Chapter 4

You mustn't pretend that brothers don't fight, because they fight worse than anybody.

Richard Starkey

At Christmas 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched a worldwide poster campaign to announce 'War Is Over (If You Want It)'. It was a stunningly simple and effective message, placing the responsibility for peace on the whole of mankind. It also removed the couple's self-imposed burden of saving the world. There was little more talk of donating their earnings to peace or carrying their bed-in tactic behind the Iron Curtain. Their priority now was personal freedom: physical, chemical, existential. 'We've been through the post-drug depression, ' Lennon explained when they returned from Denmark in mid-January. 'Now we've resurrected hope in ourselves. '

Yet the world was closing in on the Lennons: their marriage was disintegrating, so was the Toronto Peace Festival; Ono's health was delicate after a series of miscarriages; and there was the perennial problem of Apple. Since May 1969 two ravenous sets of lawyers had been debating the legality of the management agreement that Lennon, Harrison, Starkey and Klein had signed. As Paul McCartney reflected ruefully, 'We put every lawyer's kid through school. '

During a meeting at Apple in mid-January, Lennon, Harrison and Starkey agreed an expanded management contract with ABKCO and Klein designed to cover the gaping loopholes in the original draft. (Significantly, McCartney was not consulted about the deal. ) They signed on behalf of a web of companies that month – not just the various Apple subsidiaries, but such concerns as Singsong Ltd (handling Harrison's music publishing), Startling Music Ltd (likewise for Starkey) and Ono Music Ltd. There were Apple offices in Switzerland, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, France and Germany to consider; twin incarnations of Apple Records Inc. in New York and Los Angeles; Bag Music Inc., for some far-flung outpost of the Lennon/Ono empire; and Joko Films Inc., which looked after the Lennons' US film interests. A total of 33 companies sheltered under the Apple umbrella, each now owing allegiance to Klein's ABKCO.

The meeting was held a few hours after Lennon and Harrison had completed a recording session at Abbey Road – not for the Beatles, but for the Plastic Ono Band. The previous day Lennon had woken up with a song, which he titled 'Instant Karma! '. ^*14 Impatient as ever, he wanted to record it and release it immediately. He contacted George Harrison, who was in London with Phil Spector discussing his first solo album. 'I said to Phil, " Why don't you come to the session? " ' Harrison recalled. With characteristic brio, Spector transformed the ambience of the track, which crackled with tension as Lennon delivered his deconstruction of stardom over ominous piano and whiplash drums.

Lennon was ecstatic: in a few minutes Spector had concocted a fervid, almost claustrophobic sound beyond anything the Beatles could have achieved. The producer was erratic and prone to frequent explosions of temper and ego, but Lennon was smitten. He told Klein that he wanted Spector to produce his next album as well as Harrison's. 'Why don't we get Phil to listen to the Let It Be tapes? ' he added.

The decision required the approval of all four Beatles, and for several weeks it proved impossible to pin McCartney down. He had finally decided to accept Lennon at his word: the Beatles were over. 'I started thinking, Well, if that's the case, I had better get myself together, ' he recalled. 'I can't just let John control the situation and dump us as if we're the jilted girlfriends. ' He closed the doors to the outside world and worked in an environment where there was no one to question his judgement. His first solo album took shape in his home studio, before he ventured into Morgan Studios in north-west London – removed from the hub of the London recording industry. Even so, he reserved all his session time under the pseudonym Billy Martin, a ruse that continued when he finally felt brave enough to stroll round the corner from his home to Abbey Road Studios in February.

Eventually, McCartney answered the string of messages he'd received about Phil Spector. A soundtrack album was definitely required, but McCartney must have wondered whether someone who had already worked with Lennon, and was about to produce Harrison, could deliver an impartial appraisal of his material. Eventually he agreed, on the same proviso as the other Beatles: the album could not be released until all of them had approved Spector's work. Meanwhile, McCartney completed his own record, a charming if insubstantial collage of fragments, including rejects from the Beatles' January 1969 sessions, instrumentals and two hauntingly beautiful love songs, 'Every Night' and 'Maybe I'm Amazed'.

All four Beatles were now promising solo albums. Harrison had a stockpile of at least 20 songs, some of which had been rejected by the Beatles in January 1969, while others had been carefully retained for his own use, notably his collaboration with Bob Dylan 'I'd Have You Anytime'. Yet he was still torn between the spiritual and the secular. He had recently bought Friar Park, a Gothic mansion on the outskirts of Henley-on-Thames, formerly occupied by an order of nuns. Built by the Victorian eccentric Sir Francis Crisp, it was surrounded by grounds that encompassed not just ornamental lakes but a network of underground caves that could be explored by boat and extravagant gardens that had been allowed to slip into disrepair. Harrison's plans ran to a complete refurbishment of the property and its surroundings, and the installation of a lavish recording studio. Even by the standards of rock star grandeur, it was an epic enterprise in consumerism, but Harrison also envisaged the house as a spiritual haven.

He soon invited several members of the Krishna Temple to live with him, to his wife's muffled horror. She felt more and more isolated from her husband. 'He became increasingly obsessive about meditating and chanting, ' she recalled. 'He would do it for hours. ' After several months dedicated to the spirit, Harrison would relapse: 'As if the pleasures of the flesh were too hard to resist, he would stop meditating, snort coke, have fun flirting and partying. ' As Boyd explained, 'I didn't want to chant all day. George did it obsessively for three months, then went crazy. '

It was Harrison the chanter who travelled to Paris in March 1970 with the acolytes of the Krishna Temple on a mission to spread the word of God. 'It was rather like throwing a mountain into a puddle, ' said his Krishna friend Shyamasundar, 'because about 330-odd Frenchmen, photographers and pressmen met him at this restaurant and almost smothered him. We didn't get too much Krishna consciousness propagated. ' The same observer noted that Harrison's 'future plans were to become Krishna conscious. . . He's got everything that the material world can offer, but still there's no satisfaction in it, so he knows that to understand Krishna and actually associate with the supreme personality of God is the highest and rare-most [sic] achievement of man. ' And Shyamasundar confirmed that Krishna also dominated Harrison's musical ambitions: 'He has said that from now on he only wants to sing mantras. ' Yet Harrison knew that wasn't an appropriate dish to set before Phil Spector, so he kept the producer waiting.

So did John Lennon, despite Apple confidently announcing in March 1970 that he was about to begin an album. (Meanwhile, George Martin was promising that the Beatles would record together in June, a triumph of hope over reality. ) Several obstacles remained, not the least of which was Lennon's lack of songs. After the deluge of inspiration he'd experienced in India, his creativity had been spasmodic, although the quality of his material, from 'Come Together' to 'Instant Karma! ', obscured his difficulties. He continued to insist that his relationship with Yoko Ono had unleashed his full capabilities as an artist, but to write songs it seemed he needed the Beatles and the stimulus of McCartney's competitive instinct, or else the intervention of an irresistible force from outside. The Toronto Peace Festival certainly wasn't the answer: it collapsed in early March 1970, after Lennon sent the promoters a telegram that ended, 'We want nothing to do with you or your festival. Yours in disgust, John and Yoko. ' Harrison might have found Lennon's vision of the festival sympathetic: 'Our latest idea was to have everyone at the festival singing only " Hare Krishna" . . . Can you imagine what we could achieve together in the one spot – singing and praying for peace – one million souls? ' But his final words to his global audience were more despairing. 'We are sorry for the confusion. It is bigger than both of us. . . We still believe. Pray for us. ' It sounded like a last telegram from the Titanic.

