The Beatles Threatened to Disband When Their Manager Said He’d ‘Had Enough’ of Them

The Beatles began working with their manager, Brian Epstein, on their rise to fame. He helped them grow as artists and was an essential part of their success. Though he appreciated the way The Beatles changed his life, he once decided he’d had enough of them. The band told him that if he sold them to another label, they would stop making music altogether.

The Beatles said they would disband if their manager sold them to another label

Though Epstein was the band’s manager, he didn’t have all that much power over them.

“Brian could never make us do what we really, really didn’t want to do,” John Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “He wasn’t strong enough.”

Epstein grew frustrated with this dynamic, though, and eventually told The Beatles he was going to sell them to another label. They refused to listen to him on this, either. 

“Brian came to us in Paris once and said he’d had enough, and he wanted to sell us to Delfont or Grade, I’ve forgotten which one,” Lennon said. “And we all told him — I told him personally — that we would stop. We all said it: ‘Whatever you do, if you do that, we stop now. We don’t play anymore, and we disband. We’re not going to let anybody else have us, especially them.'”

Lennon said he did not like the way other labels managed their bands and wanted to stay with Epstein. 

“They don’t understand, the Richenbergs and the Grades,” he said. “They couldn’t handle people like us. They’re used to the donkeys that they had after the war, Tommy Handley and all them people, and the poor old Crazy Gang who, like Derek used to say, look like they’d been injected with silicone to be brought on stage at eighty.”

John Lennon said The Beatles’ career would have been different without manager Brian Epstein

Lennon believed that if The Beatles hadn’t met Epstein, their career could have taken a very different path.

“Would The Beatles be where they are today if it weren’t for Epstein? Not the same as we know it, no,” he said. “But the question doesn’t apply, because we met him and what happened, happened. If he hadn’t come along, we would all — the four of us and Brian — have been working towards the same thing, even though it might have been with different aims. We all knew what we wanted to get over, and he helped us and we helped him.”

The band worked with Epstein until his death in 1967.

John Lennon and Brian Epstein had a particularly close relationship

Of all The Beatles, Lennon and Epstein had the closest relationship. They were good friends and went on vacation together. Lennon said this trip brought them closer together. 

“It was almost a love affair, but not quite,” he said. “It was not consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.”