The one Beatles album John Lennon compared to “sexual hysteria”
As The Beatles’ lead songwriters for many years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent many an hour with their noses to the proverbial grind, chipping away at melodies and chord progressions until the glimmering pearl of a song emerged.
Like any partnership, the Lennon-McCartney songwriting factory had its peaks and troughs. There were moments when they were unstoppable, and then there were times when even sharing the same room seemed unimaginable. After the Fab Four’s split in 1970, Lennon was able to evaluate his career with McCartney with the clarity afforded by distance, leading to the assertion that, at one time, their partnership was suffused with the “hysteria” of new love.
In All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon discussed the once “fruitful” partnership: “Well, it was fertile in the way a relationship between a man and a woman becomes more fertile after eight or ten years,” he began. “The depth of The Beatles’ songwriting, or of John and Paul’s contribution to The Beatles, in the late ’60s was more pronounced; it had a more mature, more intellectual — whatever you want to call it — approach,” he continued. “We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers.”
In comparing early albums like Hard Days Night to latter-day works like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, Lennon divided his partnership with Paul into two distinct eras: “The early stuff — the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it — was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship,” he confessed. “And the Sgt. Pepper–Abbey Road period was the mature part of the relationship.”
A Hard Day’s Night is comprised of original compositions pushed by the incredibly hooky titular song. Released in 1964, it is perhaps the ultimate distillation of the Fab Four in their pop pomp, before they turned their attention to the art of it all.
That’s not to say the songs on the soundtrack for the film aren’t expertly composed; they certainly are. The album is bursting with huge songs, including ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Tell Me Why’, and ‘If I Fell’, and it harnessed the songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney in full force for the first time.
As McCartney revealed to the press at the time, “Sometimes maybe he (John) will write a whole song himself, or I will, but we always say that we’ve both written it. Sometimes the lyric does come first, sometimes the tune—sometimes both together. Sometimes he’ll do one line, sometimes I’ll do one line. It’s very varied.”
Bringing the marriage metaphor to its logical conclusion, Lennon then opened up about how the partnership might have evolved if The Beatles had stayed together: “It wouldn’t have been the same. But maybe it was a marriage that had to end. Some marriages don’t get through that phase.”
Lennon’s analogy certainly has legs. A Hard Days Night simmers with passion and optimism, reflecting The Beatles’ powerful sense of destiny following their rise to the top of the British charts throughout 1963. Having secured themselves as household names in their homeland, they set their sights on the rest of the world – embarking on a tour of Europe before making a trip across the Atlantic to break America.
Within a year, John and Paul’s musical love affair had resulted in the birth of a powerful new fan hysteria: Beatlemania.
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