‘Paul and me were the Beatles’

A series of exclusive interviews with John Lennon have now been published, giving an insight into the star’s views on his bandmate Sir Paul McCartney and the Beatles’ split.

In the interview, Lennon says fellow Beatles member Paul McCartney was the most important person to him apart from his wife.

“I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner,” the New York Post quoted the Times of London as reporting as to what Lennon said in the tape.

“One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. Paul and me were the Beatles,” Lennon claims in the tape.

The tapes also show Lennon sharing the reason for the break up of the band, as also his confession that he wanted to initiate the break up much earlier than 1970.

Lennon says in the tapes that the band only stuck together to avoid any losses in the sales of their last album Let It Be.

He says: “Paul just kept mithering (worrying) on about what we were going to do, so in the end I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce’.”

Previously unpublished chats of McCartney and Ringo Starr with British journalist Ray Connolly have also been released. Connelly recorded the tapes, in which Lennon even mentions early death.

He said: “[wasting] my life as I have been. I have to learn to do that because I don’t want to die at 40.” He was shot to death at that age in 1980.

In another interview given in 1972, Lennon adds: “The whole thing died in my mind long before the rumpus started. We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public and we were in love with them just the same way. But we were four individuals who eventually recovered our individualities after being submerged in a myth.”