Linda McCartney & Paul McCartney / Photo: Michael Castner/Getty Images

Paul McCartney Says He Was Depressed & Questioning His Musical Future After The Beatles Split

Sir Paul McCartney says he was depressed, drinking heavily and questioning his music career after The Beatles split in 1970.

As Rolling Stone reports, Macca used a recent interview on BBC Radio 4 to speak about life after The Fab Four disbanded, and gave some very honest and candid responses.

“I was depressed at the time,” McCartney says in the interview, which you can catch a clip of below.

Paraphrasing Lesley Gore’s It’s My Party, McCartney says, “‘You would be too if it happened to you.’ You were breaking from your lifelong friends. We used to liken it to the army where you’d been army buddies for a few years, and now you weren’t going to see them again.”

McCartney says that while The Beatles’ split came pretty naturally as band members grew older and got married, the dissolution of the band left him uncertain about his future in the music industry, so he got on the booze.

“The thing was, how are you gonna do it if you’re gonna do it?” he says. “You can’t play all the instruments yourself on stage. And I took to the bevvies, I took to a wee dram, and it was great at first and then after a while getting up in the morning, I was a bit far gone and suddenly I wasn’t having a good time.”

McCartney says that his wife Linda convinced him to begin working on a new project, which became Ram, their first collaborative studio album.

“For some mad reason I wanted to go back to square one and do it as we’d done it in the Beatles,” he says.

“People said, ‘Linda can’t play keyboards!’ And it was true, but John [Lennon] couldn’t play guitar when we started — he was playing banjo chords.

“Looking back on [Ram] I’m really glad we did it. I could’ve just gone into a supergroup and rung up Eric [Clapton] and Jimmy Page, John Bonham, but I wanted to go back.”

As much as that supergroup idea sounds AMAZEballs, it’s never going to happen, unfortunately.

Catch an excerpt of McCartney’s BBC Radio 4 interview, below. The full interview will be broadcast this Saturday, 28th May UK time.

Watch: Sir Paul McCartney BBC Radio 4 Interview Excerpt

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