Still prepared to engage with the outside world, Lennon found a fresh hero in Trinidad-born black-power activist Michael Abdul Malik (known professionally as Michael X), founder of a London collective known as the Black Eagles, inspired by the Black Panther Party of California. Malik stumbled upon every radical's dream, a rich and guilt-ridden patron. 'Michael was a persuasive guy, ' recalled Lennon's friend Barry Miles. 'He became whatever people wanted him to be. He would spin these rich people a yarn, and how could they not write him a cheque? John Lennon was bound to be impressed by him. It was inevitable. ' Malik talked his way into Apple's offices and fearlessly accused Lennon of cultural larceny. 'You have stolen the rhythms of the black people you knew in Liverpool, ' he said. 'You might have done it consciously or unconsciously. Anyway, now you owe us a debt. ' Lennon offered him cash from the Bag Productions account, ostensibly as an advance on a book deal, although no contract was ever signed or manuscript delivered.

When he and Yoko Ono had cut their hair in Denmark, he had saved the cuttings in a plastic bag, aware that in a world still prone to Beatlemania there were few things more valuable than true fragments of a Beatle. Now he had found a cause worthy of his sacred offering. On 4 February 1970 Lennon, Ono and Derek Taylor climbed to the roof of Malik's HQ, watched by a crowd of photographers. Lennon handed over the bag of hair, Malik offered a pair of bloodstained shorts once worn by boxer Muhammad Ali, and Lennon grinned inanely at the cameras. 'It was such an ugly meeting. Nobody printed anything, ' recalled Derek Taylor. 'There was a massive press turnout, with photographers clambering over the roofs, and then nothing in the papers. I definitely should have had the wisdom to call a halt to the daily press conferences they were giving. Every day there was a new campaign, a new cause. This was the final proof that they were overexposed. '

Lennon's desire for publicity seemed to have reached manic proportions. Even the Valentine's Day gift of his psychedelic Rolls-Royce to Allen Klein was accompanied by a press advert and a statement: 'Believe it or not, Allen Klein is a soul brother from way back – a few incarnations ago. We went out to eat with him, and it was revealed unto us, and I was sorry for the thoughts I'd had about him, even the paranoia I'd had laid on me by other people. There'll be no more of that, and I wanted to give him this to surprise him. He's just fantastic, and I know there's a lot of shit going around about him. About us too. '

More pressing was what Lennon in a notorious 1971 letter would call 'shit from the inside, baby': the psychological turbulence that was corroding his relationship with Ono. In January 1970 Lennon received a book in the mail. Entitled The Primal Scream, it was the work of radical psychotherapist Arthur Janov. '[ John] read it, ' Janov recalled, 'and he came to me. ' The book represented a profound break from orthodox psychotherapy. 'I believe that the only way to eliminate neurosis is with overthrow by force and violence, ' Janov wrote, 'the force of years of compressed feelings and denied needs; the violence of wrenching them out of an unreal system. '

These feelings and needs, he declared, were the accumulation of primal pain, first experienced in the earliest stages of childhood, perhaps even during the birth process itself. They represented rejections by fathers, mothers and other authority figures, all the agony of life in the cauldron of everyday cruelty. 'Just as neurosis results from a gradual shutting-off process, becoming healthy involves a gradual turning-on again, ' Janov wrote. 'Primal Therapy is like neurosis in reverse. Each day in a young child's life, hurt after hurt closes off more of his feelings until he is neurotic. In Primal Therapy the patient relives those hurts, opening himself up until he is well. ' The final breakthrough of recovery, Janov said, would come in an outpouring of emotion so urgent and unrestrained that it would emerge as a piercing shriek of pain.

Instinctively repelled by intellectual theory ('bullshit'), Lennon still devoured The Primal Scream with the same excitement that TheAutobiography of a Yogi inspired in George Harrison. He immediately phoned Janov and asked him to come to England. By mid-March the therapist was at Lennon's Ascot home, encouraging him to scream for his mother's love. 'John had about as much pain as I've ever seen in my life, ' Janov recalled. 'He was a very dedicated patient. Very serious about it. ' A measure of Lennon's commitment is the fact that he did not immediately run to the press, like an excited schoolboy, to alert the world to his new discovery. He had become a compulsive enthusiast, for drugs, for the Maharishi, for Ono, and for Klein, but Primal Scream Therapy affected him too profoundly to be translated into a poster event. Soon he would be dragged back into the material world, however, as the more recent past demanded his attention.

Nearly six months after Lennon had quit the group, the Beatles continued to pretend that they were still a functioning unit. Any concerns to the contrary were calmed by the imminent arrival of the Let It Be film, and by statements from Starkey and Harrison suggesting the quartet would soon work together. 'We've got unity through diversity, ' Harrison explained cryptically. It was an epigram that would soon be exposed as wildly optimistic.

There was a series of Beatle landmarks on the horizon. The HeyJude album was released on 26 February 1970. Starkey's SentimentalJourney was scheduled for 27 March. The Let It Be film was meant to premiere in New York on 28 April, then in London a week later. And the 'Let It Be' single was rush-released on 6 March, though tellingly it failed to top the British chart. Nevertheless, McCartney's elegant, gospel-inflected tune ^*15 whetted the global appetite for the soundtrack album, which still awaited completion.

Suddenly there was another item to squeeze into the agenda, an album entitled McCartney. Its creator believed that, as a co-owner of Apple, he could impose his own schedule: the record, he said, would be issued on 10 April. Neil Aspinall politely asked if he would mind postponing the album for a week, to allow Starkey's record a little longer in the spotlight. McCartney agreed, prepared a final mix on 23 March, handed over the tapes and artwork, and discovered on 25 March, when his brother-in-law John Eastman visited EMI, that Allen Klein had already postponed his album's release. McCartney immediately phoned Harrison, who told him that there was no question of delay, confirming this in a telegram that he sent to the other Beatles, Klein and Aspinall.

McCartney triumphantly showed the telegram to EMI, but his victory was short-lived. On the same day he finished his record, Phil Spector had begun work at Abbey Road on the Let It Be album. By the end of March Spector was confident that the project would be completed within a couple of days, so Klein alerted EMI that the new Beatles LP would be issued before the end of April, to accompany the premiere of the film. But the most suitable date was just one week after McCartney was due to be released. Now the Beatles would effectively be competing for sales with Paul McCartney.

Klein visited EMI executives, and 'discussed with them the problem of two long-playing records coming out together. They agreed that it was undesirable from a selling point of view. ' Once ego was removed from the equation, the solution was obvious. McCartney was only a record; Let It Be was a multimedia package, albeit chaotically assembled and still, less than a month before release, unfinished. Besides, Let It Be was a group project, and should automatically take precedence over that of an individual. And so McCartney might have agreed, had the decision not followed eighteen months of acrimony.

Lennon and Harrison certainly had no qualms about delaying McCartney. On 31 March Lennon informed EMI of their decision, writing, 'We have arrived at the conclusion that it would not be in the best interests of this company for the record to be released on that date. ' Meanwhile, Harrison wrote to McCartney:

Dear Paul, We thought a lot about yours and the Beatles LPs – and decided it's stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other (also there's Ringo's and Hey Jude) – so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date til June 4th (there's a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you'd come round when you realized that the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th. We're sorry it turned out like this – it's nothing personal. Love John & George. Hare Krishna. A Mantra a Day Keeps MAYA! Away.

Harrison's religious references sounded almost aggressive; McCartney must have wondered whose side Maya, the Hindu goddess of illusion, was on.

