John Lennon notoriously spoke out against much of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles music. He even criticized the work McCartney did while in the band. McCartney took a similar stance against one of Lennon’s albums. Though he wrote liner notes for Two Virgins, McCartney didn’t think the album was all that good. Still, he took credit for parts of it.
Paul McCartney wasn’t a fan of one John Lennon album
In 1968, Lennon and Yoko Ono released Two Virgins, the first of three experimental albums they put out as a couple. The album drew major controversy for its cover; Lennon and Ono posed fully naked for it. The other Beatles fielded questions from reporters about it, to their frustration.
McCartney claimed that the cover raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t find it overly shocking. His bigger problem was that he didn’t much like the contents of the album.
“The Two Virgins record itself I didn’t find that interesting; the music wasn’t shocking to me because I’d made a lot like that myself,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “I think John may have got some ideas from when I had a couple of Brennell tape recorders. I used to bounce sounds between them and multi-track to make crazy tapes for friends late at night. It was just ambient music.”
He said Lennon asked him to show him how to do this.
“John asked me how I did it, so I showed him how to plug the machines up,” he said. “John got two at his house in Weybridge, with exactly the same set-up, and I showed him how to use it all.”
Perhaps McCartney believed he could have made a better version of the album.
George Harrison and Ringo Starr felt similarly
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McCartney was not the only Beatle who disliked Two Virgins. Ringo Starr said he would never forget seeing the cover, but he could scarcely remember how the album sounded. George Harrison agreed.
“I don’t think I actually heard all of Two Virgins, just bits of it,” Harrison said. “I wasn’t particularly into that kind of thing. That was his and her affair; their trip. They got involved with each other and were obviously into each other to such a degree that they thought everything they said or did was of world importance, and so they made it into records and films.”
John Lennon disliked much of Paul McCartney’s music
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After The Beatles broke up, Lennon gave multiple interviews in which he insulted McCartney’s music. He was particularly hard on his former bandmate’s debut solo album, McCartney.
“I thought Paul’s was rubbish,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1971. “I think he’ll make a better one, when he’s frightened into it. But I thought that first one was just a lot of . . . Remember what I told you when it came out? ‘Light and easy,’ You know that crack.”
Though he was less harsh as the years passed, Lennon admitted he never felt a loss when he stopped writing with McCartney. He felt he was the better songwriter, and didn’t need McCartney to help him.
