World

Let It Read

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

April 2, 2000 / 1:33 PM EDT / CBS

The Beatles are looking back at yesterday to set the record straight with their behind-the-scenes story. CBS News Reporter Pamela McCall reports from London.

Thirty years after calling it quits, they want the world to know Paul McCartney did not break up the Beatles by walking out first--he was actually the last to go.

Sir Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr spent six years working on the book, entitled Beatles Anthology, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

"It's all in the first person," Geoff Baker, Paul McCartney's spokesman told CBS Radio News. "It's all in their own words and it's their story, with recollections from George Martin, Neil Aspinall - who was the band's roadie during the '60s and now is the head of Apple - and also recollections from the late and very very great Derek Taylor, who was their press officer, who also edited the book."

The 360-page volume will be published in Britain and the United States this autumn and will cost about $80. It should earn about $1.60 billion, the Sunday Telegraph reported. There are also said to be plans to translate it into dozens of languages.

The money will be split equally between the three musicians and Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon, the fourth Beatle who was shot dead in New York in 1980, even though she has not been actively involved in the project.

Among other things, the book will counter the widely held belief that McCartney pushed for the band to split up, the newspaper said, revealing that Lennon was the first to walk away, leaving McCartney to make the official announcement months later.

"...Public perception has been that it's been Paul that broke up the band because he left April the 10th," Geoff Baker said. "But as the book reveals, he was the last one to leave."

The book will also disclose that in 1996, the three Beatles turned down an offer of $175 million to perform 17 concerts in the United States, Germany and Japan.

McCartney, 57, Harrison, 57, and Starr, 59, have collected over 1,200 photographs, mostly unpublished, for the book.