Harrison's letter to McCartney was sealed in an envelope labelled 'From Us, To You', and left at the Apple reception desk for a messenger to carry to McCartney's home. But Richard Starkey agreed to deliver the bad news in person. 'I didn't think it fair some office lad should take something like that round, ' he explained. He drove to St John's Wood, handed over the letter and told McCartney that he agreed with what it said. 'He went crazy; he was crazy, I thought, ' Starkey recalled. 'He just shouted and pointed at me. He was out of control, prodding his finger towards my face. He told me to get my coat on and get out. I got brought down, because I couldn't believe it was happening to me. ' McCartney explained: 'I really got angry. . . I said, in effect, this was the last straw, and " If you drag me down, I'll drag you down. " What I meant was, " Anything you do to me, I will do to you. " ' Lennon felt that 'Paul's was just an ego game. . . Ringo had not taken sides or anything like that. . . he attacked Ringo and he started threatening him and everything, and that was the kibosh for Ringo. ' As Starkey admitted, 'I'm very emotional; things like that really upset me at the time. ' The Beatles weren't strangers to the raised fist – it was an instinctive reaction from Lennon when he felt he was being challenged – but none of the group had ever physically confronted Starkey, who was its most diminutive and vulnerable member.

The immediate victor was McCartney: the distraught Starkey reported back to Apple, and the decision was taken to let the bassist's album go ahead. But the incident had a grievous effect on the relationship between the two men. Throughout the disputes over Apple and Klein, Starkey had never let business decisions affect their friendship. Now he felt disgusted, alienated, crushed, battered, the whole range of negative emotions that McCartney had experienced when Ono and then Klein disrupted his perfect universe.

The next day John Eastman wrote to United Artists Films to say that McCartney had not yet agreed that the film should be released, and that Klein's word could not be trusted. Meanwhile, Phil Spector was close to completing the soundtrack album. The day after his confrontation with McCartney, the luckless Starkey faced another psychodrama. Spector had commissioned orchestral and choral decoration for three songs, and Starkey was there to overdub his percussion tracks, which might otherwise be obscured. For the last five years nothing had been added to a Beatles track without the approval of its composer. Now songs by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were about to be augmented, and none of the three was there to watch it happen.

Richard Hewson's^*16 arrangement for McCartney's 'The Long and Winding Road' was by far the most radical, and controversial, of the revisions. As originally recorded, the song was a selfconsciously maudlin affair, overflowing with sentimentality. Rather than subverting this mood with a touch of atonality, Hewson boldly decided to accentuate it. He delivered a score that was almost claustrophobic, like the ill-ventilated sick room of some ancien ré gime noble. On another day Starkey might have insisted that McCartney was consulted. But he was still in shock after their confrontation and also faced a more immediate problem: attempting to prevent the overwrought producer from treating the studio staff and orchestra so badly that they walked out. 'Phil had a style of humiliation that was part of his humour, ' recalled Leon Russell, veteran of many Spector sessions.

With Spector's work complete on 2 April, copies of the Let It Be album were forwarded to the Beatles for their approval, with a letter from Spector. 'If there is anything you'd like done to the album, ' the producer told them, 'let me know and I'll be glad to help. Naturally little things are easy to change, big things might be a problem. If you wish, please call me about anything regarding the album tonight. ' 'We all said yes, ' Starkey recalled. 'Even at the beginning Paul said yes. I spoke to him on the phone, and said, " Did you like it? " and he said, " Yeah, it's OK. " He didn't put it down. ' Starkey himself agreed: 'I like what Phil did, actually. ' So did Harrison: 'I personally thought it was a really good idea. ' And Lennon: 'He always wanted to work with the Beatles, and he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it. It wasn't fantastic, but I heard it; I didn't puke. I was so relieved. ' And finally, not exuberant but phlegmatic, McCartney: 'When I got the finished record there were loud ladies' voices wailing. It wasn't terrible. . . I preferred it the way it was. ' But he

raised no immediate objections. Harrison sent Spector a telegram of congratulations; Starkey phoned with the same message. It had taken fifteen months from first arrival in the chilly halls of Twickenham to the high-tension finale at Abbey Road, but it seemed as if the saga of Let It Be was over.

Throughout this period of Apple intrigue, Lennon and Ono remained under the care of Arthur Janov. The therapist had persuaded the couple that they would only gain lasting benefit from their screaming if they were separated. Reluctantly, they moved into luxury London hotels and were only allowed to communicate by letter. Janov scuttled from one suite to the other, returning Lennon to the pain of separation from his parents, Ono to the turmoil of Tokyo under American air assault.

McCartney was experiencing his own vision of hell. 'I was going through a bad time, ' he recalled, 'what I suspect was almost a nervous breakdown. I remember lying awake at nights shaking. ' Six months earlier he had felt bereaved by Lennon's departure from the Beatles. Now his tie to the group that he had joined in 1957 was strangling him. Since the arrival of Klein he had been reacting, not acting. The time had come for him to assert control over his own professional life in the hope that he could also lift the darkness closing around his soul.

The initial declaration of independence came from Eastman and Eastman. On 7 April they announced the formation of McCartney Productions Ltd. Its first two projects, they declared, would be the McCartney album and an animated film based around the strip cartoon character Rupert Bear. Meanwhile, copies of McCartney were prepared for the press. Derek Taylor rang McCartney to ask whether he was prepared to talk to journalists about the record. He replied, 'I can't deal with the press. I hate all those Beatles questions. ' According to McCartney, he suggested that Taylor send him a list of questions, and he would provide answers. 'So he asked me some stilted questions and I gave some stilted answers, ' McCartney recalled in 1984, 'that included an announcement that we'd split up. '

Taylor, however, insisted that the questions were entirely McCartney's invention: 'He was only supposed to write out information explaining how he made his album. Instead he hands us this interview with himself asking questions such as would he miss Ringo. It was entirely gratuitous. Nobody asked him that question. He asked that question of himself. ' This edited version of the questionnaire gives a flavour of the topics McCartney chose to raise.

Q: Will Paul and Linda become a John and Yoko?

A: No, they will become Paul and Linda.

Q: Will the other Beatles receive the first copies?

A: Wait and see.

Q: Is it true that neither Allen Klein nor ABKCO will be in any way involved with the production, manufacturing, distribution or promotion of this album?

A: Not if I can help it.

Q: Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment, e. g., when you thought, Wish Ringo was here for this break?

A: No.

Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?

A: No.

Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?

A: Time will tell. Being a solo album means it's the start of a solo career. . . and not being done with the Beatles means it's a rest. So it's both.

Q: Have you any plans for live appearances?

A: No.

Q: Is your break with the Beatles, temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?

A: Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don't know.

Q: Do you foresee a time when Lennon/McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again?

A: No.

Q: What do you feel about John's peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Giving back the MBE? Yoko's influence? Yoko?

A: I love John and respect what he does – it doesn't give me any pleasure.

Q: Were you pleased with Abbey Road? Was it musically restricting?

A: It was a good album. (No. 1 for a long time. )

Q: What is your relationship with Klein?

A: It isn't. I am not in contact with him, and he does not represent me in any way.

Q: What is your relationship with Apple?

A: It is the office of a company which I part-own with the other Beatles. I don't go there because I don't like offices or business, especially when I'm on holiday.

Q: Have you any plans to set up an independent production company?

A: McCartney Productions.

Q: What are your plans now? A holiday? A musical? A movie? Retirement?

A: My only plan is to grow up.

