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Sun 19 April 2026 17:30, UK
In the years between the split of The Beatles and John Lennon’s tragic murder, there were a few moments when the band almost came back together. However, when the noise surrounding any and all interaction between the old bandmates was defening, it was always too hard and too stressful to even think about.
Everybody knows that The Beatles ended on terrible terms. Even before business matters entered the picture, the four friends were beginning to splinter. After spending most of their teenage years and early adulthood together as the best of buds, they were starting to grow in different directions and at different speeds. Their collaborative relationships were already strained and struggling, and then Allen Klein arrived on the scene.
The manipulative manager was the final blow. While the rest of the band were keen to bring Klein in to manage their business, McCartney had overheard horror stories of his sneaky ways, leading him to sue the rest of the band in order to dissolve the act and keep their money away from Klein’s hands. In hindsight, all of them would eventually come to agree that McCartney did the right thing, saving their finances, but obviously, at the time, it was basically a death knell for their friendship.
After that, they all retreated into their own corners to lick their wounds and begin solo projects. However, some alliances remained. Starr and Harrison stayed close, working on each other’s albums. Lennon would also occasionally bring Starr in, but things between him and Harrison still felt too frosty. As for McCartney, he spent a period in near isolation before forming Wings and building a completely different circle of collaborators. In the haze of the breakup, it took time before those bridges were rebuilt.
At the same time, though, the calls from fans for some kind of reunion were absolutely deafening. They couldn’t be in the same place or work together at all without the question coming up. In 1970, McCartney tried to put it all to bed in a self-written questionnaire where he asked himself, “Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment when you thought, ‘I wish Ringo were here for this break?’”
To that, he answered simply, “No”.
But clearly, it was all more complex than that for everyone involved. These were four old friends, four old best friends, and the love doesn’t just disappear. Later down the line, following Lennon’s death, McCartney said that reuniting with him and making up was “one of the great blessings in my life”, and behind the scenes, all the wounds were mended around 1972, but in 1971, the idea of it felt too hard, especially when music was brought into question.
That was the year George Harrison put together his landmark Concert for Bangladesh, held at Madison Square Garden in New York, whose aim was to raise money for aid and support for refugees from East Pakistan, and all of his ex-bandmates got an invite to come and play, as Harrison knew that a quasi-Beatles reunion, even if they didn’t play any of their songs, or even didn’t play together, would bring in good donations, but Lennon wasn’t having it.
“With George and Ringo there, it would have had that connotation of Beatles. Now let’s hear Ringo sing ‘It Don’t Come Easy’. That’s why I left it all. I don’t want to play ‘My Sweet Lord’. I’d as soon go out and do exactly what I want,” he said.
However, there was a pang of regret. As Lennon saw the footage of Harrison and Starr playing alongside the likes of Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and Bob Dylan, he admitted, “At first I thought, ‘Oh, I wish I’d been there’, you know, with Dylan and Leon…they needed a rocker. Everybody was telling me, ‘You should have been there, John’.” But it was all still too fresh. McCartney turned it down for the same reason, not yet ready to revisit the band or fuel reunion rumours further, even if perhaps they would have all loved to jam.
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