After The Beatles split, tensions between the band members occasionally flared up. Despite the deep fraternal bond they shared during their meteoric rise to fame, the pressures of success and time had caused the group to unravel. By the time they finally parted ways, the relationships were strained to the breaking point. While this fractious energy was rarely evident in their Beatles recordings, it became much more apparent in the solo work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, where the former songwriting partners didn’t hold back.
The Beatles often wrote songs about one another, with George Harrison and Ringo Starr contributing their own or lending a hand to Lennon’s compositions. However, there was something particularly unsettling about hearing Paul McCartney or John Lennon aim a thinly veiled barb at each other. These moments captured the complex mix of camaraderie and tension that defined their relationship, making the emotional impact of their words all the more poignant.
In 1971, as Lennon created and released his now-iconic album Imagine, relationships were fraught to what felt like an unsalvageable degree. Famously, Lennon and McCartney traded insults through music on Macca’s track ‘Too Many People’ and the retaliation ‘How Do You Sleep?’, about which Lennon said: “I heard Paul’s messages in Ram – yes there are dear reader! Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh! I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things.”
It meant that Lennon recorded ‘How Do You Sleep?’ in retaliation, and with Harrison on guitar, the song was given extra weight, a factor that would have cut deep for McCartney. Lennon wrote in a letter to his old friend: “So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day’. A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad. What am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter’, sung – get it?”. But he wasn’t finished there. Lennon aimed another dig at his former songwriting partner on the album with the brilliant number ‘Crippled Inside’.
Lennon invited his old friend Harrison to join the recording sessions for the song, and the guitarist didn’t disappoint. While ‘Crippled Inside’ might not be the standout track on the album, it’s still a strong effort. Rich in lyrical depth and delivered with a distinctive flair, it remains a fine song, showcasing the collaborative magic between Lennon and Harrison.
There’s a folk-rock undercurrent to the song, and it sheds more light on the ‘Imagine’ proposition as Lennon confirms that while perfecting one’s perceived and outward body is all well and good, one must change their heart to have any real effect on the world around them. ‘Crippled Inside’ acts as the balance beam between Lennon’s old thoughtful style and his new, more visceral attempts at songwriting. It also contained a lyric that many have seen as an attack on Macca.
“You can live a lie until you die” is the lyric at hand, and while it seems universal enough, there is a hint that it was an arrow at the heart of his and McCartney’s breakdown. The duo had been endlessly squabbling over the minutia in the band’s contract, and while McCartney seemed determined to escape social punishment, Lennon appears to pin the blame on him with this lyric.
Of course, the reflections aren’t quite as obvious as in ‘How Do You Sleep?’ but with one of the most skilled songwriters in the world at the helm, there’s a good chance that we all simply missed the subtle reference to his most troubling relationship of the time.
Despite its heavy subject matter, there is an undeniable charm to the track. It’s as if Lennon is inviting us to dance along to our own disillusionment, to confront our inner turmoil with a wry smile and a knowing nod. The juxtaposition of light and dark, of humour and melancholy, is quintessential Lennon—an artist who understood better than most that the line between joy and sorrow is often razor-thin.
For all its biting wit, cynicism, and hidden messages, there’s no doubt that ‘Crippled Inside’ stands as one of many testaments to Lennon’s unflinching honesty. He never shied away from laying bare his vulnerabilities, and in this track, he challenges us to do the same. It’s a call to confront the cracks in our own facades, to recognise that we are all, in one way or another, crippled inside.
