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Sun 27 September 2026 16:00, UK
There’s always a temptation to wonder what would have become of The Beatles had they seen beyond their differences and continued into the 1970s as a group.
It’s hardly as though they were running out of ideas when they chose to call it a day, and this is highlighted by the fact that the three principal songwriters in the group were able to quickly enter the studio and start work on solo material. George Harrison had enough to fill a triple album with material that the rest of the band didn’t want to work on, and while John Lennon and Paul McCartney were not quite as immediately prolific, they evidently had plenty to pursue by themselves after the band reached its unfortunate end.
The thing is, they were also clearly moving in different directions from one another. This can be seen by how distinctive their respective songs on later Beatles albums were. The White Album couldn’t be more scattered if it tried, and that’s probably because each songwriter was pursuing exactly what he wanted, rather than bending his songs towards a cohesive whole.
However, while the respective members all had their own material they could have worked on, either in the form of Beatles songs or solo ventures, none of them could have foreseen the fact that they’d be forced to use any leftover songs for their own projects rather than bringing them to the studio for the others to work on. Given this, McCartney’s self-titled debut in 1970 was essentially constructed from offcuts that he happened to have lying around, rather than songs he’d deliberately written to launch his solo career.
Of course, that’s exactly how it came across upon release. The Beatles had known for some time that the end was coming, having mutually agreed that Abbey Road would be the last album they worked on in 1969, and choosing to bow out on the previously recorded Let It Be a year later. Given that they had a year to plan their next moves before announcing their split to the public, McCartney scraped together a collection of rejected Beatles tracks, demos he’d recorded at home and sketches to build McCartney, an album that divided opinion due to its carefully timed release coinciding with The Beatles’ demise.
But while the band had clearly run out of steam, and people were frustrated by the fact that they would potentially never hear the foursome together again, McCartney isn’t the sort of album that gives off the impression that the eponymous songwriter was lacking in ideas or motivation.
McCartney later commented on the album’s genesis, proclaiming that its slapdash style was very much deliberate, and that he understood why people may have seen it as an opportunistic release. “They were almost throwaways, you know?” he said. “But that’s why they were included. They weren’t quite throwaways. That was the whole idea of the album.”
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He continued, explaining how his own approach to demoing ideas didn’t change in the transitional period between being with The Beatles and pursuing his solo career. “All the normal things that you record that are great and have all this atmosphere but aren’t that good as recording or production jobs; normally that stuff ends up with the rest of your demos, but all that stuff is often stuff I love.”
The Beatles were finished as a band, but the ideas were evidently as fresh as ever, and the continued acclaim that each of them received for their solo output shows how inspired they continued to be, even in the aftermath of a torturous episode. As for the songs being throwaways, not many can say that their slapped-together demos have sold two million copies worldwide, truly underlining the inescapable pull of a songwriter like McCartney.
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