Whenever a band breaks up, especially one as globally ubiquitous as the Beatles, everyone assumes the reason they broke up must be something salacious or contentious. Our parasocial connections to these groups make it difficult to imagine a reality in which the musicians wouldn’t want to keep going unless something awful happened between bandmates.
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But sometimes it’s not that dramatic at all. Sometimes, as John Lennon explained in a 1975 interview on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, the reason a band like the Beatles broke up was as simple as a case of ennui.
John Lennon Had Surprising Reason For Why The Beatles Broke Up
The Beatles were much of the world’s first interaction with a bona fide rock ‘n’ roll band. There was no distinct frontman and backing band lineup, and all four members shared the stage playing their respective instruments and singing harmonies with one another. So, when that seemingly unstoppable team force started to crumble in the late 1960s, people began scrambling for a reason to explain why the Beatles were breaking up. For most fans and critics, they assumed the band simply couldn’t get along anymore.
“We didn’t break up because we weren’t friends,” Lennon explained to Tomorrow host Tom Snyder. “We just broke up out of sheer boredom. Boredom creates tension. It was not going anywhere, you know. We’d stopped touring. We just sort of say [mimes picking up a telephone], ‘Time to make an album.’ Go in the studio, the same four of us would be looking at each other playing the same licks. We were very good friends. And we’d known each other since we were 15. We got over all the actual fighting.”
Lennon said there was no real “nitty-gritty” fighting during the band’s official breakup in the late 1960s. After cutting their teeth across Europe in the early 1960s and their meteoric rise to stardom by the middle of the decade, the band simply felt like there was nothing left to do. The relationship had run its course, Lennon said, “like a marriage.”
Popularity Was Never A Problem In The Band, Either
Although the Beatles first broke onto the scene as a distinct unit, the public inevitably split them up into different personas with varying levels of charm, attractiveness, and specific attributes. George Harrison, for example, was the Quiet Beatle. John Lennon was the bad boy. Ringo Starr was the lovable goof. Paul McCartney was the handsome one. During the band’s breakup, rumors circulated about these personas, leading to discontent among the musicians. Once again, Lennon refuted the idea that their individual popularity was the reason the Beatles eventually broke up.
Even when the band did get into the “real dirty” kind of fighting, Lennon said, it “had nothing to do with how popular we were. The same popularity, meaning Paul was always more popular than the rest of us. [That] was going down in the dance halls in Liverpool, so it didn’t come as any big surprise, you know? I mean, the kids saw him, the girls would go, ‘Ooh! Ooh!’ You know, right away. So, we knew where the score was there.”
“It was the music that was interesting,” he continued. “That was important. As long as we were going forward and going somewhere, it didn’t matter.”
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
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