Revelations In The Head – How Paul McCartney Learned To Talk About John Lennon
Music’s greatest songwriting duo, Lennon/McCartney penned and released an estimated 180 songs together between 1962 and 1970, including the likes of ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘A Hard Day's Night’. The partnership came to an end with The Beatles’ split in 1970 and, owing to the subsequently prickly relationship between the two, would never be revisited in the years prior to Lennon’s untimely death in 1980.
The tragic nature of Lennon’s passing undoubtedly played a major role in McCartney’s unwillingness to talk about his songwriting partner in the short time after his murder. But that tactic has naturally softened to the point where, in the past five years, the 73-year-old has followed a policy of openness in interviews about the dynamic of his and Lennon’s relationship. Having most recently told Billboard that Lennon’s “whole life was a cry for help” (more on that shortly), we’ve rounded up the key interviews that McCartney has given on Lennon in the past five years in order to piece together his contemporary take on his old friend.
Speaking on the US chat show Late Night, McCartney opened up to host Jimmy Fallon about the solace he took in the wake of Lennon’s murder in how they’d “got their friendship back together” after having “a lot of business problems.”
"We'd chat about how to make bread. Just ordinary stuff, you know. He'd had a baby by then [Sean Lennon], so we could talk babies and family and bread and stuff. So that made it a little bit easier, the fact that we were buddies.”
Source: NME
