The relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, The Beatles principal songwriters,
continues to capture audiences' imaginations. This is the true story
of their rollercoaster friendship, from its humble beginnings to its tragic end.
The cultural landscape in which the two key Beatles songwriters met was very different
from that in which they rose to prominence in the early 1960s. The year was 1957, and John Lennon
was the lead singer and guitarist in a ragtag teen band called The Quarrymen. The group was
named after Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, where the 16-year-old Lennon and his bandmates
were all classmates. And while the early music of The Beatles would be predominantly rock and roll,
The Quarrymen's stock-in-trade was skiffle: a pre-rock folk and blues genre.
On July 6 of that year, The Quarrymen had a gig at a church fete, or festival, on the outskirts
of Liverpool, performing on the same bill as a dog show and a traditional brass band.
In the bustling crowd that day was Paul McCartney, then aged just 15.
McCartney, having been introduced to the band,
impressed the group of older teens with his musicianship by playing a string of
rock and roll songs on his guitar. It wasn't long before McCartney was invited to join the group,
and petitioned for the recruitment of another talented young musician: George Harrison.
On July 15, 1958 — just over a year after he met Paul McCartney for the first time — John
Lennon lost his mother, Julia, in a traffic accident. Though he didn't live with Julia,
Lennon adored his mom. She had introduced him to rock and roll and enthusiastically taught
him his first chords on the guitar which she bought for him. Her death
crushed the young Lennon, who began to act out more than he ever had before.
But in Paul McCartney he had found a kindred spirit. The younger Beatle's
own mother had died of breast cancer when McCartney was 14. McCartney told Rolling Stone:
"So we had a kind of bond that we both knew about that, we knew that feeling."
While Lennon would later write songs such as "Julia" and "Mother" that directly addressed
his sense of loss, McCartney would never consciously write about his mother in a
Lennon-McCartney song. However, McCartney later admitted that his mother's death
would have spurred him on as a songwriter. McCartney told Stephen Colbert in 2019:
"And I never thought that it affected my music until years later..."
"I certainly didn't mean it to be. But it could be, you know those things can happen."
Famously, any Beatles song written by either John Lennon or Paul McCartney was listed as a
"Lennon-McCartney" composition, a tradition that was maintained throughout the band's existence.
The decision was made very early on, back when the pair were taking their first steps
to becoming songwriters. In the book All We Are Saying, which featured one of the final
interviews Lennon gave during his lifetime, the singer told journalist David Sheff,
"We always had that thing that our names would go on songs even if we didn't write them. It was
never a legal deal between Paul and me, just an agreement to put both our names on our songs."
Even in 1969, when The Beatles were starting to record and perform with other artists, the pull
of the old co-credit was still strong. Lennon also admitted in All We Are Saying that his anti-war
anthem "Give Peace A Chance" was actually written in collaboration with his wife Yoko Ono. However,
the song was still credited to Lennon-McCartney on the record. Old habits die hard.
More recently, McCartney received some criticism for attempting to change the iconic credit,
and to have songs he penned alone listed as "McCartney-Lennon" compositions on his
later solo and live albums. However, McCartney eventually backed down, telling The Guardian:
"I'm happy with the way it is and always has been. Lennon and McCartney is still
the rock 'n' roll trademark I'm proud to be a part of – in the order it has always been."
In the early days of their friendship, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were inseparable,
writing compulsively, quote, "eyeball to eyeball," as Lennon described to Playboy in 1980. But
to suppose that Lennon and McCartney's bond was established purely through nerding out over chord
progressions and strumming patterns would be way off. Around the same time, The Beatles' manager,
Brian Epstein, had the up-and-coming group booked for hectic gig schedules,
including lengthy residencies in Hamburg's notorious red-light district.
As well as becoming a top-notch live act thanks to thousands of hours spent on stage performing
together night after night, the Beatles also grew together through a shared indulgence in
Hamburg's riotous nightlife, copious alcohol, and sex. Additionally, most of the bandmates'
extracurricular activities occurred at close quarters, seeing as the near-penniless Beatles
shared hotel rooms and bunk beds during their time in Hamburg. The incredible
intimacy between the band members was key to their legendary chemistry. McCartney told GQ,
"In music, it made us a very tight band,
but as friends it made us able to read each other. When we were super close."
The Lennon-McCartney partnership scored its first big hit in the U.K.
in October 1962 with "Love Me Do." Three months later, they released "Please Please
Me," their first chart-topper which heralded the start of Beatlemania. Today, the story of
The Beatles is looked back on in its entirety as a 7-year-long recording miracle. But 50 years on,
the immediacy of Lennon and McCartney's success as songwriters is perhaps easy to overlook.
In 1966, music critic Michael Lydon published a profile of The Beatles in which he explored
the incredible popularity of their songs, whether performed by the Fab Four or others. Lydon wrote:
"By February 1, 1966, the 88 Lennon-McCartney songs had been recorded in 2,921
versions [...] Versions by the Beatles have by now sold close to 200 million record tracks;
total sales of all Lennon/McCartney-recorded compositions must be pushing half a billion."
Lennon and McCartney were barely halfway through their collaboration.
