Paul McCartney admits the shock after The Beatles’ breakup: drinking, depress*on, and nearly walking away from music. Losing the band that had been his lifelong family left him devastated, turning to alcoh*l and questioning how anyone could move forward after The Beatles. It was a dark, little-known chapter — before he found his way back and began writing the next part of music history.

  • byJasmin
  • January 1, 2026
  • 2 minute read
Paul McCartney
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Paul McCartney began drinking, almost quit music following The Beatles’ breakup

“You were breaking from your lifelong friends”

Fans worldwide mourned when The Beatles decided to call it quits in 1970, but the breakup also took a heavy toll on Paul McCartney. During a recent taping of BBC Radio’s Mastertapes (via The Guardian), the iconic songwriter admitted that he was so beside himself that he turned to alcohol for comfort and even considered leaving the music world altogether.

“I was so depressed. You would be. You were breaking from your lifelong friends,” he said. “So I took to the bevvies. I took to a wee dram. It was great at first, then suddenly I wasn’t having a good time … It was difficult to know what to do after the Beatles. How do you follow that?” Wanting to “get back to square one,” Macca ended up forming Wings about a year later in 1971.

Elsewhere in the interview, which is available to watch here for UK users, the Beatle talked about John Lennon and how he was grateful they were able to patch things up before his passing in 1980. “I was really grateful that we got it back together before he died. Because it would have been very difficult to deal with if … well, that was very difficult anyway.”

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“I’m quite private and don’t like to give too much away. Why should people know my innermost thoughts? But a song is the place to put them. In ‘Here Today,’ (which he wrote in 1982) I say to John ‘I love you.’”

Meanwhile, when asked about his Kanye West and Rihanna collaboration “FourFiveSeconds”, he had nothing but praise for Ye. “I love Kanye and he loves me,” he said. “He’s a monster. He’s a crazy guy who comes up with great stuff, so he inspires me. It was definitely different, because we never appeared to write a song. A lot of what we did was just tell each other stories.”

Below, revisit “Here Today” and “FourFiveSeconds”.

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