Why did The Beatles break up? True story behind band's epic split

The recording of Let It Be proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the group, who had grown distant from each other as influences outside the band, both professional and personal, began to take effect.

By the time they actually called it quits, every member had walked out of the band in the years preceding it.

Now, as their story is about to be retold in a new film collection by Sam Mendes, with Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Keoghan and Joseph Quinn playing the Fab Four – we take a look at what actually happened that caused the band to split.

Why did The Beatles break up? True story behind band's epic split

The Beatles stop touring

After releasing their biggest album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in 1967, the group stopped touring – having spent seven years nearly consistently being on the road.

The members used this time to start pursuing their own material and other interests, in some cases starting families and significant relationships (more on that later), or expanding beyond music.

In 1967, their longtime manager Brian Epstein died unexpectedly from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, which rocked the group.

By the time the group got back together to record again in 1968, their separate music tastes and creative hopes had widened, causing issues when it came to making a cohesive piece of art together.

"The Beatles have been in doldrums for at least a year. Ever since Mr Epstein passed away, it's never been the same," George explains in documentary, Get Back.

John Lennon later said that on the resulting release, The Beatles (aka The White Album), "the break-up of the Beatles can be heard", according to The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles.

Recording The White Album

The White Album came with multiple issues, with the band breaking the traditional process of how they recorded.

Notably, Lennon opted to have girlfriend – later wife – Yoko Ono present at nearly all of the sessions, despite the band previously never having significant others at their recordings.

Fans have long declared Ono's presence as a turning point for the band, but that isn't entirely fair. Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back, which showed never-before-seen footage of the sessions, show Yoko largely sitting quietly.

However, the intensity of their relationship was clear for the band members, and it hasn't stopped the phrase "having a Yoko" becoming common parlance when a girlfriend interrupts a friend group's dynamic.

In the doc, Paul is seen joking: "They‘re going overboard about [the relationship] but John always does. It's going to be such an incredible, comical thing, like in 50 years' time, if people say, ‘They broke up ‘cos Yoko sat on an amp’."

He later added: "It really isn’t that bad. They just want to stay together. She’s great, she really is all right.”

But true disruption was amplified when Ringo walked out of recording due to his unhappiness at the band, explaining to Howard Stern in a 2018 interview that he didn't "feel good" and didn't "feel part of it". He quit for two weeks before finally being talked back in August 1968.

Get Back sessions

By January 1969, the group were hanging on by a thread, and Harrison became the second person to quit the band as they reconvened to record what became known as the Get Back sessions.

After spending time with Bob Dylan and experiencing his more communal approach to music, Harrison was becoming disillusioned with the experience of being in the band.

Speaking as part of the Beatles' Anthology documentary, Harrison recalled: "They were filming us having a row. It never came to blows, but I thought, ‘What’s the point of this? I’m quite capable of being relatively happy on my own and I’m not able to be happy in this situation. I’m getting out of here.’

"Everybody had gone through that. Ringo had left at one point. I know John wanted out. It was a very, very difficult, stressful time, and being filmed having a row as well was terrible. I got up and I thought, ‘I’m not doing this any more. I’m out of here.’ So I got my guitar and went home and that afternoon wrote ‘Wah-Wah’."

While his fellow bandmates initially floated the idea that they would replace him with Eric Clapton (someone who would later step in to perform with band members in later years after the group disbanded), they eventually got Harrison back on board.

In the Get Back documentary (now available on Disney Plus), a discussion between Lennon and McCartney was caught on tape, with Lennon declaring: "George said he didn’t get enough satisfaction any more because of the compromise he had to make to be together

"It’s a festering wound that we’ve allowed. Yesterday – it’s a wound that festered even deeper, and we didn’t give him any bandages."

Harrison's track Something would later appear on Abbey Road, and reached number four in the charts.

John Lennon quits the band

While Starr and Harrison had both quit the band before him, the true end of the band was when Lennon opted to leave in September 1969.

During the year, the band had been recording sporadically, but had become more involved in their own projects – Lennon and Ono married that March, and had been pursuing their own musical and political interests; McCartney had started work on solo material; Harrison was focusing more on producing; and Starr had begun appearing in movies.

Their last recording session with all four members in attendance was August 1969, where they fittingly recorded song The End.

Shortly after, Harrison, McCartney and Lennon discussed the possibility of recording a new album, but clashed over how to split the material, with Harrison and Lennon both proposing a more equal balance of compositions, rather than focusing on Lennon and McCartney tracks.

However, less than two weeks later, Lennon declared he "wanted a divorce" from the band during a meeting with their label, after a successful performance with new group, the Plastic Ono Band, with Ono in Toronto.

Initially agreeing to keep his exit private, McCartney let the cat out of the bag by telling Life magazine that "the Beatles thing is over" in early 1970.

Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney's release clash

In 1970, under label pressure, the band finished work on their final album using previous recordings.

The Get Back project, first put together in 1968, was finally completed and renamed Let It Be, with McCartney, Starr and Harrison reuniting to complete the recordings.

However, McCartney was unhappy with producer Phil Spector's treatment of some of the songs.

The release was promoted with one solitary performance on the rooftop of Apple Corps headquarters.

At the same time, as the band started to focus on their own material, tensions rose between Starr and McCartney when the drummer was tasked with trying to stop McCartney's solo release, which was scheduled to come out at the same time.

In 2018, McCartney told The Howard Stern Show that the ensuing argument resulted in him throwing Starr out of his house.

This later prompted McCartney to publicly declare he was breaking from the Beatles at the time of his solo album's release, suggesting he would not record any new music with Lennon.

Legal clashes

In December 1970, in a desperate attempt to be released from label Apple Corps and cut ties with ABKCO Records founder Allen Klein, McCartney took his former band members to court to dissolve their contactual partnership.

The High Court ruled in McCartney's favour in March 1971, but it triggered financial and others disputes that took four more years to sort out.

McCartney and Lennon would later trade public jabs at each other via their music. McCartney took aim at Lennon's new lifestyle with Too Many People. He explained to Playboy in 1984: "He'd been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit."

Lennon responded with song How Do You Sleep?, declaring: "So Sgt Pepper took you by surprise. You better see right through that mother's eye. Those freaks was right when they said you was dead," in reference to the bizarre ongoing conspiracy theory that McCartney had been killed in a car accident and replaced with a 'fake Paul'.

However, McCartney called for a truce between them in 1974 and they thankfully managed to reconcile before Lennon was killed in 1980.

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