The songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney remains unmatched in influence and importance throughout music history. The pair first met while Lennon was playing with his band The Quarrymen, and shortly, after he invited McCartney to join – the rest, so they say, was history.
The duo went on to pen around 180 songs credited to the partnership, many of them coming to be recognised as among the greatest of all time. From the beloved and endlessly covered ‘Yesterday’ to the iconic ‘Let It Be’ to hits for the likes of The Rolling Stones and Cilla Black, their collaborative impact is unquantifiable.
The partnership between the two lyricists was particularly potent in the early days of the Beatles. As the years went by, they began to write more individually, though the songs were still credited to the duo due to an earlier agreement.
Though their partnership was strongest in the Beatles’ infancy, there were a few early songs that Lennon and McCartney wrote separately, even in their early days. Though they would all be credited to the partnership, their 1963 debut record contained one song Lennon had penned alone, while their follow-up featured two.
The title song for their first record, ‘Please Please Me’, was written just by Lennon, as he has previously stated himself. “‘Please Please Me’ is my song completely,” he said via All We Are Saying, “It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie’s place…”
The band’s sophomore record, With the Beatles, featured one more Lennon solo endeavour than its predecessor. Both ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ and ‘Not a Second Time’ were written by Lennon. ‘It Won’t Be Long’ was also led by Lennon, but McCartney assisted with the lyrics.
‘Not a Second Time’ was famously declared as having an “Aeolian cadence” by contemporary The Times critic William Mann, a comment to which Lennon responded, “I still don’t know what it means at the end, but it made us acceptable to the intellectuals. It worked and we were flattered. I wrote ‘Not A Second Time and, really, it was just chords like any other chords. To me, I was writing a Smokey Robinson or something at the time.”
The second solo outing on the record, ‘All I’ve Got To Do’, was yet another example of Lennon attempting to emulate Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. “That’s me trying to do Smokey Robinson again,” he stated. Eventually, the dominant early influences of the likes of Smokey Robinson faded away into more experimental, cross-genre influences, and so too, did the prevalence of the McCartney and Lennon partnership. Nonetheless, they remain the most important duo of all time.
