That Settles It: Yoko Ono Did Not Break Up the Beatles

Paul McCartney says don't blame John Lennon's widow for the end of the legendary band

  • Share
  • Read Later
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

A recent interview by veteran British journalist David Frost with Paul McCartney is causing a stir — or, rather, resolving one. For a November episode of Frost’s television program, Frost over the World, which airs on al-Jazeera English and features hour-long interviews of the sort for which Frost is perhaps best known, he spoke to McCartney about a theory that has kept Beatles fans in hot debate since 1970.

So did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles? No, she did not.

(PHOTOS: Rare Early Pictures of Beatlemania)

The Japanese artist and musician, who married John Lennon shortly before the Beatles disbanded, has long been blamed for pulling the group apart. But, according to a preview of the Frost interview that appeared in the Guardian, McCartney dispels that notion. “[Ono] certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was breaking up,” he is quoted as saying. While he does admit that her presence at the studio for Beatles recording sessions was “difficult,” he says that Lennon was leaving the group anyway and gives Ono credit for leading Lennon to a new way of looking at the world, a perspective that led him to write iconic songs like “Imagine.”

MORE: Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon Lead Celebrity Campaign Against Fracking