The Beatles split in 1969, and they announced their break up in 1970. According to Hunter Davies, the author of the band’s only authorized biography, however, they began the process of breaking up began long before this. He shared when he believed the band started to want to part ways.

The Beatles wanted to break up long before they did

On April 10, 1970, Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles had broken up. Davies believed the beginning of the end for the band happened years before this. 

“The Beatles started to break up as Beatles as far back as 1966 when they gave up touring and stopped living communal lives,” Davies wrote in The Beatles. “With living apart so much, the Lennon-McCartney numbers, however successful, became something of a fraud. They were no longer joint numbers in the way they’d been in the old days, knocked out together in the back of a van.”

Davies believed the stasis the band experienced after they stopped touring led to bickering. Before long, members of the band were walking off during recording sessions.

“Working in the new way was fine, as long as they were still mates and nobody was getting fed up or wanting to move off in a completely different direction, but petty rows did begin, based on boredom as much as anything else.”

Ringo Starr temporarily quit, as did George Harrison. While they eventually returned, when John Lennon walked out, the band was done for good.

John Lennon said a Beatles breakup seemed inevitable when he met Yoko Ono

According to Lennon, his interest in The Beatles ended when he met Yoko Ono.

“When I fell in love with Yoko, I knew, My God, this is different from anything I’ve ever known,” he told Playboy in 1980. “This is something other. This is more than a hit record, more than gold, more than everything. It is indescribable.”

He felt that after he met her, he’d grown up past a point where he wanted to spend time with his bandmates. Once they married, he was ready to move on.

“We got married three years later, in 1969. That was the end of the boys. And it just so happened that the boys were well known and weren’t just local guys at the bar,” he said. “Everybody got so upset over it. There was a lot of s*** thrown at us. A lot of hateful stuff.”

Did they ever reunite?

While individual members of The Beatles teamed up often in years after the band broke up, the four of them never performed together again. John Lennon felt a reunion could have been possible, though.

“I’ve no idea if The Beatles will work together again, or not,” he said, per The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After The Breakup. “I never really have. It was always open. If somebody didn’t feel like it … that’s it!”