The most hurtful thing John Lennon ever did to Paul McCartney
It’s easy to forget that legends are people too. Beyond his global fame, multigenerational legion of fans, huge respect and fortune, Paul McCartney is ultimately still just a man. So, while the breakdown of The Beatles has been endlessly theorised and debated, for the men involved, it was a deeply personal split that, at several points, cut deep.
More specifically, it is the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney has been endlessly dissected. It’s one of the great questions in music history: what happened there? When the pair met as teenagers, it was as though something cosmic drew them together. From learning how to write songs “eyeball to eyeball” in the kitchens of their childhood homes, the skills they honed and the talents they discovered made them two of—if not the most—respected and revered songwriters ever. Their partnership was undeniably one of the most successful in history, as the albums they created together as The Beatles truly changed music forever.
But so much of that surely came down to their friendship. When the two boys met, it wasn’t just about the music. They bonded deeply about their shared grief, having both lost their mothers. Writing together demanded a level of intimacy that most other male friendships, especially back in their era, would never leave space for. Suddenly, they were writing songs about loss, heartbreak, love, and the memories of loved ones together, creating a true openness and a strong connection.
So when the Beatles began to splinter, when the duo stopped writing together, and their friendship descended into nastiness at the end, it’s not just a matter of how or why the world’s favourite band split, but it’s a personal issue about the breakdown of a close relationship between two life-long friends.
The thing with closeness, though, means that if things go sour, no one knows quite how to hurt someone like their old friend. When knowing everything about one another, all their insecurities and upsets, it’s easier to turn them on each other like a knife. By the time the Beatles had split, John Lennon had become brutally cutting.
It started off less serious when he’d deem McCartney’s music as “granny shit” and be bratty in the studio when working on their final records. But once the band was done, and once McCartney’s suing the group hammered the final nail into the coffin of their friendship, he got even meaner, stepping into a place that was genuinely hurtful to McCartney.
“When the Beatles had broken up and John was downing me a lot in public, that was probably the worst to take because I knew he [had] an opinion a lot of people listened to,” McCartney said of this moment in time. Both were off working on their solo albums, but Lennon never had a nice word to say about his old collaborator’s new work. But when he released one pointed take-down track, it hit a new level.
“The only thing you did was yesterday,” Lennon sings in ‘How Do You Sleep’, suggesting that the only good thing McCartney ever did was write ‘Yesterday’. To make matters worse, that line is preceded by the lyrics “Jump when your momma tell you anything”, taking a cheap and cruel dig at the fact that McCartney often felt like his late mother sent him songs in his dreams, including ‘Yesterday’.
With a dig at his music, his talent and his worth as an artist, all coming from someone who had worked so closely with him for so many years, it was a genuinely devastating blow to McCartney. “If it was just a critic saying, ‘Oh, McCartney’s stupid’, you know…” he said. “But when it was John saying, ‘All you ever did was ‘Yesterday,’ I mean… that’s hurtful.”
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