The script was duly returned to Apple, where Derek Taylor read it, raised a weary eyebrow and sent it to the press. The packages arrived on Thursday 9 April 1970. 'I received one at the Evening Standard, ' recalled journalist Ray Connolly, 'but the story was embargoed until the next day, so I didn't print anything. But Don Short at the Mirror did. ' The result was a Daily Mirror exclusive under the headline PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES. Early copies were available in the West End of London that evening, and Apple staff were immediately disturbed at home by fevered enquiries from other papers. The result was that the Mirror's report was accompanied the following morning by an altogether more sober story in The Times, MCCARTNEY SPLIT WITH BEATLES DENIED. One of Taylor's assistants, Mavis Smith, was quoted as saying, 'This is just not true. ' The paper added, 'She knew that Mr McCartney intended issuing a statement today on the release of a new recording, but denied that any critical statements meant a real break-up of the group. She said she hoped that the group would get together for another recording after the summer. '

Allen Klein had flown into London on Thursday. He was due to meet executives from the British arm of United Artists the following day, at a board meeting of Apple Films Ltd. George Harrison would attend in his role as company director, and Paul McCartney had also signalled his intention to be there, so that he could raise his misgivings about the deal between Apple and UA. But later that day McCartney informed Apple that he would not, after all, be present at the meeting. It was only when the story of a Beatles break-up appeared the next morning that Klein understood why his opponent had pulled out.

On Thursday afternoon McCartney called Lennon, who was in therapy with Arthur Janov. 'I'm doing what you did, ' he told his colleague. 'I'm putting out an album, and I'm leaving the Beatles as well. ' 'Good, ' Lennon replied. 'That makes two of us who have seen sense. ' The following morning, when Lennon heard about the Mirror's story, he realised that he had been trumped. 'I phoned John, ' explained Ray Connolly, 'and told him what Paul had said. He was furious and said, " Why didn't you write the story when I told you? " I said that he'd asked me not to, and he said, " You're the fucking journalist, Ray! " In retrospect, I think he was setting me up. He thought I wouldn't be able to resist breaking the story first, and then he could turn around to the others and say, " I told him not to say anything, " and he'd be the innocent party. '

'John had made it clear that he wanted to be the one to announce the split, ' Linda McCartney explained years later, 'since it was his idea. ' 'He wanted to be first, ' her husband confirmed. 'But I didn't realise it would hurt him that much or that it mattered who was first. ' Lennon commented later, 'We were all hurt that he didn't tell us what he was going to do. I think he claims that he didn't mean that to happen, but that's bullshit. ' Envy also entered the equation. 'I was cursing because I hadn't done it. I wanted to do it and I should have done it. . . I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which is use it to sell a record. '

With a mixture of admiration and contempt, Lennon described McCartney as 'a good PR man. . . about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job. ' But in the years to come McCartney felt apologetic enough about the statement and the way it was released to spin defensive webs around himself: 'The way it came out, it looked like it was specially engineered by me'; 'It was going to be an insert in the album. But when it was printed as news, it looked very cold, yes, even crazy'; 'I figured it was about time we told the truth. It was stupid, OK, but I thought someone ought to say something. I didn't like to keep lying to people. It was a conscience thing to me'; 'It was a nasty little period, all of that. Looking at it now, it looks very callous. '

A 'conscience thing' that 'looks very callous': by his own admission, McCartney's credibility as a 'good PR man' had been shaken. His clearest summary of what he wanted, and what he achieved, came in 1986:

I think John thought I was using this press release for publicity – as I suppose, in a way, it was. So it all looked very weird, and it ruffled a few feathers. The good thing about it was that we all had to finally own up to the fact that we'd broken up three or four months before. We'd been ringing each other quite constantly, sort of saying, 'Let's get it back together. ' And I think me, George and Ringo did want to save things. But I think John was, at that point, too heavily into his new life – which you can't blame him.

The circularity of his argument was obvious: I broke up the Beatles because John had already broken up the Beatles, although I wanted to save the Beatles. . . And yet one truth was inescapable: by staging a media event as shocking and effective as anything in Yoko Ono's imagination, McCartney achieved two purposes that did not have to be mutually exclusive. He publicised his new album, and he told the world that the Beatles were finished. Forty years later the question remains: did McCartney actually mean to split up the Beatles? 'Paul told me he was devastated when that was the story that the papers printed, ' recalled Ray Connolly.

Contemporary commentators certainly noticed that 'Nowhere does he actually say he's leaving the group. Or that he will never record with them again. ' As journalist Richard Williams observed, 'What else is new? All these facts existed at the time of Abbey Road, but it didn't stop that album being made. . . There's bound to come a time when they won't be the Beatles any more, but no one, probably not even themselves, will recognise it when it comes. '

Imagine an alternative script. The McCartney album is released, and its creator merely issues a cryptic comment about the Beatles, along the lines of 'Who knows what will happen? ' Lennon is isolated in his room of primal screams at the Inn on the Park and says nothing. Later in 1970, with the 'split' still not made public, Lennon undertakes one of the frequent changes of heart that litter his career, and invites the Beatles to help him record the songs inspired by his experience with Janov. The Beatles stumble, or stride, into a new decade, and then. . . ? It's a tempting scenario, which begs a further question: did McCartney capsize the Beatles in a fit of pique because of the letter he received from Lennon and Harrison? Twenty years later Harrison would accuse McCartney of using the rumour of a Beatles reunion to sell his own records. But in 1970 this method seems to have worked in reverse: McCartney publicised his record by making it impossible for the Beatles to reunite. It's true that Lennon had already quit the group, but by not making that decision public he had left room for compromise. McCartney was the last of the four Beatles to leave the group but he chose to take the credit – or, as it turned out, the blame.

Once his statement was launched, and then not contradicted or clarified, the resulting turbulence had to be navigated. Derek Taylor opted for a denial that spoke more about his personal distress than his grasp of reality. 'Spring is here and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope. The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops – that'll be the time to worry. Not before. Until then, the Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on. The beat goes on. ' It was the weakest pronouncement that this strikingly articulate man ever made. As he admitted later, 'The wording was no clearer then than it is now and somehow it had to do. We couldn't write the final words. We didn't want to, and we didn't know they were final, and really it wasn't any of our business, we thought in our escalating insecurity. '

Taylor then had to face the press in person, alongside Allen Klein. Here he was more realistic: 'They do not want to split up, but the present rift seems to be part of their growing up. . . At the moment they seem to cramp each other's styles. Paul has called a halt to the Beatles' activities. They could be dormant for years. . . It is no secret that Klein and Paul have never hit it off. Paul has been into this building just twice since Klein came here. ' Klein did his best to rid himself of any hint of the demonic. 'I like Paul. We've had many meetings, but it's never pleasant when someone appears not to like you. I think his reasons are his own personal problems. ' It was a subtle allusion to McCartney's binding links to the Eastman family. As Richard Williams wrote that week, 'On the face of it, Paul's distrust of [Klein] is irrational, and the only visible motive is family loyalty, honourable but scarcely characteristically hard-headed. ' Klein added that McCartney's announcement was 'a permanent maybe' and insisted that it merely reflected a situation that had existed for the past six months. For the first time someone was prepared to acknowledge that there had been a decisive move inside the Beatles' camp the previous year, but the protagonist wasn't named. In his only statement on the affair John Lennon certainly didn't admit that he had already quit the group: 'I was happy to hear from Paul. It was nice to find that he was still alive. Anyway, you can say I said jokingly, " He didn't quit, I sacked him! " ' His comments exposed the difference between the two men's PR techniques. If the roles had been reversed, McCartney would probably have insisted that 'I did it first. ' But Lennon sat back and allowed McCartney to become the focus of the world's anger.

'I had so much in me that I couldn't express, and it was just very nervy times, very very difficult, ' McCartney recalled of the weeks that followed. 'One night I'd been asleep and awoke and couldn't lift my head off the pillow. My head was down in the pillow and I thought, Jesus, if I don't do this I'll suffocate. I remember hardly having the energy to pull myself up, but with a great struggle I pulled my head up and lay on my back and thought, that was a bit near! I just couldn't do anything. ' His symbolic severance from the Beatles had done nothing to liberate his spirit.

