Paul McCartney - 1989 - Musician - The Beatles

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The 1994 author Paul McCartney said lied through his teeth: “Like hell it was”

Fri 8 May 2026 16:15, UK

Paul McCartney has had to spend over 75% of his life correcting history whenever talking about The Beatles.

Even though most people like to think they know the idea of the Fab Four’s story whenever they bring up them taking LSD for the first time or their historic breakup, the only people who will actually know what went down are the four of them behind the scenes. And even though McCartney has done a good job at telling his side of the story, he has said that some people have made it even more difficult for him to explain what the band was really all about all those years ago.

Because as much as people like to hear ‘Granddude’ tell his stories about playing with his old mates, there are just as many who think that Macca was always the stick in the mud whenever it came to the band. He tended to get labelled as the control freak in the band that wanted the band to keep making pop songs, and while he has confessed to being somewhat of a workaholic, he wasn’t about to sit back and watch people take his rock and roll energy off of him every time he performed.

Yes, he had the most whimsical ditties out of anyone in the band, but calling him a balladeer leaves a whole lot of great music on the table. He could write just as many rock and roll tunes as John Lennon could, and even when they were working on some of their experimental projects, there were times when McCartney could get even more avant-garde than anything his writing partner was doing.

You weren’t going to see him make a record like Two Virgins, but there was a reason why Lennon was so impressed by McCartney II. He realised that he had competition again, but after he was assassinated, the rest of the world was much more content to put a halo around Lennon’s legacy and call McCartney the one who was lucky enough to have written all those tunes with him.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the book Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald didn’t help matters that much. While the book isn’t necessarily a factual account of what The Beatles were all about, MacDonald’s way of explaining tunes as weapons that Lennon and McCartney would use to attack each other never sat well with the bassist, even years after it was published.

‘The Nerk Twins’ fought like brothers, but McCartney took exception to MacDonald trying to rewrite history a little too much, saying, “I’ve seen some of the books, particularly about the Beatles, where they’ll say, ‘This was McCartney’s answer to Lennon’s barb’– and so on and so on. Like hell it was! unfortunately [MacDonald] is no longer with us. He died, and so I don’t want to put him down. But while he was around I must say, I would dip into that book and think, ‘See now, what’s he got to say about this song?’ And he’d go, ‘This is McCartney’s answer to–’ and I’d go, ‘No, it wasn’t!’”

Granted, it’s not like McCartney couldn’t write a few songs at Lennon’s expense. He has talked about how ‘Too Many People’ included a few swipes at his writing partner for being a bit too holier-than-thou when it came to his sloganeering, but at the same time, there are always tunes like ‘Here Today’ that showed that he really did have a great love of his old friend even after he was gone.

This kind of revisionist history is going to happen with all kinds of celebrities at some point or another, but McCartney wasn’t willing to roll over and accept someone else’s version of the truth. Because as much as The Beatles’ feuding ended badly, McCartney was going to remind everyone about the good times that they had, instead of dwelling on every single shakeup that they had.