Did John Lennon really hate The Beatles song ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’?
We like to believe The Beatles were constantly butting heads. While they were certainly no strangers to disagreement, journalists and historians have occasionally amped up the toxicity between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. After all, nothing sells a newspaper like a great dollop of disdain. ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ from The White Album is the perfect example. Recorded at a time when tensions were running high, it’s generally held that Lennon hated this slice of early British ska. According to McCartney, however, Lennon was actually instrumental in its creation.
Written on Paul’s return from India in 1968, ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ was inspired by the favourite phrase of his Nigerian friend Jimmy Anonmuogharan Scott Emuakpor. “I had a friend called Jimmy Scott who was a Nigerian conga player, who I used to meet in the clubs in London,” Paul recalls in Anthology. “He had a few expressions, one of which was, ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra’. I used to love this expression… He sounded like a philosopher to me. He was a great guy anyway and I said to him, ‘I really like that expression and I’m thinking of using it,’ and I sent him a cheque in recognition of that fact later because even though I had written the whole song and he didn’t help me, it was his expression.”
The story goes that Lennon, who was by this point addicted to heroin, loathed ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, going so far as to describe the song as an example of “Paul’s granny shit”. Much to Lennon’s annoyance, the track took a long time to record, with The Beatles starting the song from scratch twice. By July 8th, Lennon was so sick of the song that he came into the studio under the influence of drugs. Much to everyone’s surprise, this turned out to be precisely what the song needed.
“John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he said, ‘All right, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da'”, says engineer Richard Lush in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “He went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said, ‘This is it! Come on!’ He was really aggravated. That was the version they ended up using.”
While Lush seems to have regarded Lennon’s keyboard antics as an attempt to get the song out of the way as quickly as possible, Paul McCartney holds a different view. During an interview with Howard Stern back in 2018, McCartney countered the host’s suggestion that Lennon hated ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. “Who says?” he began. “John did like that song.”
Paul went on to explain that the song was a shared venture. “I wrote the song and one thing I always love about the intro there is the piano intro.” That intro was supposedly the part Lennon hated the most, but McCartney seems to think that if he had genuinely hated it, he wouldn’t have come into the studio so eager to complete it. He could easily have let Paul finish the song alone, but instead, he decided to come in and offer up that now-famous piano line. “We all fall in behind him and go, ‘Yes!’” McCartney explained. “That’s what it needed.”
You can revisit Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ below.
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