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John Lennon was the most controversial Beatle, but Paul McCartney also had moments when the public turned against him. These days, most people view him in a positive, near-reverent light, but he’s courted controversy. Here are three times McCartney found himself in hot water with the public.

A black and white picture of Paul McCartney wearing a suit and sitting in a chair.
Paul McCartney | Fiona Adams/Redferns

Paul McCartney announced the end of The Beatles

In 1969, Lennon announced he was leaving The Beatles, but the group kept this news quiet. 

“There was all sorts of weirdness going on where record contracts were being negotiated, and our not-so-good manager at the time, this guy called Allen Klein, he was saying, ‘Don’t tell anyone because I’m in the middle of a negotiation,'” McCartney said in an interview with Apple Music. “I was saying, ‘You’ve gotta tell ’em.’ You can’t pretend the group’s still together. We’re gonna get a new record when we all know it’s not gonna happen.”

When the band asked McCartney to push back the release of his solo album, he reached the end of his rope. In a press conference, he was the first to announce publicly that The Beatles had broken up. He added that he didn’t know if the band would work together again.

“I do not know whether the break will be temporary or permanent,” he said, per The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After the Break Up, concluding, “I do not foresee a time when the Lennon & McCartney partnership will be active again in songwriting.”

Because of this, McCartney has long been viewed as the instigator of The Beatles’ breakup. It didn’t help that he filed a lawsuit against the band afterward.

Paul McCartney’s drug bust became controversial because of its severity 

In 1980, McCartney sparked controversy when Japanese authorities arrested him for arriving in the country with half a pound of marijuana. The country had strict drug laws, and he could have landed in prison for up to seven years. Many people wondered what he had been thinking, particularly because he was a father. McCartney admitted that it wasn’t a smart move on his part.

“It was very stupid!” he said. “We’d been in America and the attitude to drugs over there is very different and it led me to take a real casual approach. Most people taking that kind of thing into the country would give it to the roadies, that’s the common practice. That just shows that I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

Paul McCartney’s reaction to John Lennon’s death was immediately controversial

Later that year, McCartney received harsher public criticism after Lennon’s death. As he was one of the people who knew Lennon best, the press asked him to comment.

“I was very shocked, you know,” he said. “It’s terrible news … Drag, isn’t it?” 

This came across as flippant to many, and people were upset with him. He later explained that in his grief, he hadn’t known how to respond.

“I was probably more shattered than most people when John died,” he told Good Morning Britain in 1985. “And I had plenty of sort of personal grief. But I’m not very good at kind of public grief. So someone thrust a microphone into my face the day it happened and said, ‘What’s your comment?’ Now all the other pundits came out with great comments: ‘Well, John will be sorely missed.’… All I could muster was, ‘It’s a drag.’ And it was like … I couldn’t say anything else but that. I just couldn’t. Neither could George [Harrison], neither could Ringo [Starr]. Nobody came out with any big comments because he was too dear to us; it was just too much of a shock.”

Luckily, McCartney has mostly remained on the public’s good side these days.

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