There can be no doubt that The Beatles’ success depended on far more than four people. However, central to the band’s success was the primary songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The latter joined Lennon’s skiffle group, The Quarrymen, in 1957 and quickly became his right-hand man, regularly invited to private listening and songwriting sessions at Aunt Mimi’s house.
As they stoked the early embers of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, the pair observed a strange yet profitable telepathy. As married couples might finish each other’s sentences, Lennon and McCartney seemed to finish one another’s songwriting ideas as a whole greater than the sum of its two halves. Little did this teenage pair know at the time, over the coming decade, they would become the most successful songwriters of all time, rivalling Elvis Presley’s stature as the apical musical icon.
In 2021, McCartney appeared on BBC Radio 2 to discuss his contemporary exploits in a conversation that inevitably circled back to his former bandmate, who had been dead more than four decades at the time. “We’d grown up together. From little kids, we’d taken the first steps together,” he said of their early bond. “We kind of learned to walk together, then we learned to run. And the fact that each of us was influencing the other was very important. And we were learning, not just about songs and stuff, about life.”
Continuing, McCartney explained how their confidence as a pair was crucial to The Beatles’ early success. Whether competitive or symbiotic, creativity is always better shared. “If I did something that was a little bit ahead of the curve, then John would come up with something that was a bit ahead of my curve. And then so I’d go, ‘Well, how about this?’ and there was a lot of friendly competition.”
As The Beatles enjoyed their first few years of global success, the screaming hoards forced the foursome into small hotel rooms for hours on end. Naturally, the group developed bonds far beyond friendship, more comparable to family. “That’s an awful long time to be collaborating with someone,” McCartney reflected on The Beatles’ time together throughout the ’60s, “and you grow to know each other, and even when you’re apart, you’re still thinking about each other, you’re still referencing each other.”
Like many family units, The Beatles endured their fair share of rifts and remonstrations. As we saw in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, George Harrison became particularly incensed with McCartney, who had taken on a de facto managerial role and limited Harrison’s creative contributions to the final two Beatles albums. In reality, such cracks had begun to appear within and between all four members, and a split was inevitable.
When the band first broke up in 1970, the atmosphere was more tacitly awkward than it was acrid. However, as the members split off into their respective solo careers, thinking about one another from afar, tensions began to mount, especially between Lennon and McCartney. As two halves of the famous songwriting partnership, each felt a need to prove themselves as an independent musical force.
In a portension of today’s diss-track battles in hip-hop, Lennon and McCartney began writing songs either intended or interpreted as slights on the other. Firstly, Lennon took offence at McCartney’s solo debut cut ‘Teddy Boy’, assuming the song referred to himself. When the former released Ram in 1971, Lennon felt similarly about ‘Dear Boy’ and ‘Too Many People’. In response, he mentioned McCartney in his Plastic Ono Band song ‘I Found Out’. This reference was somewhat ambiguous, but there was no question in Lennon’s bilious Imagine cut ‘How Do You Sleep?’
At around the same time, Harrison also reacted to The Beatles’ breakup in ‘Isn’t It a Pity’, ‘Wah-Wah’, and ‘Sue Me, Sue You Blues’. Instead of responding to Lennon’s angry address with further anger, he decided to pen a conciliatory ballad as a follow-up to ‘Dear Boy’; he titled it ‘Dear Friend’ and released it on his 1971 album with Wings, Wild Life.
In a 2018 Q&A on his website, McCartney discussed ‘Dear Friend’ as one of very few of his songs he finds difficult to listen to. This beautiful ballad is emotional as it is, but for McCartney, it’s on a whole different level, especially since Lennon’s death. “I have to sort of choke it back,” he explained.
Continuing, McCartney explained how the lyrics attempt to bury the hatchet and assure fans that they never really hated one another. “That lyric: ‘Really truly, young and newly wed.’ Listening to that was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’” he added. “I’m trying to say to John, ‘Look, you know, it’s all cool. Have a glass of wine. Let’s be cool.’ And luckily, we did get it back together, which was a great source of joy because it would have been terrible if he’d been killed as things were at that point, and I’d never got to straighten it out with him.”