The year 1967 was a transformative one for The Beatles, the decisive
period in which the friendly rivalry that propelled the Lennon-McCartney songwriting
partnership to the highest possible critical and commercial heights began to disintegrate.
May of that year saw the release of the band's landmark album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band, which some critics have argued is the band's most iconic and representative work,
not to mention a release that has become indelibly linked to the '60s counterculture.
But Sgt. Pepper also signaled the moment Lennon and McCartney's interests started to diverge,
and the power struggle between the two, which would complicate the final years of the band,
began. As Rolling Stone notes, the concept album was primarily McCartney's idea,
whose role in the group was expanding as Lennon found himself in crisis, withdrawing from the
world amid the last turbulent months of his unhappy first marriage. Lennon later commented,
"I was still in a real big depression in Pepper, and I know Paul wasn't at that
time. He was feeling full of confidence [...] I was going through murder."
Though the Sgt. Pepper tune "A Day In The Life" represents one of the
greatest successes of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, the song is emblematic of their
increasingly separate songwriting, being a combination of two different compositions.
As time went on, it became obvious that Lennon and McCartney's "eyeball to eyeball"
songwriting style of the early sixties would never be revisited.
As the 1960s wore on, The Beatles were wearing out. As noted by Rolling Stone,
in 1968 both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were creating some of their greatest work during the
making of the band's famously sprawling White Album. However, the creative directions that
the songwriters were going in began to deviate significantly, as did their personal lives.
Lennon, head over heels in love and beginning a whirlwind romance with his new partner Yoko Ono,
became alienated amid a growing heroin addiction, according to Beatles Bible.
But when the band's break-up finally hit the papers in April 1970,
it seemed to have all been Paul McCartney's doing.
"The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as
a landmark in the decline of the British Empire. The Beatles are breaking up."
Seemingly out of nowhere, McCartney announced that The Beatles were no longer making music together,
and that he was going solo. Lennon was quick to characterize McCartney's actions as a betrayal.
However, McCartney wasn't the first to leave the band — in fact, he was the last. Lennon had
announced he was leaving a year earlier, while George and Ringo had each walked out earlier
than that. But in terms of PR, it was McCartney who took the hit for the end of The Beatles.
While Paul McCartney's announcement that The Beatles were no more certainly meant
he attracted plenty of ire from fans and critics alike, it managed to enrage John
Lennon in that it inherently suggested that McCartney was the band's de facto leader.
Lennon declared to the press at the time,
"I started the band, I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."
But the war of words didn't just occur through the press — it was also waged on wax. In 1971,
McCartney released Ram, his second album with his wife, Linda. The album contained the song
"Too Many People," which Lennon interpreted as a swipe against him and Yoko Ono.
Lennon hit back with the brutal "How Do You Sleep?" which features the line,
"Those freaks was right when they said you was dead."
The lyric was a reference to the longstanding urban myth that McCartney died in the early '60s
and had been replaced by an imposter. For many, the disunity that characterized the
post-Beatles relationship was symbolic of the end of the '60s counterculture,
something that Lennon himself noted in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview:
"I don't believe in it. The dream is over. I'm not just talking about the Beatles,
I'm talking about the generation thing. It's over."
The only record on which John Lennon and Paul McCartney can be heard playing together
after the dissolution of The Beatles is a bootleg: the poorly received A Toot and a Snore in '74,
a recording of a drug-fueled jam session. Pitchfork recently called the record "atrocious."
But the fact that the two most bitterly at odds former Beatles were in the same room
and finally making music together again is a testament to the fact that by the mid-'70s,
the animosity between Lennon and McCartney was finally beginning to dissipate.
In interviews from around 1974 and 1975, Lennon was relaxed enough about
his relationship with McCartney to openly discuss the idea of a Beatles reunion,
even admitting that he would, quote, "go along with it" if someone else organized it.
"I haven't worked with Paul because we had a more difficult time but now we're pretty close."
Although Lennon and McCartney never did work together again, it wasn't a conscious
decision — rather, the chance just never arose. Lennon effectively retired from music for five
years in 1975 to care for his newborn son, Sean, while McCartney claimed it was, quote,
"pot and politics" that meant he was unable to reconnect fully with his former songwriting
partner in his final years. McCartney was banned from entering America due to drug offenses,
while Lennon and his young family were splitting their time between Los Angeles and New York.
John Lennon was killed in the street in New York on December 8,
1980. He was 40 years old, and had recently returned to the public eye
with the release of his first album in five years. In a now infamous clip, McCartney,
who had spent the day following Lennon's death in a London studio, tells the assorted press outside,
"Drag, isn't it?"
The comment received plenty of criticism, but McCartney was in shock. He later explained,
"I was at home, and I got a phone call. It was early in the morning. [...] It was
just so horrific. You couldn't take it in, and I couldn't take it in."
In 2020, McCartney described how, even today, he still recalls the dynamic of his time with Lennon,
when, "eyeball to eyeball," they created some of popular music's best-loved tunes,
and noted how thankful he was that the two rivals had patched up their relationship before Lennon's
tragic death. McCartney told The Times of London:
"We had certainly got our friendship back, which was a great blessing for me, and I now will often
think, if I'm writing a song, 'OK, John — I'll toss it over to you. What line comes next?'"
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