Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImageAt a glance, it appears as if Paul McCartney took the breakup of The Beatles in stride, almost immediately releasing a pair of solo albums — McCartney and Ram — before forming Wings two years later. In truth, he was so depressed he hit the bottle for a while and seriously considered getting out of music altogether.
Those are some of the startling confessions McCartney shares in just three minutes of an interview for the BBC Radio 4 Mastertapes program.
“How do you follow that?” McCartney said of his post-Beatles feelings. “It was very depressing, because you were breaking from your lifelong friends.”
Also depressing: “Not knowing whether I was going to continue in music,” McCartney revealed, explaining that after playing in a band, he wasn’t sure how to continue on his own.
It got so bad, McCartney said he “took to the bevvies. I took to the wee dram,” meaning alcohol. “I was a bit far gone,” he admitted. “Suddenly, I wasn’t having a good time. It wasn’t working.”
McCartney’s late wife, Linda, is the one who got him back on his feet, convincing McCartney to form Wings – although for a time, he considered putting together a supergroup: “…just rung up Eric [Clapton], Jimmy Page, John Bonham, whatever.”
Why didn’t he? “[F]or some mad reason, I kind of wanted to go back to square one, and just do it as we’d done in The Beatles,” McCartney said, adding, “Looking back on it, I’m really glad we did it, because it was the way to do it.”
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