As their early material might betray, The Beatles were rather fond of the opposite sex. With the exception of a few flings and indiscretions, the band was generally home to committed romantics, opting for long-term relationships and marriage from a young age. Perhaps the least befitting of the rampant rock and roll homewrecker stereotype was Paul McCartney.
Before he met the love of his life, Linda Eastman, in 1967, McCartney was in a long-term relationship with the British actor Jane Asher. The couple first met in 1963 while The Beatles were in the early stages of success in the UK. Asher intimately witnessed McCartney’s rise to global fame, with the star spending many nights at her family home in London.
McCartney wrote many of his hit songs in the Asher household, most famously waking from a dream with not just a melody or line but the whole of ‘Yesterday’ formed in his head. The Beatle would go on to write ‘Let It Be’ in his sleep a few years later – McCartney certainly knows all about ‘Golden Slumbers’.
‘Let It Be’ was an emotional ballad McCartney wrote about his mother, Mary, who tragically passed away in 1956 when he was just 14. With “Mother Mary” in the lyrics, this was one of the more tangible references in McCartney’s catalogue of songs written for the women in his life, but there had been many before, and many were soon to follow.
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Undoubtedly, many of McCartney’s lovesongs of the early and mid-1960s would be at least partially inspired by his concurrent relationship, but the most obvious, directed credits are ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘You Won’t See Me’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You’.
The five songs listed above perfectly reflect the unfortunate trajectory of McCartney and Asher’s relationship in the mid-60s. The former two arrived in 1964, during the relative contentment of the pair’s early relationship, but by the time McCartney wrote material for Rubber Soul, the late 1965 follow-up to Help!, he and Asher had begun to drift their separate ways.
With Asher’s busy acting career and McCartney’s commitment to both road and studio, they found very little time to spend with each other, leading to several incendiary disagreements. With this situation in mind, it doesn’t take a forensic scientist to see where lines like “Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight” came from.
“As is one’s wont in relationships, you will from time to time argue or not see eye to eye on things, and a couple of the songs around this period were that kind of thing,” McCartney said of ‘I’m Looking Through You’ in the book Many Years From Now. “This one I remember particularly as me being disillusioned over her commitment.”
“She went down to the Bristol Old Vic quite a lot around this time. Suffice to say that this one was probably related to that romantic episode and I was seeing through her façade,” he continued. “And realising that it wasn’t quite all that it seemed. I would write it out in a song, and then I’ve got rid of the emotion. I don’t hold grudges, so that gets rid of that little bit of emotional baggage. I remember specifically this one being about that, getting rid of some emotional baggage. ‘I’m looking through you, and you’re not there!’”
In a separate interview with Hunter Davies, McCartney admitted to being somewhat selfish in wanting Asher to stay with him while he was home. “I knew it was selfish. It caused a few rows,” McCartney noted. “Jane left me once and went off to Bristol to act. I said, ‘OK then, leave, I’ll find someone else.’ It was shattering to be without her.”
The couple endured their quarrels for a further two years. Amid ebbs and flows, McCartney proposed to Asher in 1967 and invited his fiancee to India to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the following year. Alas, shortly after The Beatles’ arrival home from India, Asher found McCartney in bed with a young New Yorker named Francie Schwartz. Despite a vain, fleeting attempt to repair the damage, they ultimately broke up during the recording of The White Album.
Songs Paul McCartney wrote about Jane Asher:
‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’
‘And I Love Her’
‘We Can Work It Out’
‘You Won’t See Me’
‘I’m Looking Through You’
Watch Paul McCartney perform ‘I’m Looking Through You’ live in Montreal in 2011 below.
