Sir Paul McCartney: I turned to alcohol after The Beatles split
Sir Paul McCartney turned to alcohol after The Beatles split.
The singer-songwriter has revealed he was gripped by depression and "took to the bevvies" and almost walked away from his music career entirely when the iconic four-piece band – which also included John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr – went their separate ways in 1970.
Paul recalled: "I was depressed at the time, yeah. You would be. You would be too.
"I was breaking from my lifelong friends, not knowing whether I was going to continue in music. I took to the bevvies. I took to a wee dram.
"It was great at first, then suddenly I wasn’t having a good time. It wasn’t working. I wanted to get back to square one, so I ended up forming [his band] Wings."
Before The Beatles split, the rest of the band defied Paul’s wishes and appointed Allen Klein as their manager, who took a hefty share of their profits and gave his own company the rights to press The Beatles’ records in the US.
In order to get away from Klein’s influence, the ‘Live and Let Die’ hitmaker sued his bandmates, prompting a rift with the late John Lennon.
But Paul is thankful they were able to restore their bond before his friend was assassinated in 1980.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Mastertapes’, he said: "I had to fight and I had to fight the others which was the worst decision of my life y’know. I would make calls to John occasionally and it was a bit ‘Yeah, do what you want?’, ‘Well what do you want?’, silly buggers stuff.
"I was getting annoyed so I would call him silly insults, because by then he had got a little bit of an American accent so I would say ‘all right Kojak’ and he would be coming back to me with insults.
"But we persevered long enough for it to break through and music brought us together. That was one of the things I was really grateful for, was that we got it back together before he died, because it would have been very difficult to deal with. It was difficult anyway but it would have been especially difficult.
"We had a good relationship and we just talked kids and baking bread, ordinary stuff."