A year after McCartney's wedding had brought sobbing fans onto the streets, reporters found it easy to procure equally shocked comments from those who didn't want the dream to end. It was too soon for any claims that this event marked the death of the 1960s; such theorising, applied to any number of apparently epoch-defining moments, would come later. For the moment the response was immediate, a reflex reaction to an unseen punch. Besides the devastated fans, the most obvious victims were the businessmen who feared the end of a financial bonanza. Allen Klein reminded the press that McCartney was 'obligated to Apple for a considerable number of years'. An official announcement followed, insisting that no member of the Beatles was allowed to 'offer his services without the approval of his colleagues'. Back in 1962 the prospect of a split had been built into the Beatles' managerial contract with Brian Epstein: 'The Artists jointly and severally agree that should two or more of them desire to remove one or more of the other Artists, then with the consent in writing of the Manager they shall give notice in writing by registered post. ' But that was in the days of innocence, when the Beatles were merely a pop group, not a corporation with dozens of global subsidiaries to feed.

Those corporations still needed fuel, and while McCartney's statement was being digested, Richard Starkey and George Harrison attended a board meeting of Apple Films, after which Starkey signed a letter to United Artists, informing them that 20 per cent of the Beatles' earnings from Let It Be should be paid directly to Klein's ABKCO company. Over the next week the dramatic focus switched from the Beatles to the soundtrack album that would shortly be issued in their name.

When he received the acetate copy of Let It Be from Phil Spector, Paul McCartney had grudgingly agreed to its release. Now, with the furore surrounding the Beatles' split filling his ears, he kept returning to the album, like a dog obsessively licking a wound. As he listened again to 'The Long and Winding Road', with its grandiose arrangement obscuring his original design, he became increasingly disturbed. There was no longer any need to conciliate his fellow Beatles; now truth must speak. But his prevarication was fatal. McCartney was imbued with the spirit of Hamlet, neglecting to act until only failure could follow.

On Tuesday 14 April, ten days or more after he first heard the album, McCartney rang Apple and demanded to speak to Klein. When he was told Klein wasn't there, he insisted that Apple staff member Bill Oakes take down a letter to the manager. The letter, which was to be copied to Spector and John Eastman, read:

Dear Sir,

In future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission. I had considered orchestrating 'The Long and Winding Road' but I decided against it. I therefore want it altered to these specifications: 1. Strings, horns, voices and all added noises to be reduced in volume. 2. Vocal and Beatle instrumentation to be brought up in volume. 3. Harp to be removed completely at the end of the song and original piano notes to be substituted. 4. Don't ever do it again.

McCartney complained to Ray Connolly a few days later, 'No one asked me what I thought. I couldn't believe it. I would never have female voices on a Beatle record. ' He had chosen to forget adding his wife's vocals to Let It Be a few months earlier, and indeed the presence of Lennon and Harrison's wives on the White Album in 1968. Yet his central point was impossible to deny: 'It just goes to show that it's no good me sitting here thinking I'm in control, because obviously I'm not. '

The situation was laced with irony. McCartney had envisaged Apple as an artistic haven, but now the company had restructured his own work without his permission. Worse still, it was McCartney who had recognised the need to bring in a manager to trim the company's wildest excesses, and now that manager was committing excesses of his own in the one area that McCartney had imagined was safe from interference. Under the circumstances, his letter was comparatively mild. He made no threats, delivered no ultimata; he didn't even ask for Spector's overdubs to be removed, merely reduced in volume; he seemed to assume that, at some level of Apple, the McCartney name would still be powerful enough to ensure that his wishes were satisfied. Yet he was wrong.

The response from Allen Klein was also rational, within his own world view. Spector had invited comment from McCartney, who had chosen not to speak. Now that the production process of the album had begun, McCartney had finally decided to object. Klein's motive was to safeguard the company against interference, no matter what the source, and on 14 April, the company needed to push ahead with the album, to ensure that the release date was met. The time for remixing was over. Klein attempted to phone McCartney but discovered that the musician had once again changed his number. So, Klein recalled, 'I sent a telegram to the effect that I did not understand his letter, and asking him to call me or Phil Spector direct. I added a postscript that Mr Starkey wanted his telephone number. The following day a message was relayed to me that the letter spoke for itself. By this time it was too late to do anything about altering the record, in view of the time required for its production before release. ' A few days later McCartney ingenuously told a reporter, 'I've sent Klein a letter asking for some of the things to be altered, but I haven't received an answer yet. ' But by then he must have known what the answer would be.

So McCartney took his case to the people. He used an interview with Ray Connolly of the Evening Standard to expose the full palette of his objections to Klein, the Let It Be album, the bizarre restrictions that he now faced from his own company, but not, at least overtly, the other Beatles. Even Klein was spared savage criticism. McCartney presented his case as a lament, not an accusation: 'The party's over, but none of us wants to admit it. . . Allen Klein keeps saying that I don't like him because I want Eastman to manage the Beatles. . . I thought, and still think, that Linda's father would have been good for us and I decided I wanted him, but all the others wanted Klein. Well, all right. . . that's up to them. . . but he doesn't represent me. ' As an illustration of the gulf that had opened within the Lennon/McCartney partnership, he explained, 'We don't do harmonies like we used to. I think it's sad. On " Come Together", I would have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he would have liked me to, but I was too embarrassed to ask him. ' He was a scared child, alone in the dark forest of intrigue. 'I don't work to the best of my abilities in that situation. ' He ended with a Lennonesque cry from the heart: 'Give us our freedom, which we so richly deserve. We are beginning now only to call each other when we have bad news. . . We're all talking about peace and love, but really, we're not feeling peaceful at all. There's no one to blame, we were fools to get ourselves into this situation in the first place. ' It was a clear gesture of conciliation: there was no one to blame, not even Klein; the responsibility was owned collectively by the four 'fools' and their advisers; all they needed to do was obey their inner longing for 'peace and love'. While he was undoubtedly hoping to appear as a man of reason and goodwill, these were not the words of someone who had issued a triumphant manifesto of liberation less than two weeks earlier. He wanted dé tente followed by reconciliation, but like his effort to alter the Beatles' album, he had – by accident or unconscious design – left it too late.

In any event his most important audience was scattered. His relationship with Richard Starkey had been scarred by the confrontation of 31 March. In late April John Lennon and Yoko Ono left England for Los Angeles, to pursue a summer of Primal Scream Therapy during which they were effectively out of contact with Apple, the Beatles and the attendant disputes. Harrison took the same flight, intending to work with Bob Dylan. Just before he left, McCartney phoned him in Henley, and as Harrison recalled, 'came on like Attila the Hun. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. ' Once again McCartney had let emotion sway his judgement. As Harrison would soon reveal, he was still open to the prospect of reconciliation, but rather than negotiating McCartney had poured out all the vitriol he'd been repressing, all the anger he felt about the way that his friends had gone behind his back and distorted his work, all the bitterness and grief.

