‘How Do You Sleep?’: The nasty and “absolutely puerile” John Lennon song
We have all experienced bad break-ups at one point or another, but it is difficult to imagine a break-up quite as ugly as that of The Beatles. After spending the 1960s redefining the landscape of pop and revolutionising the music industry, the Fab Four had reached the end of their tether, and being cooped up in a studio with their bandmates certainly didn’t help. In the wake of their break-up in 1970, John Lennon and Paul McCartney descended into a vicious personal spat which overshadowed the early years of their respective solo careers.
Lennon and McCartney had been a gifted songwriting partnership going back to the days of The Quarrymen in 1950s Liverpool. Together, the pair penned a seemingly endless array of iconic and revolutionary songs which continue to inspire artists today, over half a century later. Their sensibilities were always different, but those contrasting influences formed a key part of why The Beatles were so beloved and universal. Nevertheless, these differences proved too much to handle during the latter days of the ‘Mop Tops’.
As songwriters, the pair had already been drifting further apart for years, each pursuing their own radically different songwriting style: Lennon often strived for ‘Revolution Nine’ experimentation and social comment, whereas McCartney tended to favour love songs and jaunty ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ style tracks. These differences caused a wealth of disagreements between the two, which descended into vicious arguments towards the end of the 1960s.
The visceral nature of these disputes continued into the songwriters’ respective solo careers, with McCartney having a few digs at Lennon on Ram’s ‘Too Many People’ in 1971. These malicious pokes at Lennon were fairly tame, however, in comparison to Lennon’s track ‘How Do You Sleep?’. Released on Imagine in 1971, the album is entirely directed towards the songwriter’s former bandmate, and includes multiple resentful lyrics, a notable example being “The only thing you done was yesterday, and since you’re gone you’re just another day.”
That line references two McCartney tracks, The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ and the solo track ‘Another Day’, as a means of suggesting that Macca’s greatest work was behind him, and his contributions to The Beatles were few and far between. While these claims are easily disputable, the fact that they were written by Lennon reflects the intensity of his resentment and anger towards his former songwriting partner, following McCartney’s legal battle to officially dissolve The Beatles in the London High Court.
“I used my resentment against Paul, that I have as a kind of sibling rivalry resentment from youth, to write a song. It was a creative rivalry… It was not a vicious vendetta,” Lennon said of the track during a BBC Radio One interview days before his death in 1980. Nevertheless, the lyrics of the song certainly have a vicious undercurrent. Reportedly, though, some of the most egregious lyrics were cut from the final recording.
Poet and publisher Felix Dennis was in the studio with Lennon while the songwriter was working on ‘How Do You Sleep’, and he recalled in You Started It that “Some of it was absolutely puerile.” The writer shared, “Thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatalogical jokes and then falling about with laughter at their own wit.”
Seemingly, then, Lennon’s lyrical assault on McCartney on ‘How Do You Sleep?’ had the potential to be even more vicious than it ended up being. Thankfully, the division between the pair did not last forever, and both songwriters managed to reconcile once the dust had settled on their feud.
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