Remember When: The Beatles Almost Bought an Island in Greece (Because Why Not?)

The Beatles did a lot of wacky stuff back in the day. After all, if you’re young, talented, and filthy rich, why not make a bold choice or two? In 1967, when the Fab Four were at the height of their career, they came particularly close to making a pretty hefty investment. Specifically, The Beatles came dangerously close to purchasing an entire island off the coast of Greece.

It’s safe to say that The Beatles were doing quite a bit of psychedelic substances at the time. From those drug-induced bouts, the band decided that they would purchase the land in order to build a space where they could have complete creative freedom and more or less do whatever they wanted.

“Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island, and then all the other community things that were around then,” said Paul McCartney in Many Years From Now. “It was drug-induced ambition, we’d just be sitting around: ‘Wouldn’t it be great? The lapping water, sunshine, we’d be playing. We’d get a studio there. Well, it’s possible these days with mobiles and…’ We had lots of ideas like that.”

The purchase didn’t come to fruition, and the reason why is about as silly as you’d expect.

Why The Beatles Didn’t End Up Buying a Whole Island in Greece

The band travelled to Greece for a bit of a vacation in July of that year. They traveled throughout the mainland before reaching the island in question about three days into their trip. The island boasted 80 acres (allegedly), a village, olive groves, and a number of gorgeous beaches. 

“Greece was on the left; a big island on the right,” George Harrison would later say in the notes of Anthology. “The sun was shining, and we sang ‘Hare Krishna’ for hours and hours. […] We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate.”

In order to purchase the island, The Beatles need a certain amount of money to present to the Greek government. They ended up getting that far and were approved to purchase the island with about £90,000 worth of Greek cash. However, by the time they got to that point, the Fab Four had left Greece and forgotten about the whole thing.

“It came to nothing,” Ringo Starr said of the whole thing. “We didn’t buy an island, we came home. We were great at going on holiday with big ideas, but we never carried them out.”

Photo by Cummings Archives/Redferns

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