‘Little White Lies’: The first song that bonded John Lennon and Paul McCartney
The meeting of John Lennon and Paul McCartney changed music forever. After fate directed a run-in at a summer fair, where Lennon was on stage, and a young McCartney was watching, the two Liverpool lads becoming friends kicked off the story of one of history’s most beloved bands. So, it’s no wonder that music also helped bond the two boys.
John Lennon was 16 when 15-year-old Paul McCartney appeared in his life. He was playing in a skiffle group, The Quarrymen, at a church fete when McCartney introduced himself, amusing but then impressing the older boys by playing his guitar upside down to account for being left-handed. He played Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and from that moment, he was in.
But as time went on and Lennon and McCartney bonded, the band morphed. It was no longer that young McCartney was simply another musician allowed to be in the group. Instead, over time, the band became their joint project, informed by the songs they wrote as a duo and the music they shared between them.
There was plenty that could have bonded the two. McCartney’s mother died when he was 14, and soon after the friends met, Lennon’s mother passed too in a tragic car accident, meaning that their shared grief became a tie between them. Raised in a difficult family amidst complex relationships, it seems that McCartney’s more settled family home became a kind of safe haven for Lennon, who started spending all his spare time hanging around there. But as two young men in the late 1950s and ‘60s, that kind of emotional openness wasn’t their way. In the future, McCartney talked about this and about how he wished he could go back and tell his friend that he loved him, stating, “You never say anything like that. Especially if you’re a Northern Man.”
But without that emotional ability, music became their shared language. The boys spent their teenage years bonding over the tunes they loved, sharing new recommendations and trying to translate what they were listening to into songs. But it wasn’t just new, youthful rock and roll they bonded over. In fact, the first song they shared was an oldie.
“When I first met John Lennon, you’d think we’d have talked rock’n’roll, but I remember us discussing ‘Little White Lies’ – that kind of 1920s and ’30s song was the platform we took off from,” McCartney told Gramophone, picking out an old pop song from decades earlier. While the boys would go on to be the faces of the UK’s new rock and roll sound, their early bonding moments actually came through more mainstream songs as McCartney admitted how essential that stuff was to their songwriting, stating, “A lot of this light music had an impact on me as a composer – I took from it a deep interest in how to shape a melody.”
So while The Beatles are often held up as one of the shiniest examples of countercultural music and one of the brightest talents in rock and roll, the reality is that their origin came from the popular tunes that everyone and their nan also loved too.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.