“Slightly guilty”: John Lennon’s regret surrounding The Beatles’ publishing
The Beatles spent the 1960s carving out their place as the biggest band of all time, and it’s a title they’ve retained ever since. Between them, they penned some of the most well-loved songs of all time, pioneered a range of new studio techniques, and led the way for popular culture and the music industry as we know it today. And along the way, they generated a huge amount of money through records, merchandise sales, concerts and more.
The question of how to split those earnings was a difficult one. It wasn’t just the Fab Four who had to be taken into account, but their manager, Brian Epstein, too. Before his death in 1967, the manager reportedly took home 25 per cent of the money, while the remaining amount was split between the band members. But not every Beatle took home the same amount of money.
Over the years, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had proven themselves to be the driving songwriters of the group, penning the majority of the band’s biggest hits and back catalogue. McCartney provided the ideas for classics like ‘Eight Days a Week’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’, while Lennon contributed ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘Across the Universe’ and ‘Help!’
George Harrison and Ringo Starr occasionally contributed their songwriting talents to the band. Starr penned ‘Octopus Garden’, for example, which appeared on the band’s iconic album Abbey Road, while Harrison contributed classics like the shimmering ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. However, their contributions were outweighed by their bandmates, who couldn’t keep themselves away from pen and paper.
So, Lennon and McCartney penned far more of The Beatles’ tunes, and their take of the royalties reflected this. However, Lennon was never entirely comfortable with the split of revenue between the band, and he even pushed for Harrison and Starr to get more out of their songwriting.
“I always tried…” Lennon once stated in an interview shared in All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “It was because of me that Ringo and George got a piece of John and Paul’s songwriting.” Lennon went on to acknowledge that under the “auspices” of their later manager, Allen Klein, “John and Paul own completely anything that Maclen [Music] published.”
“I always felt bad that George and Ringo didn’t get a piece of the publishing,” Lennon admitted, “Not bad enough to do anything about it, but slightly guilty about it.” The songwriter went on to acknowledge that it was because of him that Harrison and Starr each got five per cent of Maclen. “Not because of Klein and not because of Paul,” he clarified, “Because of me.”
Starr and Harrison may not have contributed to the band’s songwriting quite as much as McCartney and Lennon, but that didn’t stop Lennon from feeling regret and remorse surrounding their lesser pay cheques. Now, of course, the finances of The Beatles are even more complicated.
Strangely, in the 1980s, Michael Jackson outbid McCartney in order to buy The Beatles’ music, spending a whopping $47.5million to do so. This soured the relationship between the popstar and the former Beatle, but McCartney has since regained control of the band’s publishing rights. In 2017, he worked with Sony to reacquire the songs.
