still at it. In the end the party was cancelled.

The big split between John and Paul came over the running of Apple, the Beatles’ company. Originally it had been Paul who was the main force behind the company, and in his bustling, busy, and offhand way he tried hard to make it succeed. But in its original form it was doomed to failure. It lacked a big business brain. So John called in American Allen Klein who managed the Rolling Stones. Paul was furious and refused to have anything to do with the agreement which brought Klein in. He was, however, outnumbered by the other Beatles.

Since then his interest in Apple has waned considerably. I understand he now takes much of his advice from his father-in-law — a well-known New York show business lawyer — and he rarely visits the Apple offices.

Content

Always close to his own family he now seems content to spend as much of his time as possible with Linda and their children. Once the most charming and diplomatic of the four his attitude is now one of remoteness. He used to be the Beatles’s greatest fan and defender, but now one gathers the impression that perhaps he is disillusioned with the events of the last couple of years — disillusioned perhaps with John, the elder boy he worshipped for so long during the early days in Liverpool and Hamburg.

While feigning that tolerance of others on which all four Beatles pride themselves, I wonder is there not a degree of contempt in Paul’s eyes for the activities of Lennon and Yoko. A couple of months ago, when half London was talking about a particularly outrageous film that John had made of his sexual organs, which he had titled Self Portrait, I was staggered to discover that Paul didn’t even know about it. And nor, he made quite clear, did he want to know particularly.

For John life changed totally the day he met Yoko Ono — and whatever you may think of them you must admit that together they represent the love story of the decade. He told me this week that the reason he returned his MBE to the Queen at this particular moment was because he wanted to start the seventies off as just plain John Lennon, not John Lennon, MBE.

He might also have said he wanted to start the seventies as just John Lennon — not Beatle-John Lennon, because the Beatles have become, in many ways, a hindrance to him.

While his position with them has provided the cash for him to follow his own pursuits — artistic, altruistic and otherwise — the reasons which first made him into a Beatle are now out of step with those of the other three.

Recently he decided he wanted to go back on stage and perform again, but none of the others was interested, so he had to create his Plastic Ono Band (a makeshift group of friendly and untied musicians) to accompany him. The fact that the Plastic Ono Band’s latest record, Cold Turkey, didn’t sell very well must have been particularly upsetting — proof, in a way, that even with a Beatle singing, it takes the magic name of the Beatles to make it into an automatic hit.

People ask me all the time if John is insane. He isn’t. Far from it, in fact. He’s possibly capricious, juvenile and distasteful on occasions, and maybe his demonstrations for peace might be more effective were he to tackle them more orthodoxly. But he’s still the great wit, the very original thinker. Sometimes I think he’s rather like the monkey in the zoo who is really laughing at all the people who are laughing at it.

Artistic

So what can we expect of the Beatles in the seventies? Is a final split inevitable? I think not. In fact, I’d say, it was practically impossible. Contractually they just can’t afford to leave each other, and for similar economic reasons, nor can their company Apple be killed. And ironically enough, although Apple started off very badly, this year it’s proved the most successful of all the independent recording companies in the country.

But the Beatles can’t go back. There’s no possibility of the myth of the four-in-one being resurrected. Each of the four will now continue to further his separate career. True they will go on making records together, and presumably, since Lennon and McCartney have the ability to capture so well the mood of the moment in their music, they will make many more hits. (This week they are top of the American hit parade for both singles and albums, and have the best-selling album in Britain.)

But they won’t really be the Beatles any more: just four musicians, two of whom may turn out to be the greatest songwriters of the century, who will occasionally get together in the recording studios, paper over their differences of temperament, reminisce about their one shared magnificent memory, and then go ahead and make good music.

And in the meantime they’ll get on with being adult, growing older, and being artistic. And, who knows, but might not they singly yet create something more worthwhile than all their joint efforts created in that frenetic period of pop culture six years ago?

“I can’t see me still being a Beatle when I’m 30,” John Lennon, then 24, said in 1964. By name he will be, but really he won’t be. Not really.