Paul McCartney And John Lennon’s Friendship In Photos Shines A Light On Their Special Connection

The tale of Lennon and McCartney’s storied friendship began on July 6, 1957, when a 15-year-old McCartney overheard his future songwriting partner playing with his skiffle band The Quarrymen at a church in Liverpool, England. McCartney stopped by to watch and was mesmerized by Lennon’s stage presence and ability to work the crowd, if not his limited guitar-playing skills.

Lennon met McCartney after the show; the pair were introduced by the latter’s friend Ivan Vaughan. This first moment was, of course, a hugely significant moment in music history, but obviously it didn’t seem like it at the time. No, in that moment, it was just two music-obsessed teenagers from different sides of Liverpool sitting on folded chairs and talking. Not that Lennon showed much interest in his future songwriting partner McCartney in the very first instance.

It took the then-15-year-old McCartney to take the guitar he was carrying off his back and start playing Eddie Cochran’s “20 Flight Rock” and Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop A Lula” for Lennon to take notice. He was suddenly transfixed by McCartney’s musicianship, and in an interview a few years later conceded, “I dug him.”

The chemistry between the pair soon became apparent once McCartney had shown his talent. One of the Quarrymen would later claim that on the day they met, Lennon and McCartney had “circled each other like cats.” Maybe, like their feline counterparts, they were trying to figure each out at this early stage.

Of course, Lennon would go on to invite McCartney to join his band shortly after. But although he was impressed by the talented teenager two years his junior, Lennon would reveal some fascinating insights into his thought-process on that day ten years later — details that shine a light on the dynamics of their relationship.

A decade on from that 1957 meeting when McCartney had played those songs so brilliantly to him, Lennon spoke to journalist Hunter Davies and revealed his initial concerns about his future bandmate. He said, “I half thought to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, ‘If I take him on, what will happen?’”

Lennon, then, was clearly both awed and intimidated by this musical prodigy. He told Rolling Stone in 1970, “I had a group. I was the singer and the leader; then I met Paul, and I had to make a decision: was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?”

Thankfully for all music lovers, Lennon took the option of making his group stronger. And the pair did bond personally, particularly over their shared love of rock ‘n’ roll. In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, McCartney said, “John and me, we were kids growing up together, in the same environment with the same influences.”

Lennon and McCartney’s kinship was also deepened by the personal heartbreak of them both losing their moms when they were young. McCartney was only 14 when his mother, Mary, died from cancer. Lennon, meanwhile, was 17 when his mom, Julia, was hit by a speeding car in July 1958. But it seems the pair often hid their inner pain.

The hurt was real, though. “We had a kind of bond that we both knew about that; we knew that feeling,” McCartney said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2019. “I never thought that it affected my music until years later. I certainly didn’t mean it to be. But it could be, you know; those things can happen.” This was a different era; men were expected to “man up,” and Lennon and McCartney largely conformed to this orthodoxy.

That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of happy times for Lennon and McCartney in the early days of The Beatles, or that they were always faking their smiles — far from it. The band and their chief creative forces had some wild times in their formative years, in their hometown of Liverpool and in particular in Hamburg, Germany.

Indeed, in Hamburg The Beatles really came of age. Not just in the sense of growing musically into a formidable live act, but also in effectively becoming adults and bonding together tightly as a unit. And yes, Lennon and McCartney, like their fellow bandmates, fully indulged themselves in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

McCartney would later recall the decadent early years spent in shared hotels in Hamburg. Let’s just say they were eventful times for the four high-spirited young men. McCartney told GQ in 2018, “There were sexual encounters of the celestial kind, and there were groupies.” And legend has it George Harrison losing his virginity in the same room brought applause from the other three.

But the whole experience out there in Germany would really bring them together. “I mean, I think in the end this was one of the strengths of The Beatles, this enforced closeness which I always liken to army buddies,” McCartney recalled. “Because you’re all in the same barracks. We were always very close and on top of each other, which meant you could totally read each other.”

This, of course, included John and Paul, who were near-inseparable at that time. Lennon remarked to Playboy magazine in 1980 that the pair wrote music “eyeball to eyeball” in the early times. The beginning of their songwriting partnership would also result in a famous teenage pact between the pair.

That pact was the agreement that any song penned by John or Paul — even if it was individually constructed — would be credited as a Lennon-McCartney work. Lennon revealed the deal with the co-credit in one of the last interviews he ever gave. He said, “We always had that thing that our names would go on songs even if we didn't write them. It was never a legal deal between Paul and me, just an agreement to put both our names on our songs.”

But according to McCartney’s autobiography Many Years From Now, he initially wished for those names to be listed the other way round. And they almost were. On the very first copies of The Beatles’ 1963 debut Please Please Me, the duo’s original songs were marked McCartney-Lennon — but someone stepped in to change that.

Indeed, McCartney wrote in Many Years From Now, “I wanted it to be McCartney-Lennon, but John had the stronger personality and I think he fixed things.” He added, “I remember going to a meeting and being told, ‘We think you should credit the songs to Lennon-McCartney. Lennon-McCartney sounds better, it has a better ring.’ I had to say, ‘All right.’” 

McCartney appears to touch on an important point here in his relationship with Lennon. John was not only his senior — by some 20 months — but he more often than not, he also had the more forceful personality. They were fundamentally different characters, but that’s arguably what made them work so well together.

And they certainly did that, propelled by a rivalry that was initially friendly but grew increasingly fraught further down the line. While the pair would often write lyrics and music together in the early days, they would just as often compose most of a song themselves, before bringing it to the other for suggestions, criticism and embellishments. This process resulted in some of the best-known and most-loved songs in popular music history.

