Paul has talked candidly
about the depression he suffered after The Beatles broke up, confessing
he considered giving up music altogether.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Mastertapes, he said he had been at a loss when the band fell apart in acrimony in 1970.
"It was difficult to know what to do after The Beatles. How do you follow that?" he told John Wilson.
"I was depressed. You would be. You were breaking from your lifelong friends. So I took to the bevvies."
The
Beatles officially split in 1970 with the release of Let It Be, but the
seeds of their demise were sown a year earlier, when the band appointed
Allen Klein as their manager, against Paul's wishes.
Although
Klein helped restructure the band's loss-making business, Apple, he
also took a hefty share of their profits, and gave his own company the
rights to press The Beatles' records in the US.
He further angered Paul by hiring Phil Spector to overdub a choir, orchestra and
additional drums on to Let It Be; and attempted to make EMI delay the
release of the star's first solo album.
In order to divest himself
of Klein's influence,Paul had to sue his bandmates. The legal
fall-out was the caustic agent that finally broke his bond with John.
"The business thing split us apart," said Paul, adding that all the "heavy meetings" were "doing my head in".
He became so depressed that he did not know "whether I was still going to continue in music".
Eventually, he moved to Scotland - partly to make himself unavailable for the business meetings - and hit the bottle.
"I took to a wee dram. It was great at first, then suddenly I wasn't having a good time. I was far gone," he said.
"It was Linda who said, 'you've got to get it together...' and that led to Wings.
"I liked the idea of a band. I wanted to go back to square one."
However, he admitted: "We were terrible. We weren't a good group. People said, 'Linda can't play keyboards,' and it was true. "But John couldn't play guitar when we started [The Beatles]."
Mastertapes was recorded in Studio 3 of the BBC's historic Maida
Vale, where the Beatles taped numerous radio sessions in the 1960s.
Among
the audience were Brad Pitt, Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Martin
Freeman, James Bay and Simon Pegg, as well as 100 members of the public,
many of whom were able to put questions to Paul.
Paul
talked about the writing of solo songs including Maybe I'm Amazed,
Coming Up and Dance Tonight, as well as his Band on The Run and Sgt
Pepper's.
The conversation also covered his recent collaborations
with Kanye West, revealing: "We never appeared to write a song. A lot of
what we did was just telling each other stories."
"People says he's eccentric... which you'd have to agree with. He's a monster. He's a crazy guy that comes up with great stuff."
And
Paul discussed how his relationship with John had improved
in the months before the star's untimely death in 1980. "I would make
calls to John occasionally," he said. "We just talked kids and baking
bread."
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