Harrison retained a sense of objectivity. The youngest Beatle, he was now the group's wisest spokesman. 'We all have to sacrifice a little in order to gain something really big, ' he explained as he arrived in New York. 'And there is a big gain by recording together, I think musically and financially and spiritually. For the rest of the world, you know, I think that Beatle music is such a big sort of scene, that I think it's the least we could do, to sacrifice three months of the year, at least, just to do an album or two. I think it's very selfish if the Beatles don't record together. ' Could the Beatles work together again? 'It's easy, ' he replied. 'We've done it for years. We all know that we're all separate individuals, and all we have to do is accept that we're all individuals and that we all have as much potential as each other. '

The message was universal, but the implication was specific: for Harrison the Beatles could only function if the group was accepted as a partnership of four equals, and three equal songwriters, rather than a power base of two. 'There was a point in my life when I realised anybody could be Lennon/McCartney, ' Harrison reflected. 'The point is, nobody's special. ' And the particular 'nobody' he had in mind was his school friend Paul McCartney. 'Everybody changes, and sometimes people don't want other people to change, or even if you do change they won't accept that you've changed, and they keep in mind some other image of you. ' Harrison didn't need to add that musicians beyond the Beatles were prepared to accept him as a creative artist. He was about to go into the studio with Bob Dylan, perhaps the only contemporary artist all four Beatles were prepared to recognise as their superior, and Dylan accepted him on a basis of equality, not polite sufferance or open derision. Their relationship had none of the jagged competition that had marked Dylan's sporadic friendship with Lennon. Dylan recognised the depth of Harrison's spirituality and found a gentle humour and heart in the Liverpudlian that ensured their relationship would survive for decades to come.

The creative freedom offered by the Dylan sessions and the prospect of an epic recording adventure with Phil Spector allowed Harrison to separate the Beatles as an institution from his repressed role in the group. Yet he still found it difficult to avoid pinpointing McCartney as the source of any conflict or tension. He could describe the 'bitchiness' between Lennon and McCartney as 'childish' and then say, 'I get on well with Ringo and John, and I try my best to get on with Paul. ' It was McCartney, he said, who 'wouldn't let me out of the bag' and recognise his flourishing creativity. 'The conflict musically was [with] Paul, ' he admitted, 'and yet I could play with any other band or musician and have a reasonably good time. '

The launch of Apple marked the moment when McCartney went off the rails, Harrison believed. 'Really it was his idea to do Apple, and once it started going Paul was very active in there, and then it got really chaotic and we had do something about it. When we started doing something about it, obviously Paul didn't have as much say in the matter. ' And then the battle between Klein and the Eastmans had begun. Harrison said that he wished Klein had been their manager from the beginning, but that McCartney didn't agree – 'that's only a personal problem that he'll have to get over. . . It's a difficult one to overcome because – well, you can think of the subtleties. He's really living with it. When I go home at night, I'm not living there with Allen Klein, whereas in a way Paul's living with the Eastmans. ' What McCartney failed to recognise was the power of democracy:

The reality is that he's outvoted, and we're a partnership. We've got these companies which we all own 25 per cent of each, and if there's a decision to be made, then, like in any other business or group, you have a vote, and he was outvoted three to one, and if he doesn't like it, it's really a pity. Because we're trying to do what's best for the Beatles as a group, or best for Apple as a company. We're not trying to do what's best for Paul and his in-laws. '

The Harrison quote that went around the world that spring was purely optimistic: 'Everyone is trying to do his own album, and I am too. But after that I'm ready to go back with the others. ' No one doubted that Starkey would go along with the majority. Now even Lennon was prepared to hint at a positive outcome: 'I've no idea if the Beatles will work together again, or not. I never really have. It was always open. If somebody didn't feel like it, that's it! It could be a rebirth or a death. We'll see what it is. It'll probably be a rebirth. '

For McCartney it felt more like asphyxiation. 'It was murderous, ' he recalled. 'I was having dreams, amazing dreams about Klein, running around after me with some hypodermic needle, like a crazy dentist. ' But the nights paled alongside the days. 'I was impossible, ' he admitted in 1984. 'I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes. ' Since the age of 15 he had been John Lennon's friend, collaborator, partner, confidant; from 18 he had been a Beatle; from 20 he had been a star. His artistic abilities weren't in doubt, but what use was McCartney without the Beatles? His account of the spring and summer of 1970 reads like a textbook description of clinical depression: 'It was just the feeling, the terrible disappointment of not being of any use to anyone any more. It was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul. . . I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then I really was a kind of cocky sod. It was the first time I'd had a major blow to my confidence. ' The effect on his wife, he said, was devastating: 'She had to deal with this guy who didn't particularly want to get out of bed and, if he did, wanted to go back to bed pretty soon after. He wanted to drink earlier and earlier each day, and didn't really see the point in shaving, because where was he going? And I was generally pretty morbid. ' He lingered in a state of psychological self-destruction, pointless, endless, inescapable.

Only one avenue promised relief: full legal separation from the rest of the Beatles. If they didn't want him any more, why did they insist on keeping him locked into this financial and spiritual prison? The Eastmans couldn't soften his despair, but they could spar with Klein, parry his blows and hope to land a punch. John Eastman made the initial assault, inviting Klein to a meeting at the University Club in midtown Manhattan. The venue, perhaps the grandest of New York's private rooms, might have been designed to intimidate Klein. Eastman negotiated with the politesse that the venue demanded. Was there a way, he wondered, in which McCartney might be able to secure the fruits of his own labour, rather than adding them to the Beatles' collective pot? Klein didn't reject Eastman's proposal; he merely pointed out the potential tax liability that might be accrued if, as Eastman suggested, the individual Beatles exchanged some of their assets within the Apple group. Then Lee Eastman entered the ring with characteristic bluntness. He drafted a letter to Klein demanding that McCartney be freed from his partnership with the other Beatles immediately. Klein didn't bother to reply. Next McCartney suggested that he should cover all his own expenses in future in return for being allowed to take £ 1, 500 per month from the Beatles' account. The reply was predictably negative.

'Eventually, ' McCartney recalled, 'I went and said, " I want to leave. You can all get on with Klein and everything, just let me out. " ' Having not spoken to Lennon for several weeks, he sent him a letter that summer, pleading that the former partners 'let each other out of the trap'. As McCartney testified, Lennon 'replied with a photograph of himself and Yoko, with a balloon coming out of his mouth in which was written, " How and Why? " I replied by letter saying, " How by signing a paper which says we hereby dissolve our partnership. Why because there is no partnership. " John replied on a card which said, " Get well soon. Get the other signatures and I will think about it. " ' Communication was at an end. Yet the press continued to believe, fired by hope more than evidence, that it was only a matter of days before the four men healed their wounds. The stories taunted McCartney, who fired off a letter to the prime offender, Melody Maker: 'Dear Mailbag, In order to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year, my answer to the question, " Will the Beatles get together again? " . . . is no. ' He had finally pronounced the verdict that was missing from his self-interview in April: the Beatles were no more.

There had been little evidence to the contrary during the intervening months. Apple released the McCartney album on 17 April 1970, and Klein couldn't resist a public riposte to the musician's jibes. In US music trade magazines Apple took out their standard advertisements for the record, to which Klein affixed an incendiary statement of fact: Apple, it said, was 'an ABKCO-managed company'. McCartney was incensed, and booked rival ads for his album which featured photographs of him looking inappropriately coy or mock-serious, but carried no mention of Apple, let alone ABKCO. The clear victors were the advertising salesmen, able to sell space for the same record to both sides.

In an effort to reinforce McCartney's separation from Klein, the Eastmans contacted EMI to insist that all royalty payments for his album should be sent directly to them, not paid to Apple. EMI executive Len Wood replied apologetically that this was impossible: the company had a contract with Apple not the Eastmans.

Sales of McCartney soon outstripped those of the Hey Jude compilation album assembled by Klein, but in turn were overtaken by the Beatles' Let It Be in May. NEW LP SHOWS THEY COULDN'T CARE LESS, trumpeted Britain's best-selling pop paper, the New Musical Express. Reviewer Alan Smith characterised Let It Be as 'a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop music'. And there was more: 'narcissistic pin-ups and chocolate box dressing', 'contempt for the intelligence of today's record-buyer', 'lost their self-respect', 'sold out all the principles for which they ever stood', 'hype in a pretty packet'. There were complaints about the cost of the package, with its elegant paperback book chronicling the January 1969 sessions in enigmatic words and sumptuous photographs. In keeping with the Beatles' current level of cohesion, the binding of the book soon disintegrated: 'a cheapskate epitaph' indeed.