George Martin, the famed producer who helmed the majority of The Beatles albums, once defined Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership and personal relationship as being like “two people pulling on a rope, smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond.”

Down the years, other people in the know have drawn attention to the stark differences between Lennon and McCartney, both in terms of their personalities and their outlook on life. But they noted how this worked in both their and the band’s favor. For instance, Lennon’s first wife Cynthia once said, “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence. Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”

Geoff Emerick, an EMI engineer who worked on several Beatles albums, wrote in his memoir that he thought Lennon and McCartney effectively formed a “single creative being.” In his view, The Beatles was Lennon Paul McCartney — which seems a bit dismissive of Harrison and Ringo Starr.

Still, Emerick also wrote in Here, There and Everywhere about the clear differences between the pair that he observed when he worked in the studio with them. He wrote, “Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on.”

Emerick seemed to think that Lennon and McCartney were an odd couple and was perhaps surprised that their friendship worked at all. He wrote, “Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing.”

Anyway, unless you’ve been living under a rock for 60 years, you’ll know that The Beatles and their chief songwriters conquered the U.K., then America and the world. Yes, from 1963 and the release of their debut studio record Please Please Me, the band enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom, both enjoying and enduring massive fame and screaming fans everywhere in a period now widely labeled “Beatlemania”.

For seven remarkable years from the release of their debut L.P., Lennon and McCartney lived with increasingly intense levels of fame and adulation. Their songwriting partnership was quickly shaping up to be the among the most remarkable in rock history. For instance, by 1966 they had penned 88 original songs that had sold somewhere around 200 million records. 

But how did Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting work, given their differences? Their mutual friend from Liverpool, Pete Shotton, arguably summarized it best. He told website Slate, “Paul’s presence did serve to keep John from drifting too far into obscurity and self-indulgence, just as John’s influence held in check the more facile and sentimental aspects of Paul’s songwriting.”

Shotton’s comments tend to ring true: McCartney was seemingly always the sentimental and dreamy one of the pair, whilst Lennon tended to bring grit and the blues. The former cared more for melody; the latter favored soul-baring rock ‘n’ roll. In short, they not only complemented one another, they completed each other. Until, that is, things started to get a bit more complicated, and, dare we say, messy.

By 1967 tensions in the relationship between Lennon and McCartney had begun to become more prominent. The pair — who had always had some conflicting interests and differing ideas on how to do things — began to clash over the direction of the band. McCartney had become more prominent as a leader in the band, whilst Lennon became depressed over his failed first marriage, and the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band concept was largely of the younger man’s making.

Many factors have been cited as helping bring about the eventual break-up of The Beatles. They include their weariness of fame and Beatlemania, manager Brian Epstein’s death, Lennon's relationship with Yoko Ono and Harrison's wish to record more songs. But at the center of it all was the power struggle between the old pals Lennon and McCartney.

That struggle intensified by the time the band were recording what would become The Beatles, the expansive double record more commonly called the “White Album.” Some argue that LP is the band’s best, and it certainly contains some of Lennon and McCartney’s — and Harrison’s — best songs. But by then, the “eyeball to eyeball” way of working the two friends had once favored was well and truly gone. Their relationship had changed for good.

Ono’s presence caused conflict, and McCartney and Lennon began voicing disapproval of each other’s songs. John mocked Paul’s whimsical tracks like “Martha, My Dear” and he in return despaired at avant-garde collages like “Revolution 9.” McCartney later admitted “there was a lot of friction during that album” while Lennon quipped that you could hear “the break-up of The Beatles” on it.

The rising tension between McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr meant The Beatles really came to an end in 1969 — although the news was announced by McCartney in April 1970. This led many to believe that McCartney had been to blame for the demise of the world’s most popular band. This theory was widely regarded as gospel for many years, and Lennon seemed to do little to disprove it.

Much has been written about the end of The Beatles and the supposed hostility between Lennon and McCartney in the decade after, before Lennon’s murder in December 1980. Of course, there were pointed songs like McCartney’s “Too Many People” and Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” Plus, the former’s lawsuit added fuel to that fire, too. Yet in recent years, McCartney has looked to set the record straight on it all.

In 2020 he gave a revealing interview with British newspaper The Sunday Times in which he talked in more detail about his relationship with Lennon and The Beatles’ demise and appeared to suggest the band’s end was more of a mutual call. McCartney said, “We made a decision when The Beatles folded that we weren’t going to pick it up again. So we switched off... You talk about something coming full circle that is very satisfying: let’s not spoil it by doing something that might not be as good.”

In that interview with The Sunday Times, McCartney talked heartwarmingly about how he had been able to rebuild his friendship with Lennon before he died, and that he even “writes songs with him” today. He said, “We had certainly got our friendship back, which was a great blessing for me, and I now will often think, if I’m writing a song, ‘Okay, John — I’ll toss it over to you. What line comes next?’ So I’ve got a virtual John that I can use.”

Finally, McCartney reflected on what had made The Beatles special, and the memories sparked by Peter Jackson’s Get Back film. He said, “It was so reaffirming for me. Because it proves that my main memory of The Beatles was the joy and the skill. I bought into the dark side of The Beatles breaking up and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m to blame.’ I knew I wasn’t, but it’s easy when the climate is that way to start thinking so.”

McCartney finished with a memory of his slain songwriting partner and friend. He told The Sunday Times, “There’s a great photo Linda took, which is my favorite, of me and John working on a song, glowing with joy. This footage [Peter Jackson’s Get Back] is the same. All four of us, having a ball.”