John Lennon Told People Not to Mention Paul McCartney in Front of Him: ‘It Depresses Me’
After The Beatles broke up, all of the former band members felt disgruntled, but John Lennon and Paul McCartney frequently argued through the media. They wrote songs about one another and complained about each other in interviews. While Lennon was happy to publicly discuss his former bandmate, he didn’t want to hear other people bring him up. He said that any mention of McCartney depressed him.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney publicly feuded after The Beatles broke up
Tensions within The Beatles had been mounting as the 1960s came to a close. Once the band announced their split, the acrimony between them boiled over publicly. The comments Lennon and McCartney made about each other were particularly vitriolic.
McCartney wrote a dig about Lennon and Yoko Ono’s activism in the song “Too Many People.” Lennon hit back with the far more scathing “How Do You Sleep?” In it, he sang, “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead” and “The only thing you done was yesterday/ And since you’ve gone you’re just another day.”
While they complained about each other in interviews, both men said they could never fully hate each other. Lennon said that though he couldn’t forgive McCartney or George Harrison for their attitudes toward Ono, he couldn’t stop loving them either. McCartney felt similarly.
“People said to me when he said those things on his record about me, you must hate him, but I didn’t,” McCartney told The New Yorker in 2021. “I don’t.”
John Lennon didn’t want people to mention Paul McCartney around him
Lennon often discussed his relationship with McCartney in interviews, but he didn’t want people to bring up his former bandmate. While recording “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” in 1971, producer Phil Spector called McCartney’s new album “awful.”
“Don’t talk about it,” Lennon told him, per The Guardian. “It depresses me.”
He added that he wasn’t upset about the music, but he didn’t like the way McCartney’s name reminded him of the unresolved problems between The Beatles. McCartney was suing the band in order to wrest control from manager Allen Klein. The band wouldn’t hammer out the terms of their break up until 1974.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that whenever anybody mentions his name, I don’t think about the music – I think about all the business crap,” Lennon said. “Don’t talk about him.”
Their rivalry ensured that they both kept making music
For Lennon, there was one benefit to hearing about McCartney: he felt inspired to make music. Because of the rivalry between them, new songs from McCartney lit a fire under Lennon.
“You know, I heard a story recently from a guy who used to record with John [Lennon] in New York, and he said that John would get lazy — but then he’d hear a song of mine where he thought, ‘Oh, s***, Paul’s putting it in, Paul’s working!'” McCartney told Billboard in 2001. “Apparently [Coming Up] was one song that got John recording again. I think John just thought, ‘Uh oh, I better get working, too’ [beams]. I thought that was a nice story.”
