Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Sir Paul McCartney speaks about his life after The Beatles. 
 
 Sir Paul McCartney 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 Sir 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 Sir 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, Sir Paul had to sue his bandmates. The legal fall-out was the caustic agent that finally broke his bond with John Lennon. 
 
 Image caption The star said he formed Wings "to get over the shock of not being in The Beatles any more" 
 
 "The business thing split us apart," said Sir 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]." 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Sir Paul said he was initially wary of recording with Kanye West and Rihanna, thinking "this could be loaded" 
 
 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 Sir Paul. 
 
 Sir 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 Sir Paul discussed how his relationship with John Lennon 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." 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Sir Paul reveals some illuminating stories about his collaboration with Kanye West. 
 
 Sir Paul McCartney's Mastertapes interview is available now on the Radio 4 website and BBC Red Button. It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this Saturday, 28 May. ||||| Displaying the kind of subtle linguistic wit for which he’s known, Keith Richards decided it was high time to go on record with a few thoughts about the output of The Beatles, a ’60s band Paul McCartney was in before Wings. In a new interview with Esquire, the Rolling Stones guitarist offers up the verbal equivalent of falling out of a tree, calling the Fab Four’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—long considered one of the best albums of all time—a steaming pile of garbage. 
 
 “Some people think it’s a genius album,” Richards said, probably while being irascible and charming in a way that drives Mick Jagger absolutely insane. “But I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish.” His point (such as one can be made out) seems to be the band got carried away by the insanity of the time, and the music suffered as a result. “If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away. The Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles. But there’s not a lot of roots in that music.” Indeed, there are not a lot of roots in the music, if you mean the blues stuff the Stones were borrowing from, and not the eclectic mix of Eastern, classical, and folk influences that are all over Sgt. Pepper’s. 
 
 Then again, it’s hard to take Richards too seriously here, as he immediately turns on his own band, as well. He compares The Beatles’ “mishmash of rubbish” with the album the Stones put out just six months later (Their Satanic Majesties Request), saying it was “kind of like Satanic Majesties—‘Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we’.” On that point, no doubt, he will find many Beatles fans in full agreement with him. We now await the gentle and thoughtful response of the internet to Richards’ claim. 
 
 [Via EW] 
 
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– Not a fan of Paul McCartney and Wings, McCartney's follow-up band after the Beatles broke up? No worries, McCartney apparently has no illusions about the group's talent: "We were terrible. We weren't a good group," McCartney admits in a new interview with BBC Radio 4, per the BBC. "People said, 'Linda [McCartney] can't play keyboards,' and it was true. But John couldn't play guitar when we started [the Beatles]." He explains that he was depressed after the Beatles broke up, and wanted to continue in music, but wasn't sure how. Wife Linda suggested putting another band together in 1971. "We knew Linda couldn't play, we didn't know each other, but we learned. We had some funny experiences," he says. "Looking back on it, I'm really glad we did it."