It’s no exaggeration to say that music lovers have spent over half a century wondering what might have been if the Beatles never split up…or if they’d gotten back together at some point. As it turns out, one very famous fan (and fellow legendary musician) nearly made that dream come true.
During a 2004 interview on BBC 6 Music with Marc Riley, David Bowie revealed what happened when he got an unexpected knock on his hotel door in the middle of the night in 1974 — several years after the Beatles broke up — and opened it to find John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
As Bowie recalled, he’d “taken over a suite” at the Pierre Hotel in NYC where he was spending his time obsessively making his own films with a Sony video recorder.
“Fortunately, I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night and complete these things,” he quipped.
“About three in the morning, there’s a knock on the door,” Bowie continued. “And John was there and he had got Paul with him. It was the two of them been out on the town for the evening…he said, ‘Can we come in?’…he said, ‘You won’t believe what I’ve got here!’”
“And I said, ‘I thought you two…’, and he said, ‘No. All that’s gonna change.’”
As Bowie explained, the night that unfolded was nothing short of “great.”
“We spent the evening just like rapping and talking,” he said. “There was kind of a strange thing between them. There was a little bit of distance every now and again, but that must have been the first time they’d been back together for, you know, since the big bust up, you know.”
McCartney and Lennon were getting along so well, in fact, that the hangout almost resulted in what would have been a truly legendary supergroup.
“They actually asked me if I’d kind of join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something else: David Bowie and the Beatles. They liked the idea there’d be two — like, DBB. I think they wanted to call it DBB,” Bowie said, adding, “The next morning, it just never came to anything.”
How did David Bowie and John Lennon meet?
As producer Tony Visconti recalled during a 2021 interview with the BBC, Bowie and Lennon’s first meeting also took place late at night in a hotel, according to The Guardian.
“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” Visconti said of Bowie, who asked him to go along and “buffer the situation.”
“About one in the morning I knocked on the door and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other,” Visconti recalled. “Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal and he was sketching things and he was completely ignoring Lennon. So, after about two hours of that, he [John] finally said to David, ‘Rip that pad in half and give me a few sheets. I want to draw you.’ So David said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’, and he finally opened up. So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John and they kept swapping them and then they started laughing and that broke the ice.”
The pair went on to have a “great friendship,” with Lennon asking Bowie to play on a cover of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and helping to co-write Bowie’s hit song “Fame.”
Related: How John Lennon Changed the World Forever 56 Years Ago Today
This story was originally reported by Parade on Sep 24, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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