Paul McCartney Made John Lennon ‘Come Alive’ When They Were Together

Paul McCartney and John Lennon met as teenagers, years before they became international superstars. While it didn’t initially seem that they had much in common — McCartney admitted that he found Lennon frightening — they got along. Through their obsessions with music, they formed a friendship that invigorated Lennon.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon clicked when they wrote together

Lennon and McCartney met at a church festival. Lennon and his band, the Quarrymen, had performed to an audience that included McCartney. He was impressed enough with Lennon’s talent and showmanship that he had to introduce himself afterward.

From there, they became fast friends and collaborators. McCartney would meet with Lennon over lunch, and they worked on music together.

“Paul would have a school notebook and he’d be scribbling down words,” Lennon’s classmate Helen Anderson said in the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “Those sessions could be intense because John was used to getting his way by being aggressive — but Paul would stand his ground.”

McCartney was a talented musician and didn’t want to discard his ideas. This made them both better musicians and excited Lennon.

“Paul seemed to make John come alive when they were together,” Anderson said.

Competition fueled their interactions

Lennon and McCartney became prolific songwriters, writing “eyeball to eyeball” in basements, hotel rooms, and the backs of vans. They had to work quickly because of the demand on them, but they also were constantly trying to one-up each other.

“John and Paul had always been competitive,” Lennon’s first wife Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Although the other band members — and the audience — knew that John was the group’s leader, Paul wanted to be involved in all the decisions, whether they were about which venue to play or which songs to use. The two sang alternatively on stage and each had his own style.”

Fellow musician Paul Simon also noticed this. He said that Lennon and McCartney were so competitive with one another that they took the oxygen out of the room. 

While this may sound like a tense, unpleasant working environment, it pushed them to improve. Even after The Beatles broke up, Lennon felt compelled to write new, better music every time McCartney released an album.

John Lennon said he didn’t feel a loss when he stopped writing with Paul McCartney

Though collaboration with McCartney seemed to light Lennon up, he claimed that he didn’t feel any sort of creative loss when they parted ways. 

“I never actually felt a loss,” he told David Sheff in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “I don’t want it to sound negative, like I didn’t need Paul, because when he was there, obviously, it worked. But I can’t — it’s easier to say what my contribution was to him than what he gave to me. And he’d say the same.”

Those who knew Lennon did not necessarily agree, though. Cynthia and longtime Beatles producer George Martin said that without McCartney, Lennon likely never would have made it. He needed competition and someone to push him, which McCartney provided.