Following the band’s split in 1970, the two artists went on separate paths. However, there was a slight chance the two could have reunited in a supergroup with David Bowie, Showbiz reports.
David Bowie was an admirer of John Lennon, and the two became friends after first meeting in the 1970s. The pair worked on a few songs together, including Bowie’s “Fame” and his cover of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” The “Starman” singer learned a lot from the former Beatle and, in his commencement speech for Berklee College of Music, Bowie called Lennon his “greatest mentor.”
“It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” Bowie shared. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful, and imbued with strangeness.”
In an interview with BBC Radio 6, Bowie recalled the night when the two ex-Beatles suggested forming a trio.
"I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night doing things. About 3 in the morning there is a knock on the door. John was there and he had Paul with him. The two of them had been out on the town for the evening.”
“It was great, we spend the evening just like rapping and talking. There was kind of a strange thing between [the two]. There was a little bit of distance every now and then. But that must have been the first time they’d been back together since the big burst. They actually asked me if would kind of join the two of them and become a trio with them. ‘David Bowie and The Beatles’, they liked the idea to of ‘DBB’, that’s what we wanted to call it. But the next morning just never came to anything,”
Bowie, Lennon, a mountain of cocaine and Young Americans: A night with David Bowie, John Lennon and a “mountain of cocaine.” It was December 1974 and (producer) Tony Visconti was with Bowie in New York recording material for the the singer’s Young Americans album.
Visconti jumped at the opportunity to meet Lennon and quickly agreed. After finishing his work at the studio around midnight, the producer caught a cab to Bowie’s hotel.
“I go up to David's suit and I knock on the door a lot and nobody answers. But I hear a lot of scuffling behind the door, and finally I don't know who answered, but I think it was Neil Aspinall, one of the minders of the Beatles,” Visconti recalled. “I said, ‘It's Tony. Tony Visconti. David asked me to come by tonight.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, OK. We were just a bit worried you might be the police.'”
