A tour to help heal the rifts between members of The Beatles had been suggested by Paul McCartney, but amounted to nothing, the veteran songwriter has claimed.
McCartney, who would leave the band in the late 1960s, had hoped that getting back on stage with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, might help the band work through the problems laid bare in documentaries Let It Be and Get Back. But it appeared the tensions were too much for the Fab Four, with Lennon confirming his departure from the group privately to his bandmates. McCartney, who would go on to form Wings and later enjoyed a successful solo career, commented on his hopes of getting The Beatles back on the road and why it never came to pass.
In response to criticism from Philip Norman in his book, Shout!, the Blackbird songwriter says he tried his best to keep the band together in the late ’60s.
He said: “What the book says, about me being the great manipulator simply isn’t true. Nothing happened in The Beatles unless everyone wanted it to happen. But when there was a decision to be made, somebody had to say it out loud — and that usually turned out to be my job. I accepted it.
“I certainly wasn’t responsible for splitting up the Beatles, as some people think — in fact, I was the last one to come to that view. I’d wanted us to tour, to bring us closer together again.
“It all gets absorbed into the myth, your image builds up, it gets into plays and books, and it becomes the truth. Except that it wasn’t. There’s a story that I used to straighten John’s tie before we went on stage. That seems to have become a symbol of what my attitude was supposed to have been. I’ve never straightened anyone’s tie in my life, except perhaps affectionately.”
There had been previous offers for The Beatles to reunite, though the band never got on stage as a four-piece again. Drummer Ringo Starr has since shared the moment the group were the “closest” to getting back together, and why it never came to be. An interview given when both John Lennon and George Harrison were still alive had Starr hopeful that The Beatles would get back together, but it seemed unlikely in 1977.
Though Starr would work with all three of his former bandmates on various projects, including his self-titled solo album, the four would never get together as The Beatles again. Starr noted the many moving parts which would have to fall into place for the group to have gotten back together, but said an impromptu performance, similar to their rooftop appearance at Apple Studios, would have been easier to pull off.
He said: “There’s too much involved to get together to make it possible. I would love for the four of us to play… don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t see why it shouldn’t because… I mean, I’m just going from the Ringo album. It was John [Lennon], George and I. It was the closest we ever got to a reunion. And it was fine.
“I mean, I would dig that. But until the four of us… I’ve talked to John about it and we’ve gone through it, and if there was a set-up on the lawn outside here and we just happened to be around, we could play, you know. Then I’d love it. I’d love it, it doesn’t matter where it was. But I mean, that would be easy. But to set up this thing takes a lot of craziness.”
The Beatles nearly did reunite on one occasion after a lucrative $50million offer. The band turned it down, however, after being informed their opening act would be a shark. Australian aquatic adventurer Wally Gibbins had been pitched as the opening act alongside the great white shark, which he was set to fight to the death. The Beatles were not keen on the idea.
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