April 10th 1970-Paul McCartney leaves the Beatles

ock 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.

By: Kitty Empire

Source: The Guardian

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