Who is The Leader? | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Who is the leader of The Beatles? What are your thoughts? Those were the original questions. I have my theory on this, and it is my theory, it is mine and belong to me. Here it is. I will say it now. E-hum. A-hum. Here it comes. As follows:

John was the original leader of the group, having started it and having his say-so about who will be in the band. Most of the previous comments agree on this.       During the years of success when they were still touring, John and Paul were both the main spokespersons of the group. Of course, they did say in several interviews over the years that John was the leader.   

On stage, on the other hand, Paul was definitely the musical leader. He was the one who always, with few if any exceptions, said hello and how are you and all that after the first one or two songs. And he was always the one who said the bye-byes before the last song. On some occasions the closing tune was a mainly-John-song but mostly it was one of Paul´s solo vocal numbers. The hello´s and goodbye´s usually fall on the musical leader of the band, unless anything else is known about it.

After touring was out of the equation, Paul tried to lead them in various ways. This is quite well documented. Not that the other three really wanted it to be that way, or perhaps even Paul didn´t even want it himself, but that is what happened. Officially, I suppose, John was still to be regarded as the leading leader of the group. Somebody mentioned John was the first to say he wanted out. That is an interesting point. He said he wanted out of the group, like “Ì´m leaving”. Not “I want to disband the group because I don´t want to play with you lot anymore”. Which opens up the impossible question, what would John have said if the others had said “Alright then, we´ll carry on without you, we´ll get somebody else in and continue making music ourselves!” Now that would have been interesting! Remember when George wanted out at one point in early 69, and John was reported as having said “We´ll get Eric Clapton instead”, so the idea of replacing a band member would not have been new to him really.