THE BEATLES STUFF ALL GOT TOO HEAVY, AND ‘HEAVY’ AT that time had a very particular meaning for me. It meant more than oppressive. It meant having to go into meetings and sit in the boardroom with all the other Beatles and with the accountants and with this guy Allen Klein. He was a New York spiv who had come over to London and talked to The Rolling Stones and persuaded them he was the man for them. Prior to that, he had persuaded Sam Cooke he was the man for him. I smelled a rat but the other chaps didn’t, so we had a fight over it and I got voted down. I was trying to be Mr Rational and Mr Sensible, and it all went haywire.

It was early 1969, and The Beatles were already beginning to break up. John had said he was leaving, and Allen Klein told us not to tell anyone, as he was in the middle of doing deals with Capitol Records. So, for a few months we had to keep mum. We were living a lie, knowing that John had left the group.

Allen Klein and Dick James, who sold our publishing in Northern Songs without giving us a chance to buy the company, were both hanging around in the background of this song. All the people who had screwed us or were still trying to screw us. It’s fascinating how directly we acknowledged this in the song. We’d cottoned on to them, and they must have cottoned on to the fact that we’d cottoned on. We couldn’t have been more direct about it.

The thing is that we’d grown up as kids with pocket money. Someone gave you a little money at the end of the week, and that’s how life worked. We were still a bit like that. When we first got some real money, we were talking to accountants, and they asked us what we were going to do with it. We said we’d put it in the bank. Those were still the days when you could actually make money on the interest on a savings account. But they said, ‘No, no, no. That’s not what you do. You’ve got to invest it.’

Linda photographed by Maureen Starkey. Apple office, London, 1969

I didn’t want to do that, because I considered investment too risky. We knew that property would throw off some money one day, but we didn’t really get it. So, this whole idea of ‘funny money’ was very much on our minds. Contracts were written on funny paper. Lying behind the song is the idea of the contract as a relationship between two people. The negotiations are at once business negotiations and romantic negotiations; I’m thinking of the lines ‘And in the middle of negotiations / You break down’. The breakdown in negotiations is also a kind of nervous breakdown.

The problem was that, by this stage, everything was up for negotiation, and miscommunication was the order of the day. We weren’t really writing together anymore. Each person was bringing in little bits of this and little bits of that. And we all knew that phase of our lives, of being The Beatles, was coming to an end. We were working towards an album, knowing it was probably going to be our final fling. Though Let It Be was released later, Abbey Road was indeed the last album we recorded in the studio.

There was an upside, however. I’d got married to Linda, and our relationship offered some respite from the dreary infighting and the financial stuff. The lines ‘One sweet dream / Pick up the bags and get in the limousine’ were a reference to how Linda and I were still able to disappear for a weekend in the country. That saved me.