There were harsh words too for the Let It Be film, and its 'pseudo- ciné ma-vé rité attempt to canonise' the Beatles. One US reviewer, Billboard's Ed Ochs, pronounced sentence on the Beatles and the age they represented with a contemptuous demolition of their appeal: 'four moppet dolls who, for the good part of a decade, have danced and squealed as the creative playthings of a great mass who built an economy around their pleasant music'. And this from a magazine that still depended on Apple's advertising dollars. Was the Beatle decade nothing but collective self-deception?

Apple's beleaguered managing director Neil Aspinall hoped not. As Let It Be was premiered, the company announced that Aspinall was compiling a second documentary, which would span the Beatles' career from Liverpool to the London legal offices where their future was decided. It was assumed that the four members of the group would be interviewed for the project, which would in any case be released before Christmas 1970. Its working title was borrowed from McCartney's controversially abused song 'The Long and Winding Road'.

While the film did little more than mediocre business, the Let It Be soundtrack – symbolically packaged in a sleeve that featured separate portraits of its creators, with a fatuous note claiming that it was 'a new phase Beatles album' – was a remarkable success, as fans rushed to experience what they believed would be their final taste of the Fab Four. Allen Klein proudly announced that he had ordered four million copies of the album to be pressed in the USA, and that 3. 2 million of those had been sent out to stores. The gulf between those two figures would become the subject of legal arguments several years later. For now, the album topped the American charts, and so did the two singles that accompanied it: the title track followed by a sardonic choice from Klein, the much-maligned Phil Spector production of 'The Long and Winding Road'. If the track was so lousy, he could have asked McCartney that summer, why had it reached No. 1?

This commercial success could not disguise the fact that Klein's empire was precariously placed. He had arrived at Apple when the company was unprofitable but still steaming ahead on idealism. 'Apple was an astonishing place to come into from the outside world, ' press officer Derek Taylor commented twenty years later. 'All the rooms were different, but none of them was at all conventional, or like anything that anyone had known before. And it was all done unselfconsciously; it wasn't as if we were all walking around showing off, we were all free spirits. ' Any spirit of freedom had vanished with the sackings, the checks on expenses, the ABKCO accountants monitoring the Liverpool insiders who had served the Beatles since the beginning. 'We were working for people who were so famous that there was really no precedent, ' Taylor said. 'It was like a bizarre royal court in a strange fairy tale. But nothing should have turned out like that, should it? '

The first public recognition of how things had turned out came in July 1970, when disc jockey and pop pundit Anne Nightingale visited the Apple office on a particularly lethargic day. Her findings were presented in the Daily Sketch newspaper under the heading APPLE COMING APART AT THE CORE. When Klein heard about the story, the phone line from New York to Savile Row glowed with incandescent heat. By the end of the month the press office was closed and the staff had been dismissed – with the exception of Derek Taylor, who was regarded too affectionately by three of the group and, with certain reservations, by Klein to be sacrificed immediately. ^*17 As another London paper reported glumly, 'Since the break-up of the Beatles, their Apple empire has diminished to little more than a centre for collecting their royalties, and dealing with their private affairs. ' There was still an Apple Records, defiantly throwing occasional releases into the marketplace by artists such as Badfinger and Mary Hopkin. But there was no talk of unearthing talent, changing the working methods of the industry, subverting capitalism or any of the proud boasts of 1968.

Not that Klein's ABKCO company was any more secure, it seemed. For a year or more he had been unchallenged as the most influential manager in the rock universe, controlling the affairs of not just the Beatles but also, despite their misgivings, the Rolling Stones. The Stones' agreement with Klein officially expired at the end of May 1970, however, and two months later the group announced that he would no longer be operating as their business manager. ^*18 The inevitable legal manoeuvring would follow soon enough, and Klein was left with effective control over all the music the Stones had recorded plus a vital share in their music publishing. Financially his position was enviable, but the end of his active involvement in their career compounded the feeling that Klein was more careful with columns of figures than with people and their fragile emotions.

Remarkably, Klein had not abandoned hope that the Beatles might resume their career. In July 1970 he contacted his accountants to check the potential tax implications of a grandiose project: a worldwide tour by the group with a documentary film to chronicle it for posterity. If a tour had taken place, he would have been eligible for 20 per cent of the proceeds. Given the distance between McCartney and the others, Klein can only have been anticipating that Lennon, Harrison and Starkey would recruit a replacement and carry on regardless.

Meanwhile, Klein's clients were still creating music. Richard Starkey's debut album had been greeted fondly as an indulgence from a national treasure. In June 1970, however, he recorded something more substantial in Nashville. Producer and steel guitarist Pete Drake assembled a crack session band and a bunch of previously unrecorded songs, and guided the nervous but soon

exuberant Starkey through an album of country material ideally suited to his lugubrious voice. Meanwhile, Starkey was considering the possibility of making an album of experimental music. Suddenly the least creative of the Beatles was acting like the first graduate of the Lennon/Ono school of artistic expression. 'What I really wanted to do was confuse everyone, ' he explained. 'I wanted the standards album, a country one, and I've done an electronics album which I haven't put out yet. I wanted to put all these albums out and people would say, " Shit, what's going on here! Electronic, country, standards, pop records! " ' The country record, Beaucoups of Blues, duly appeared in late 1970, but sadly Starkey lacked the momentum to pursue his multidimensional scheme. His most significant artistic decision of this period, however, was only recognized much later: he was responsible for championing the classical composer John Tavener, whose first two albums were issued by Apple. 'The next thing I want to do with him, ' Starkey said excitedly, 'is get a rock group together, just a crowd of friends, and I'm [going to] put his stuff on top of what we play. ' It was another tantalizing but unfulfilled vision of Starkey as the Renaissance Beatle.

Starkey was among a dozen musicians assembled at a variety of London studios that summer by Phil Spector and George Harrison. Spector was responsible for forcing Harrison into the most inspired vocal performances of his career, and also for the intense, almost decadent quality of the three-LP box set that resulted, titled All ThingsMust Pass. In later years Harrison would compare these sessions to 'a case of diarrhoea', as he poured out the songs that had been held back for so long. Only one tune, 'My Sweet Lord', matched Harrison's determination to record nothing but spiritual chants, but many of the songs were pitched perfectly between the romantic and the divine.

More intriguing were the glimpses of Harrison's Beatles inheritance. 'Apple Scruffs' was a playful tribute to the fans who littered the doorstep of their London HQ, one of whom subsequently wrote a book documenting how close the Beatle came to crossing the divide between hero and lover. ^*19 'Wah-Wah' was both a celebration of a guitar effects pedal and a response to Harrison's exile from the group in January 1969. 'Isn't It a Pity' was a remarkably non-judgemental commentary on the disintegration of the Beatles' spirit. But the most compelling testimony to the recent past was provided by 'Run of the Mill', a title that perhaps reflected a comment about his songwriting from one of his fellow Beatles. Certainly they inspired the song, which was both a rejection of the culture of recrimination that had scarred the Beatles' final months and a lament for lost love and respect. In a flashback to the Let It Be sessions, Harrison recalled 'another day for you to realize me, or send me down again', perhaps remembering how Lennon had unfeelingly criticised his songs. When he sang 'you've got me wondering how I lost your friendship' the sentiment was more apposite for his decaying relationship with McCartney. 'Even before I started, ' he recalled, 'I knew I was gonna make a good album, because I had so many songs and I had so much energy. For me to do my own album after all that, it was joyous, dream of dreams. '

In retrospect, critic Simon Leng astutely noted 'the self-referential nature of many of the solo Beatle songs' that emerged over the next couple of years. 'It's as if " the Beatles" were an everyday fact of life, ' he wrote, 'as much a natural subject for a song as the weather or walking the dog. Such was the celebrity status attached to the group that the public and media longed for these further installments of " The Beatles soap opera". ' The Beatles were not alone in this self-obsession; it became a hallmark of the singer-songwriter movement that was emerging in the USA, fuelling the increasingly insular work of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. But Harrison's work offered a teasing glimpse into an intimate world that had previously been off-limits to the public.

