Paul McCartney doesn’t think any band will ever replicated the success that The Beatles had.
The 73-year-old singer has insisted the success of the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ band was down to them writing their own material, and timing, but doesn’t see it happening again with any of today’s music.
McCartney said: “Let’s not forget, those four boys were f***ing good. You name me another group who had what The Beatles had. We all played, which is pretty hard. You don’t get a lot of that these days.
“We came at the right time. We wrote some pretty good stuff, our own material. We didn’t have writers. Could that happen again? I don’t know. I wish people well but I have a feeling it couldn’t.”
McCartney went on to talk about his feelings after his former band-mate John Lennon was murdered in 1980 by Mark Chapman in New York, and confessed it made the other Beatles feel like they couldn’t compete with Lennon, as it made him a “martyr”.
Speaking to Esquire magazine, the ‘Hey Jude’ star said: “When John got shot, aside from the pure horror of it, the lingering thing was, OK, well now John’s a martyr. A JFK. So what happened was, I started to get frustrated because people started to say, ‘Well, he was The Beatles.’
“And post-Beatles he did more great work, but he also did a lot of not-great work. Now the fact that he’s now martyred has elevated him to a James Dean, and beyond.”
But Lennon’s death is not the reason beyond The Beatles’ lasting fame. McCartney is right, we’ll never see anyone like them again.
