‘Run For Your Life’: The most divisive song by The Beatles
The Beatles leader John Lennon was well-known for being tough on himself and his band’s music. Not afraid to tear into their efforts, the Liverpudlian put some of the Fab Four’s best-loved songs to the sword with ‘Run for Your Life’, the 1965 track taken from Rubber Soul, unfortunate enough to be the one that Lennon designated as his least favourite.
The case of ‘Run for Your Life’ is an interesting one. The internal debate surrounding it is symptomatic of the cracks that would become more prominent in The Beatles as their career progressed. While Lennon hated the material, guitarist George Harrison made no bones about proclaiming it his favourite. This was something Lennon would note when vocalising his disdain for the song later in life.
“I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it – I used to like specific lines from songs – ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ – so I wrote it around that but I didn’t think it was that important.”
When speaking to David Sheff for the interview that would eventually be compiled into the book All We Are Saying, Lennon said he “always hated” ‘Run For Your Life’ but described it as a “favourite” of Harrison’s. He also provided more information about the rockabilly classic ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, which Elvis Presley covered in 1955.
Lennon said: “Just a sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of, but it was always a favourite of George’s. It has a line from an old Presley song: ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ is a line from an old blues song that Presley did once.”
Paul McCartney, Lennon’s Beatles songwriting partner, would offer his own account of the song in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography, Many Years From Now. He called ‘Run For Your Life’ a “macho song” and outlined the difference between his approach to life and songwriting in comparison to Lennon. McCartney also points to the insecurities that his bandmate battled against.
“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney said. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘Catch you with another man’. It was never a concern of mine, at all, because I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls; it was a perfectly open relationship so I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”
Listen to ‘Run For Your Life’ below.
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