George Harrison once said a Beatles reunion wasn’t “beyond the bounds of possibility”

Band reunions are all the rage in the modern music business, with everybody from the Eagles to Oasis cashing in on years of internal conflict by setting aside their differences for a run of exorbitantly priced concerts. While the cultural trend of band reunions is a fairly modern invention, there have been multiple instances of legendary groups reuniting years after their heyday, going back decades.

One of the first groups to kick off the trend, in fact, was The Beatles.

Throughout the Fab Four’s tenure, the band were forced to fend off countless opportunists looking to cash in on the global gravy train that The Beatles and Apple Corps quickly became. The band, by their own admission, made a fair few mistakes when it came to managing their growing empire, the hiring of Allen Klein perhaps being the most obvious example. Even after the messy dissolution of the world’s biggest band in 1970, these pesky capitalists continued to hound the band members as they each embarked upon their own respective solo careers.

Almost immediately after the band announced their split in 1970, with Paul McCartney announcing his departure from the group in April of that year, calls for the ‘Mop Tops’ to reunite rolled in thick and fast. Nevertheless, each band member became immersed in their independent work in the wake of the split, exploring their own influences and desires without having to justify themselves to the other three band members, or – in the case of George Harrison and Ringo Starr – having to fight to get their voices heard.

Being in the world’s biggest band for nearly a decade comes with monumental mental strain, and the individual members of the band weren’t gagging to return to that high-pressure environment. Of course, the division between members was widened by the public spat between McCartney and John Lennon, which ensued after the breakup, culminating in the vicious attack of Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ which seemed to put an end to any rumours of reunification.

Nevertheless, offers from promoters and music moguls continued to present themselves to the band. These offers seemed to peak around the mid-1970s, with the most lucrative coming from promoter Sid Bernstein, who had worked with the band during their early tours of the US. Reportedly, Bernstein made the band an offer to reunite for a one-time benefit concert, which aimed to raise $230 million (over $1 billion when adjusted for inflation). Other offers for a handful of shows came in at around $50m, but all were refused by the band.

The huge money offers that almost reunited The Beatles

That is not to say, however, that none of the band members ever considered a reunion. After all, they often performed on each other’s solo albums, and largely remained good friends even after the messy split in 1970. During a 1977 interview with Crawdaddy, when Harrison was asked about a potential reunion, he didn’t deny the possibility of it happening.

“The four of us are so tied up with our own lives, and it’s been eight years since we split. And time goes so fast,” he shared.

He did note, however, that a reunion was “not beyond the bounds of possibility.”

Explaining, “But we’d have to want to do it for the music’s sake first. We wouldn’t stick together because somebody had put an ad in the paper putting us on the spot.” Bernstein’s $230m offer a year prior to the interview had, indeed, been published as an advert in The New York Times.

As we all know, this reunion never came to fruition. Each former Beatle was far too busy with their own solo careers to fit in any time for reunification talks, and the idea was put to bed for good in 1980 when John Lennon was fatally shot outside his apartment building in New York City. You cannot have The Beatles without Lennon, although offers for the remaining three members to reunite still surfaced every few years.

Harrison himself passed away in 2001, and, although Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney still collaborate on occasion, the likelihood of anybody performing under The Beatles’ name ever again is slim to none.