The Beatles’ Paul McCartney looked back on his relationship with former bandmate John Lennon and recalled their first time meeting. They both grew up in Liverpool, but they rarely crossed paths. It was their shared love for music that created a special bond between them.
Lennon unfortunately passed away in 1980 after he was brutally shot in front of his New York apartment. The Beatles was never the same, and his bandmates kept the late musician’s legacy forever in their music.
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Paul McCartney Shares First Meeting With John Lennon
Speaking in A Life In Lyrics podcast, Paul McCartney shared the first time he laid eyes on John Lennon. He thought he was very cool. McCartney said via Rolling Stone:
“The first time I ever saw John Lennon, he got on the bus … he was like this slightly older guy with this sort of rocker hairdo — lots of grease — black jacket, sideburns, sideboards as we call them. And I just remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s a cool guy. No idea who he is.’”
McCartney found out Lennon also had a passion for writing songs. This was already a giveaway sign that they would eventually get along. He continued:
“What would happen is when I would talk to people, they’d sort of say, ‘What are your hobbies? What do you like to do?’ And then inevitably, I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve written a couple of songs.’ And they’d go, ‘Oh.’ And we’d pass that pie, and we’d carry on a conversation. But I met John, we were just chatting, and ‘Well, I’ve written a couple of songs.’ And he said, ‘Well, so have I.’”
Songwriting has strengthened their bond because they spent a lot of time together crafting lines and creating tunes that fans would later hear in their music. McCartney further added:
“So that was like a full stop. So then it was like, ‘Let me hear what you’ve done, and I’ll show you what I’ve done.’ So that started us getting together. I think I was possibly the first person he’d met who’d said that to him. That was the start of our relationship. We decided to get together, normally at my house, and my dad always left his pipe in the drawer, so we would take tea, fill the pipe with it, and smoke it.”
Some of the famous songs the Lennon-McCartney duo wrote together were We Can Work It Out, A Day In The Life, and Eleanor Rigby.
Paul McCartney On His Friendship With John Lennon
Paul McCartney shared in another BBC Radio 2 interview the dynamics of his friendship with John Lennon. Their differences in personality truly added a little extra something that would ignite creativity in their songwriting. He confessed via Far Out Magazine:
“My attitude would be, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and then John would bring another edge to it. What was the great thing was the combination of those two attitudes, and I look back on it now like a fan.”
McCartney mused how blessed he was to have met someone who shared the same passion for music and a friend who complemented his character. Finally, the musician admitted:
“I think, ‘Wow, how lucky was I to meet this strange Teddy Boy off the bus who turned out to play music like I did, and we get together and, boy, we complemented each other’. They say with marriages opposites attract, and we weren’t madly opposites, but I had some stuff that he didn’t have, and he had some stuff I didn’t have so when you put them together it made something extra.”
The surviving members of The Beatles once tried to record Now and Then in 1994 but failed to do so because of the lack of high-standard technology. The song was finally released this month.
