The final time John Lennon talked about Paul McCartney
Together, Paul McCartney and John Lennon created a history that transcended the music industry. Fate brought their union, leading to a brotherly bond that gifted the world with a catalogue of songs that remain culturally vital 60 years later.
Due to Lennon being two years older than McCartney, the pair weren’t school friends, and it took a slice of good fortune for their paths to cross. However, in a sliding doors moment, they coincidentally travelled on the same bus and started talking about music. From then, they started writing songs together which eventually blossomed into a band that later morphed into The Beatles.
Although their relationship endured many peaks and troughs over the decades, it was built on a foundation of brotherly love. They may have hated each other at points, but underneath the insults, Lennon and McCartney wished the best for their former songwriting accomplice.
Following The Beatles’ dissolution, the pair had a very public disagreement that lasted for several years. Thankfully, before Lennon’s tragic death, they had resolved their differences and were once again friends, as the final time that the late star spoke about McCartney proved.
Even though they didn’t see each other often throughout the 1970s, whenever they happened to be in the same city, it was a special moment, which meant an incredible amount to the pair, considering the difficulties their relationship had previously faced.
McCartney’s ‘Too Many People’ from Ram featured a sly dig at Lennon and Ono that escalated their feud. “I was looking at my second solo album, Ram, the other day and I remember there was one tiny little reference to John in the whole thing,” McCartney later explained.
The Beatles bassist elaborated: “He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit. In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices,’ I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two.'”
In light of ‘Too Many People’, Lennon brutally responded with ‘How Do You Sleep’, which only amplified the bad blood. Although this could have been enough to end their friendship permanently, Lennon and McCartney eventually buried the hatchet before it was too late.
For McCartney, it’s the only small grain of positivity he can take from Lennon’s passing. “I was very lucky before he got killed we were mates and we were ringing each other and we were talking about – I don’t know – we used to make bread,” McCartney later told Jonathan Ross. “So we’d talk about, ‘What’s your recipe, man?’ So it got very normal again.”
As McCartney said, like most friends, they typically talked about mundane parts of life, such as bread baking, rather than dealing with the profound. However, just days before his death outside the Dakota Building, the BBC’s Andy Peebles interviewed Lennon at his family home, and McCartney was a prominent topic of conversation.
“He explained how he loved living in New York and how much he missed England,” he notes in the book Who Killed John Lennon? by author Leslie Ann Jones. “He told me about McCartney turning up at the Dakota and ringing the doorbell, and John not letting him up, yelling down, ‘I’m baking bread and looking after the baby! If you think I’m coming out clubbing, you’ve gone mad!'”
Peebles revealed that Lennon opened up to him about his “lifelong ‘sibling rivalry'” with McCartney. Thankfully, Lennon expressed no hard feelings towards McCartney, only exhibiting love for his former bandmate.
Surprisingly, following the interview broadcast, McCartney reached out to contact Peebles. He told the journalist that he did a “wonderful job” but also wanted more information regarding Lennon’s feelings towards him.
McCartney was grieving, and in the midst of his pain, he needed answers from Peebles to allow his mind to rest easy. “Paul McCartney and I had a private conversation,” Peebles added. “He needed me to reassure him that John still loved him, despite all the post-Beatles fallings-out.”
He continued: “‘John talked about you in the interview,’ I told Paul. ‘He was sarcastic, funny and irreverent but there was no doubting his fondness for you.’ We both became very emotional. I knew Paul well enough… I felt awful for making him cry.”
Despite everything they’d said about each other in public and behind closed doors, Lennon and McCartney had an unbreakable bond. Ever since losing their mothers as teenagers, they were kindred spirits who knew each other better than they even knew themselves.
The loss of Lennon will never leave McCartney, and the pain of his death in such a cruel manner is impossible to grieve fully. However, Lennon’s positive remarks proved to be the words McCartney most desperately needed to hear. It would have devastated him to know that Lennon still held a grudge, but thankfully, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
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.