No Beatle project would ever match the self-exposure of the songs written by John Lennon during 1970. They were an unfiltered and uncensored portrayal of an artist who was shedding his past and uncertain of his future. Lennon had been eager to excise poetic imagery from his writing. There would be no more of the self-consciously psychedelic verbiage that filled his songs in 1966/7. The visceral roar of his wife's voice, which he viewed as an outpouring of pure emotion, had inspired him to search for words that would fulfil the same impulse. The songs he wrote under the spell of Primal Scream Therapy represented the apotheosis of that technique.

In lyric after lyric on the album that became John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band he scratched at the scars of the past, from the desertion of his parents ('Mother', 'My Mummy's Dead') to the inadequacies of his education ('Working Class Hero', 'I Found Out'). During his sessions with Janov he had laid bare his core of pain, which fuelled songs such as 'Remember' and 'Isolation'. While some of his writing was little more than a digest of Janov's theories, the most effective used the doctor's therapeutic techniques to reveal the shape of his soul, undecorated and unashamed.

None of Lennon's new songs was as blatantly a cleansing of the spirit as 'God', which presented a relentless list of divinities and heroes in whom he had lost belief. As the parade went by, icons and idols were brought to their knees, from Jesus and Buddha to Elvis Presley and Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman. But the most shocking disavowal, at least for Lennon's audience in 1970, came in the final line, followed by a suitably awed silence: 'I don't believe in Beatles. ' Lennon later explained that he was denying 'Beatle' as a symbol, as a disguise, a deception; but it was hard for anyone who heard the song not to feel that he was pronouncing sentence on the group he had formed in his teens.

Initially his audience amounted to just three people: Yoko Ono, of course, plus Janov and his wife Vivian. He presented the Janovs with a handwritten set of his new lyrics on 6 August 1970. Janov wanted the Lennons to undergo his therapy for at least a year, but Lennon was convinced that he was under threat from the US immigration service. 'He said, " Could you send a therapist to Mexico with me? " ' Janov recalled. 'I said, " We can't do that, John. " We had too many patients to take care of. They cut the therapy off just as it started, really. . . We had opened him up, and we didn't have time to put him back together again. I told him that he had to finish it, but it wasn't possible. '

When Lennon returned to England in August he was around 30 pounds heavier than he had been in the spring. He had been living, he said, 'on chocolate and Dr Pepper'. He would soon refer back to his 'fat Elvis period' of the mid-1960s, when a combination of fame and lethargy had affected his physique. Now he had regained all the weight that he had found so contemptible.

'Part of [Primal Scream Therapy] was not to self-control in any way, ' he explained, 'so I would just eat and eat and eat. And it was all very well for the mind, but for the body it was terrible. But the idea was, Well, I am an artist, not a model, so fuck it, I wonder who I'm trying to please? It was me I was trying to please, I found out – too late. '

Having embarked on the process of casting out idols, he found it difficult to stop. Lennon's espousal of a new passion, followed quickly by total rejection, formed a pattern in his adult life. It stretched from fame, which had been the initial impetus for all four Beatles, through sex (too many groupies), drugs (too many bad trips), Maharishi (disillusionment) and Magic Alex (further disillusionment). Only Yoko Ono and Allen Klein remained intact, because even a fully cleansed Lennon needed someone to lean on. Janov was the latest addition to the list. The therapist recalled that when Lennon left he 'wanted to put an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle saying, " This is it: Primal Therapy. " I said to him, " I don't want you to do that. This therapy's far more important than the Beatles in the long run of history, and I think it's got to stand on its own. " ' Slowly, though, Lennon's familiar process of doubt set in. The power of Janov's therapy was unmistakable, but could its creator be trusted? Lennon started to wonder why all his sessions had been taped (standard practice, Janov said) and some of them filmed (not true, according to Janov). Could he trust another father figure when so many had let him down? Eventually he decided to distinguish between the man and his message, claiming, 'Janov was an idiot, but he was not bad. His therapy was good. It was just that he was a pain in the neck. '

In late September 1970 Lennon entered a recording studio for the first time in almost eight months. Phil Spector had already agreed to produce the album, but nobody at Apple could contact him, and eventually Allen Klein had to book a full-page ad in Billboard magazine, which read simply, 'Phil! John is ready this weekend. ' By the time Spector appeared, the album was virtually complete, and the producer did little except supervise the mixing process and play piano on one song. Lennon was insistent that the sound should be as sparse and compelling as the lyrical content, so there was no call for Spector to demonstrate his flair for lavish orchestration. Indeed, Lennon recruited just three musicians for the project: Billy Preston, who made a fleeting appearance at one session, Klaus Voormann and Richard Starkey. Musical simplicity aside, the choices reflected Lennon's awareness that he could only record such revelatory material if he was with close friends.

The impact of Janov's therapy was soon clear to both Voormann and Starkey, who recalled that 'suddenly we'd be in the middle of a track and John would just start crying or screaming – which freaked us out at the beginning'. Voormann added, 'He was very vulnerable in a way. Very up and happy a lot of the time – but really emotional, crying a lot. He was still living those experiences out. He would cry in the control room, listening to the songs, talking to Yoko, remembering the kind of things in the lyrics. You could see that he was moved. ' And though Starkey never let down his guard, Voormann revealed that the drummer found the sessions disturbing: 'Ringo was very sad. The old John had gone; it was a different John. It wasn't the old one he was used to. For him, that was quite a thing. Ringo told me that after one session – that it was hard for him. '

Midway through the sessions Lennon celebrated his 30th birthday – a cultural event of sorts, although no fanfare had greeted Starkey's arrival at the same landmark a few months earlier. Various rock luminaries were approached by Apple's Mal Evans to record musical greetings, among them Starkey and George Harrison, both of whom delivered their gifts in person. ^*20 That same day Lennon's estranged father, Freddie, visited him unexpectedly with his teenage wife and new baby. The visit might have been designed to trigger an immediate primal scream, and it ended with Lennon howling violent threats at his father, threatening to have him killed. Freddie Lennon was sufficiently disturbed to lodge an account of what had happened with a solicitor, in case he was murdered.

A few days earlier Lennon, Voormann and Starkey had laid down the skeleton of a song that its drumming composer called 'When Four Knights Come to Town'. Starkey completed the song with Harrison's help a few days later, and it was released the following year under the title 'Early 1970'. In four simple verses Starkey painted a vivid miniature of each of the Beatles: Lennon staying in bed for peace, Harrison escaping his 40-acre grounds to play endless sessions, McCartney keeping his 'plenty of charm' hidden away on his farm, Starkey exposing his own limited musical skills. The message was simple: Starkey knew that when Lennon and Harrison came to town, they would be happy to work with him, but would McCartney? He didn't know. But he was certain about one thing: 'When I come to town, I want to see all three. ' It was a rough draft of a peace treaty, and for the handful of people who heard the track in October 1970 it must have signalled that a reunion was still not impossible, and that Lennon's 'rebirth or death' equation might have a positive solution. That was October, however, and the song wasn't released until March. By then, 'Early 1970' would seem like a false memory of a mythic past, its Arcadia tangled with weeds.