The Beatles Felt ‘Depressed’ About 1 Part of Their Fame
In the 1960s, The Beatles’ level of fame eclipsed anything they thought was possible. Everywhere they went, they faced crowds of screaming fans and inquiring journalists. While they wanted recognition for their music, they felt things had gone a bit too far. Their friend shared the part of their success that depressed the band the most.
A friend of The Beatles said their fame depressed them
As Beatlemania raged on across the world, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr became accustomed to finding fans camped outside their homes. People followed them wherever they went, and the crush of the crowds became dangerous. As a result, they avoided many public spaces.
“We reached a point where quite often, The Beatles were longing to have privacy,” their friend, Alex Mardas, said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “Even Ringo at the time was saying that he would give anything in his life to go to a local pub, which is a tradition in England, to stay around to have a drink. He couldn’t. So he had to build the pub in his house because Ringo had a full pub inside his house. But it’s not the same thing, because he missed the pub.”
Mardas said each of the Beatles missed the sense of normalcy they lost with fame.
“That depressed them very much,” he said. “I mean, they had everything from the one side, and from the other point of view that they lost completely their freedom. And for me, this is the reason they moved out of the stage completely. They didn’t want this publicity.”
Alex Mardas said The Beatles made the wrong move to address their fame
As Mardas mentioned, The Beatles decided to stop touring. Mardas said they seemed to believe this would alleviate the pressure of fame on them. Unfortunately for them, they were still famous after they stopped touring.
“So they made a mistake,” Mardas said. “They thought that by moving out of the stage and sitting home and going to the studio to make recordings, people will forget, and they will leave them alone because they’re just recording artists.”
Instead, they found themselves stuck in their homes.
“They were equally famous,” Mardas said. “And it was a tremendous stress for them and tension daily. I mean, they hardly moved ever out of the houses, because they couldn’t live in town. They used to live isolated in the house without friends, without anything. So you can go mad like this, because you have everything, and you can’t use it.”
They said they were able to keep one another sane
While the pressures of fame were tremendous, the band relied on each other to navigate the chaos. Starr said this saved them from a fate like Elvis’.
“Elvis went downhill because he seemed to have no friends, just a load of sycophants. Whereas with us, individually, we all went mad, but the other three always brought us back,” he said in the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “That’s what saved us. I remember being totally bananas thinking, I am the one, and the other three would look at me and say, ‘Scuse me, what are you doing?’ I remember each of us getting into that state.”
