Imagine there’s no lawyers
MORE ON THE BEATLES STORY
The Beatles’ fame meant that there’s lots of honest first hand audio and video recorded at the time. And it has been published since. Anyone interested in the break up process can spend hours or years exploring the step by step detail of this unique rich story of complicated changing relationships.
“You always hurt the one you love … and we all love each other.”
Ringo on The Beatles
The Beatles website brings out lots of Beatles news half a century later. Did you know that coping with the shared loss of their mothers at a young age first brought Paul and John to write the first “Lennon-McCartney original” songs together?
Here’s a short Youtube story of the Beatles rise and fall: creatively, organisationally and financially. Four talented young men worked hard with great success on their one shared passion. Then they struggled to grow up individually and to grow apart amicably. Of course, personal interests and family relationships played their part.
“The Beatles: Get Back” film adds a belated extra window through the candid extended filming of their last recording sessions. The strains show but so does the commitment, love and creativity they still had. They all continued to work with each other after they broke up. But never all four at once.
After some delay, The Beatles Tapes were published first as LPs in 1976 and later in other formats. In early 2020 Mark Edmonds summarised them in the Daily Mail.
Listen here to John’s 1971 interview with David Wiggs in New York. Did Yoko Ono being in the room influence what John said? Here’s the relevant section in full:
JOHN: I never thought we’d come to that [splitting and arguing], because I didn’t think we were that stupid. But we were naive enough to let people come between us. And I think that’s what happened. [pause] But it was happening anyway. I don’t mean Yoko, I mean businessmen, you know. All of them.
WIGG: What, do you think they were – do you think businessmen were responsible for the breakup?
JOHN: Well, no, it’s like anything. When people decide to get divorced, you know, you just – quite often you decide amicably. But then when you get your lawyers and they say, “Don’t talk to the other party unless there’s another lawyer present,” then that’s when the drift really starts happening, and then when you can’t speak to each other without a lawyer, then there’s no communication. And it’s really lawyers that make… divorces nasty.
You know, if there was a nice ceremony like getting married, for divorce, then it would be much better. Even divorce of business partners. Because it wouldn’t be so nasty. But it always gets nasty because you’re never allowed to speak your own mind, you have to talk in double-dutch, you have to spend all your time with a lawyer, and you get frustrated, and you end up saying and doing things that you wouldn’t really do under normal circumstances.
Is John right? How can such complex things be decided amicably? How can complex things be decided adversarially? Why don’t we make early support the first port of call for such a major relationship challenge? How do we break our habitual reliance on what we know is a harmful simplistic adversarial legal system?
