So much for having everyone “come together.”
Sir Paul McCartney, 81, revealed that he found the presence of Yoko Ono, the wife of the late John Lennon, to be an “interference” while the band recorded 1968’s “The White Album.”
“John and Yoko had got together and that was bound to have an effect on the dynamics of the group,” McCartney explained on the podcast “McCartney: A Life in Lyrics.” “Things like Yoko being literally in the middle of the recording session [were] something you had to deal with.”
“The idea was that if John wanted this to happen, then it should happen. There’s no reason why not,” continued the “Yellow Submarine” performer. “Anything that disturbs us, is disturbing.”
The British vocalist/songwriter would not let the subject be, adding that other members of the iconic group found the “disturbance” annoying.
“We would allow this and not make a fuss,” continued McCartney. “And yet at the same time, I don’t think any of us particularly liked it.”
“It was an interference in the workplace. We had a way we worked,” elaborated the “Hey Jude” singer. “The four of us worked with George Martin. And that was basically it. And we’d always done it like that. So not being very confrontational, I think we just bottled it up and just got on with it.”
McCartney noted that working in the studio was part of their jobs.
“It was the idea of the Beatles, it was also just this straight, practical thing of, ‘This was our job.’ This is what we did in life,” he said. “We were the Beatles. That meant if we didn’t tour, we recorded. And that meant if we recorded, we wrote.”
The Post reached out to McCartney and Ono, 90, for comment.
McCartney, meanwhile, recently addressed artificial intelligence helping to create the “final” Beatles album.
The project is expected to be released later this year — the controversial technology was used to “extricate” Lennon’s voice from a previously unheard track.
“It was a demo that John had that we worked on, and we just finished it up, it’ll be released this year,” McCartney said in June. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI, so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”
McCartney took to social media to assure fans that nothing was fabricated.
“Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year,” he tweeted in June.
“We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” McCartney clarified. “It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”
He concluded his post: “We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course — Paul.”
While the name of the unfinished track was not shared, several fans speculated it’s “Now and Then,” which was composed by Lennon before his death in 1980.
According to McCartney, he received the demo in 1994 from Ono along with several other songs on a cassette labeled “For Paul.”
The three surviving Beatles attempted to record the tune in 1995, but the session ended quickly after issues with Lennon’s vocals emerged.