The 1964 Beatles song John Lennon was always jealous of: “Damn fine”
God knows how The Beatles ever actually got to be successful. What really lay beneath the perception of kings was a bedrock of jealousy and bitterness.
That makes the band sound like a hellish experience from start to finish, which obviously it wasn’t, at least all of the time. But the fact remained that, for all their partnership was golden and prolific, Paul McCartney and John Lennon could turn from the best of friends to warring foes at the absolute flip of a switch.
Their relationship was difficult to define in this respect. There was indisputable love, but there was also rage, and latterly a wealth of heartbreak and regret. You could say they were almost like brothers, with the only reason they could fly off the handle so much being ultimately because they felt so safe around one another.
This admittedly makes it sound like too romantic an affair, let’s cut to the chase: Lennon could be spiteful when he wanted to be. While Macca was able to hand this back in spades, of course, sometimes in the Beatles world, it felt like the approval of the top dog was the only thing that ever mattered.
He decided to pass that down from on high when it came to ‘All My Loving’, as much as he may have been loathed to confess it. “‘All My Loving’ is Paul, I regret to say. Because it’s a damn fine piece of work. But I play a pretty mean guitar in back,” he said during an interview in 1980. It was brilliantly bitter, naturally, but it equally masked something far more sincere.
Lennon made these comments a decade after the band had ended in disarray, and nearly two decades since they had started out as the bright-eyed young lads from Liverpool who had the world at their feet. Evidently, a lot had changed in that time, and it was easy to see how he had become potentially jaded. But that band, and all that came with it, had never left him.
To be fair, it would be hard for the legacy of the Fabs to be far from the forefront of his mind. But the point was that despite the pretences of negativity that could occasionally be put up towards it, The Beatles was both the first and the last thing that all the members lived and died by, not least Lennon himself.
In that regard, his relationship with McCartney continued to go through peaks and troughs even many years down the line, because there was simply something about one another that they could never let go of. Was it respect? Was it contempt? Was it a combination of both? More than likely, making their web of entanglement one that was impossible to unfurl.
At the end of the day, it was never really just about ‘All My Loving’. That was simply his way of expressing that, although he knew how good he could be in his own right, McCartney always seemed to be the one he was chasing, whether that actually transpired to be true in real life or was just a mirage in his head. The Beatles were in competition, and sometimes, Lennon didn’t always feel like he’d won.
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