Paul McCartney says Beatles split led to ‘difficult time’: ‘I did get stoned and wasted’

Paul McCartney says he was massively affected by The Beatles‘ split, with the immediate aftermath leading him to a “very difficult time”.

The Beatles member would establish Wings just a few years after the Here Comes the Sun hitmakers parted ways, but McCartney says it took him some time to get back on his feet. In an interview given around the time of Egypt Station‘s release, McCartney confirmed he had struggled to come to terms with the end of the band and the press scrutiny which came after he announced his departure. Though McCartney was not the man to end The Beatles (he claims that John Lennon announced his departure in private long before the public learnt of the band’s end), he was the most affected by its demise. A song on Egypt Station, Happy With You, reflects on that period a little further.

The lyric “I used to drink too much/Forget to come home” appears to be a straight adaptation of how McCartney was finding life without The Beatles. He said around the release of the album: “I did used to get stoned and wasted. I was bummed out and in the middle of this horrendous shit where someone was going to take every penny we’d ever made.

“That wasn’t easy and led to a very difficult time in my life. I definitely self-medicated there and drank more than I ever had and probably more than I ever have since. But you go through it.” McCartney would go on to share that he was “self-medicated” with drink and “most particularly in the period right after The Beatles [split up].”

McCartney has been open about his struggles in leaving The Beatles behind. Fans also believe McCartney was the one to suffer most of all from the end of the band. McCartney was seen as the reason The Beatles broke up at the time of the news, though this was rubbished by the Let It Be hitmaker decades later. One fan suggested: “I’d say they were all harmed by it, given that they all nearly lost friendships of over a decade, essentially familial relationships. But Paul was probably the most upset about the breakup and said Linda saved him and may have drunk himself to death if not for her.”

Another added: “Emotionally, I’d say John and Paul suffered the most. Their relationship was so pivotal for both of them. Even though they restored the friendship, they never had the same closeness again and the creative partnership never recovered.”

McCartney would speak openly about what he did in the immediate days after The Beatles broke up. Though he would release McCartney and Ram, along with founding Wings, the end of the Fab Four took its toll.

He said: “Yeah… no I did, yeah. That was kind of a feature of that time, because what happened was The Beatles, towards the end, was very constricting. So I think I was just trying to escape in my own mind. I had the freedom to have just have a drink whenever I fancied it. I’d go into the studio, maybe have another drink and so on. I over did it, basically, I got to a point where Linda had to say ‘look, you should cool it’.

“Linda was a big horse rider. At some point in the day we would have gone for a horse ride. I might have played with the kids, and they liked to go on horse rides too. Then in the evening, I’d drink whisky, of which there was a large supply in Scotland.”

“George was likely happiest, still upset about what I mentioned above but now he was able to control how many songs he wanted to release and when without having band mates stopping him.”

Others suggested Harrison made off the best in the years after The Beatles. One person wrote: “All Things Must Pass was George’s ‘the shackles are finally off’ album. And it was great.”