John Lennon points to ‘boredom and tension’ as the reason The Beatles broke up

John Lennon says one reason The Beatles broke up was “boredom and tension” within the group.

The legendary songwriter went on to collaborate with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band, releasing his last album, Double Fantasy, shortly before his death. Lennon claimed the Fab Four broke up because they had hit the end of their creative road. The Beatles had already sworn off touring after the North American shows in 1964, so it may not be a surprise to some that their work in the studio ended after they had run out of interest. Lennon explained his theory in an interview, sharing that the mixture of “boredom and tension” was no good.

He said: “We didn’t break up because we weren’t friends, we just broke up out of sheer boredom, you know. Boredom creates tension. It was not going anywhere. We’d stopped touring and we would sort of say ‘time to make an album’ go in the studio, the same four of us would be looking at each other and playing the same licks, those silly hair cuts that you have now.”

Lennon further elaborated and confirmed the “actual fighting” from the group was squashed in the early days. The rest of The Beatles seemingly accepted Paul McCartney was the most popular of the four, and were not surprised by that later in their career.

Lennon added: “We were very good friends and we’d known each other since we were fifteen and we got over all the actual fighting, the real nitty gritty, dirty stuff which had nothing to do with how popular we were. The same popularity, I mean Paul [McCartney] was always more popular than the rest of us going down the dance halls in Liverpool, so it didn’t come as any big surprise, you know?

“I mean the kids saw him, the girls would go ‘ooh’ right away, so, we knew what the score was. But it was a group, it was the music that was interesting, that was important. As long as we were going forward and going somewhere, it didn’t matter. It just got like a marriage that doesn’t work.”

The Beatles’ final sessions together were deemed a “real hell” by George Harrison, who recalled the Abbey Road and Get Back recordings as nightmarish at times. He said recording Here Comes the Sun was a response to the hard times the band were headed through.

Harrison said just weeks before the release of Abbey Road: “It was written on a very nice sunny day in Eric Clapton’s garden. We’d been through real hell with business and it was all very heavy. Being in Eric’s garden felt like playing hooky from school. I found some sort of release and the song just came.

“It’s a bit like If I Needed Someone with that basic riff running through it. But it is very simple really.”