Alan Clayson

John Lennon was well into a career as a non-Beatle long before the quartet was officially dissolved in 1971. Five years earlier, he’d met Yoko Ono, a Japanese-American ‘concept artist’ who was to become his second wife. She also replaced Paul McCartney as his creative partner, beginning when she and Lennon filled a trilogy of albums with sounds not usually regarded as musical. Saying things most people didn’t want to hear, the pair made their headline-hogging lives an open and ludicrous book with many bewildering public pranks. Nevertheless, taped at one of their ‘Bed-Ins’ was John’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’, a singalong anthem released as - so he put it - ‘an escape valve from The Beatles’.

Lennon’s eponymous debut solo album was the cathartic result of Primal Scream therapy under psychologist Dr Arthur Janov. This was evidenced in its personal exorcisms (eg ‘Mother’ and ‘Isolation’) as well as its stark rejection of former heroes - notably in ‘God’ - and a projection of himself as a ‘Working Class Hero’....

The late George Harrison’s last willing burst of public activity began in 1991, when, alongside Eric Clapton, he undertook a tour of Japan. He was in excellent form, as evidenced on a subsequent live album.

There was to be no tailing off in quality either during what amounted to his only full-scale UK show as an ex-Beatle, when he headlined an extravaganza at London’s Royal Albert Hall to raise funds for the Natural Law Party in the run-up to 1992’s General Election. Its finale was ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, one of George’s lead vocals on 1963’s With The Beatles.

Always it boiled down to The Beatles, who - Harrison once suggested - were an English grammar-school interpretation of rock ’n’ roll. His 15-year-old self, however, had filed out on his last day at Liverpool Institute High School For Boys in 1958, with no academic qualifications whatsoever, to start work as a trainee electrician. Also in that year, he passed through the ranks of several short-lived skiffle groups before joining The Quarry Men, the outfit that mutated into The Beatles....

Paul McCartney’s career as an ex-Beatle became tangible in 1970 with an eponymous solo album, praised for its sketchy charm. Ram and - also in 1971 - Wild Life were almost as slap-dash. In keeping with this production criterion, Wings - McCartney’s new group, with his wife Linda on rudimentary keyboards - trekked across Britain and Europe for mainly casual, unannounced engagements before the issue of four contrasting singles: ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ (after the ‘Bloody Sunday’ incident in Londonderry), ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb (yes, the nursery rhyme), Hi Hi Hi (banned by the BBC for sexual innuendo) and the syrupy ‘My Love’ from 1973’s Red Rose Speedway. A reflection of the growing McCartney family’s rural contentment, this offering confirmed that, despite his still-agile bass playing, Paul’s wispy capacity for what John Lennon as derided as ‘granny music’ was bottomless....