‘Help!’

As soon as The Beatles started getting bigger, John Lennon felt as though he needed to hold his tongue. Suddenly, there were a lot more eyes on the band, and that meant that his political views needed to be subdued, his hair needed to be neater, and the entire band had to start wearing suits.

“We weren’t as open and as truthful when we didn’t have the power to be,” he said, “We had to take it easy. We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise.”

That was also reflected in a lot of the songs that Lennon wrote, as he couldn’t reveal his true self in most of them. That’s why he was such a big fan of ‘Help!’, as it was one of those rare occasions when he was allowed to be his authentic self. It’s one of The Beatles songs he was always proudest of because of how well he had managed to articulate his feelings in it.

“I meant it, it’s real. The lyric is as good now as it was then, it’s no different, you know,” he said, “It was just me singing ‘help’, and I meant it, you know. I don’t like the recording that much; the song, I like. We did it too fast to try and be commercial.”

‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’

Even though a lot of the time John Lennon thought that the songs he was writing were a bit too pop-oriented, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some tracks he wrote with Paul McCartney that he really enjoyed listening to. One of the greatest melodies he ever came up with was ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, which was a track that’s a lot of fun to listen to and also highlights their musical ability.

“We [Paul & John] wrote that together, it’s a beautiful melody,” he said, “I might do that and ‘Help!’ again. Because I like them. I sing them, you know, they’re the kind of songs I like to sing”. It wasn’t just Lennon who liked the song, but the rest of the world did too, as it was the track that really propelled The Beatles into the spotlight.

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’

Not only was this one of John Lennon’s favourite songs, but also a fan favourites. It combines two elements of his songwriting that appeal to listeners everywhere: his ability to draw on memory and his penchant for psychedelia. Lennon’s favourite aspect of the song was the lyrics he wrote, as while they were definitely poignant, they were also written in such a way that it sounded like he was talking in the song.

“Because it’s real, yeah. It’s like talking, you know, ‘I sometimes think, no, but then again, I mean…‘ you know, like that,” he said, “It’s like that Elton John one where he’s talking to himself sort of singing which I thought was nice.”

‘Mother’

When The Beatles eventually broke up, John Lennon was able to make music that reflected him much better. He was able to write music which was a representation of who he was as a person, and that meant laying everything on the line, his political beliefs, his societal standpoint and even his trauma.

He relished this opportunity to write more transparent music, and perhaps one of his most brutally honest tracks was ‘Mother’. “Many, many people will not like ‘Mother’, it hurts them,” he said, “The first thing that happens to you when you get the album is you can’t take it. Everybody reacted exactly the same. They think, ‘Fuck!’.”

‘Give Peace a Chance’

This song is credited to both Lennon and Yoko Ono, but the latter admitted, “‘Give Peace A Chance’ is basically John’s idea. I might have thrown some words in”.

They wrote the track while doing their ‘Bed-In’, where, after they got married, the couple honeymooned in protest and refused to leave their bed. While they did this, they had plenty of time to discuss politics and the world around them, and in doing so, managed to come up with this track.

It’s easily one of Lennon’s best offerings and represents a quintessential moment in his life. Yoko Ono always cited it as one of her favourites. “I thought it was great,” she said, “With ‘Give Peace A Chance’, it’s very important when you try to communicate on a very wide level […] You have to choose very simple but powerful words to get the message across.”

‘Hello Goodbye’

One of the main things that drove a wedge between The Beatles was the fact that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wanted to write completely different songs. McCartney was writing a lot of pop songs, and while people loved listening to them, Lennon was ready to move on to something different. ‘Hello Goodbye’ is a pretty good representation of this division, as it was the complete opposite of the kind of music Lennon was keen on making.

“That’s another McCartney. Smells a mile away, doesn’t it?” he said, “An attempt to write a single. It wasn’t a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano. Like one of my favourite bits on ‘Ticket To Ride’, where we just threw something in at the end.”

‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’

Pretty much every member of The Beatles, apart from Paul McCartney, hated this song because the whole thing was just a little bit too cheesy, and it made members cringe when they heard it. Lennon had no intention of ever recording the song, and when he found out he had to, he stormed into the studio and played poorly on purpose; clearly, he simply didn’t want this one to go out.

“John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he [McCartney] said, ‘All right, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’,” said Richard Lush, one of the band’s engineers, who said that Lennon “went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said, ‘This is it! Come on!’ He was really aggravated.”

‘Across the Universe’

When John Lennon and Paul McCartney initially started working together, they bounced off one another creatively incredibly well. When creative friction started to become a real problem, rather than heightening one another’s ideas, they instead wound up essentially ruining each other’s songs.

John Lennon was a big fan of ‘Across the Universe’ when he was initially writing it, but felt as though McCartney ruined it when he got involved, so much so that he eventually detested it. “Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song,” said Lennon, “Meaning that we’d play experimental games with my great pieces.”

‘Run For Your Life’

One of the biggest pressures that John Lennon and the rest of The Beatles first experienced when they initially started becoming successful was the number of songs their label was asking them to write. There was simply no letting up for the band, as it seems that every time they wrote a song, they were asked for another, and another, and so on. It led to the creation of half-arsed songs that none of the band members was passionate about; ‘Run For Your Life’ was an example of as much.

“I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” said Lennon, “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.”

‘It’s Only Love’

There is a lot to like about John Lennon’s songwriting, but he was best at writing lyrics, and he knew it as well. When he sat down with a pen and paper with the intention of getting some words down for a new song, he did so knowing that other people’s, and subsequently his own, expectations were incredibly high. This is why he hated the song ‘It’s Only Love’ so much. The rhythm and melody were both pretty nice, but Lennon could never get over how much he hated the lyrics.

“It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote,” he said, “Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then, I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written.”