Yoko Ono Blames Paul McCartney for Beatles Breakup

A new thread to the enigmatic story of just why The Beatles called it quits was revealed when the Library of Congress recently released recordings of interviews with some of the most iconic names in music such as George Harrison and David Bowie. As many have long claimed, Yoko Ono may in fact not be to blame for the legendary band's breakup.

Speaking to music industry "bigwig" Joe Smith (via Rolling Stone) in a recorded interview, Yoko Ono reveals new details of what she described as the Beatles' "divorce." Ono claims that John Lennon was "feeling very good about" the breakup, but she admitted that some tensions had been steadily forming within the band.

"The Beatles were getting very independent," she said in the 1987 interview, according ot the Huffington Post. "Each one of them [was] getting independent. John, in fact, was not the first who wanted to leave the Beatles. [We saw] Ringo [Starr] one night with Maureen [Starkey Tigrett], and he came to John and me and said he wanted to leave. George [Harrison] was next, and then John. Paul [McCartney] was the only one trying to hold the Beatles together. But the other three thought Paul would hold the Beatles together as his band. They were getting to be like Paul's band, which they didn't like."

Ono further added that the breakup of the Beatles noticeably strained her relationship and marriage with Lennon for a time. She noted that the songwriter seemed to dearly miss his ex-bandmates and that he "expected all that to be replaced by me."

Ono's version of events gels with some recent comments from McCartney: in October, McCartney told David Frost that Ono "did not break the group up" because it was "already breaking up."

McCartney went on to say in the interview that without Ono opening up the avant garde for Lennon, he doesn't think songs such as "Imagine" would never have been written.

"I don't think he would have done that without Yoko, so I don't think you can blame her for anything. When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave, he was definitely going to leave [one way or another]."

He added that in retrospect he was happy with the timing of the band's breakup. The Beatles left "a neat body of work," so the split "wasn't that bad a thing," he said.