Lennon–McCartney

• 1. Introduction

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  Lennon-McCartney began not in a recording studio, but at a church fête on the 6th of July 1957, when a fifteen-year-old boy played Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock" well enough to impress a sixteen-year-old skiffle bandleader. That meeting between Paul McCartney and John Lennon would eventually produce approximately 180 jointly credited songs and help push the Beatles past 600 million records sold worldwide. But the partnership was never simply two people writing together in a room. It was a formal legal arrangement, a creative negotiation, a friendly rivalry, and sometimes a contested memory. How did two teenagers from Liverpool build what Guinness World Records would recognize as the most covered song catalog in history? And what happened when both men tried, years later, to remember who had actually written what?

• 2. Before They Met

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  McCartney wrote his first song fragments in spring 1956, just shy of fourteen years old. Among them was the tune that would eventually become "When I'm Sixty-Four", as well as a piece he called "I Call It Suicide". Lennon's first song, "Calypso Rock", came about March 1957. Neither boy knew of the other's experiments yet. McCartney had seen Lennon around the local area before their introduction but had no idea who he was. When Ivan Vaughan brought McCartney to the church fête, Lennon's Quarrymen were already on stage. McCartney's guitar playing and his command of "Twenty Flight Rock" made an impression strong enough that Lennon soon asked him to join. Early musical idols for both of them included the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. They spent hours learning those artists' songs and imitating their sound at McCartney's home at 20 Forthlin Road, at Lennon's aunt Mimi's house at 251 Menlove Avenue, and at the Liverpool Institute. According to historian Mark Lewisohn, the first song they wrote together was titled "Too Bad About Sorrows", completed in January 1958, followed shortly by "Just Fun". Each page of the notebook where they collected these fragments was headed "another Lennon-McCartney original", a formulation they borrowed from theatrical writing teams like Rodgers and Hammerstein.

• 3. The Dry Years

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  In May 1960, Stuart Sutcliffe joined the group, and his close friendship with Lennon disrupted what had been building between Lennon and McCartney. McCartney grew envious, and the writing stopped entirely. The pair wrote no new songs at all in 1960, even as the Beatles were filling hours of stage time during their residency in Hamburg. Lewisohn noted that for a bar band, playing recognizable songs was the commercial priority. The silence continued through 1961 as well; neither wrote anything new that year either. When they did play an original, they hid it. They kept their songwriting secret from associates and fans alike, rarely announcing their own songs as such to the audience. Possibly the only documented exception was a performance of "One After 909" at the Top Ten Club, which Astrid Kirchherr specifically requested. It was not until late 1961, roughly when the Beatles first encountered Brian Epstein, that Lennon and McCartney began performing their original material with any regularity. Three of their old originals turned up at the failed Decca Records audition on the 1st of January 1962: "Like Dreamers Do", "Love of the Loved", and "Hello Little Girl".

• 4. Making It Official

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  A tape of the Decca audition performance of "Like Dreamers Do" reached EMI's song publishers Ardmore and Beechwood, who lobbied EMI management to sign the Beatles as recording artists specifically to secure exclusive publishing rights to Lennon-McCartney songs. Around March 1962, both writers resumed composing for the first time since 1959; Lennon wrote "Ask Me Why" and McCartney wrote "Pinwheel Twist". At the Beatles' first four EMI recording sessions, between June and November 1962, the band played almost exclusively Lennon-McCartney material. Producer George Martin was initially unconvinced the two could write a hit. His skepticism shifted after "Love Me Do" reached the UK top 20. On the 1st of October 1962, Lennon, McCartney, and Epstein signed a publishing agreement with Ardmore and Beechwood, binding the partnership in legal terms for the first time. Mark Lewisohn's description of that moment captures the scale of it: "From the 1st of October 1962, unstoppable twin energies - the Beatles and Lennon-McCartney - were running strong, together and separate, side by side and neck and neck, parallel missions that intertwined, mutually reinforcing." In February 1963, publisher Dick James proposed creating the Northern Songs publishing company specifically for Lennon-McCartney songs. Under that arrangement, Lennon, McCartney, and Epstein collectively owned 50 percent of the new company.

• 5. How They Actually Wrote

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  Lennon described his and McCartney's method in a 1980 Playboy interview with unusual clarity: "Paul provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes." He also admitted that he had once wrongly assumed McCartney held the monopoly on melody, before reconsidering songs like "In My Life" and "This Boy". Author David Rowley found a telling statistical pattern in their work: at least half of all Lennon-McCartney lyrics contain the words "you" and/or "your" in the first line, a sign of the shared communicative purpose Lennon said was their main intention. Historian Todd Compton noted partial truth in Lennon's self-characterization but pointed out that McCartney's most characteristic songs - "Yesterday", "She's Leaving Home", "Eleanor Rigby", "For No One" - tend toward tragedy and isolation rather than optimism. George Martin attributed the quality of their output to the friendly rivalry between the two. As their careers progressed, complete songs more often emerged from a single writer, with the other contributing a middle eight, a chord, or a few words. "A Day in the Life" is the most famous exception: a McCartney fragment beginning "Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" was grafted into the middle of a Lennon composition. "Hey Jude" offers another instance. McCartney was ready to change the line "the movement you need is on your shoulder", feeling it was nonsensical. Lennon told him to leave it alone, calling it one of the strongest lines in the song.

• 6. Who Wrote What

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  In 1972, Lennon gave Hit Parader a song-by-song breakdown of contributions, and McCartney publicly disputed only one entry. That disputed song was "In My Life". Lennon said McCartney helped only with "the middle eight"; McCartney said he wrote the entire melody, drawing on Smokey Robinson songs for inspiration. For "Eleanor Rigby", the accounts diverge even further. McCartney recalled writing the music on a piano at Jane Asher's family home in Wimpole Street. In 1972, Lennon claimed he wrote 70 percent of the lyrics. But Pete Shotton, Lennon's childhood friend, remembered Lennon's contribution as "absolutely nil". Journalist Hunter Davies recorded that the last verse was finished in the studio with suggestions from all four Beatles. For "Ticket to Ride", Lennon initially said the song was "three-quarters mine" in 1965, but by 1980 he reduced McCartney's contribution to influencing only the way Ringo Starr played the drums. McCartney in Many Years from Now said they wrote it together and offered Lennon 60 percent. For "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", Lennon told Hit Parader he authored the song from a circus poster and acknowledged no contributions from McCartney. In 2013, McCartney described spending an afternoon with Lennon working from that same poster, and asked directly: "What was that afternoon I spent with him, then, looking at this poster?" Lennon himself acknowledged in 1969 that the partnership's influence was permanent and mutual: "We write how we write now because of each other. Paul was there for five or ten years, and I wouldn't write like I write now if it weren't for Paul, and he wouldn't write like he does if it weren't for me."

• 7. The Credit Dispute

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  The first Beatles UK single, "Love Me Do", released in October 1962, carried the credit "Lennon-McCartney". But their next three releases that year and into 1963 reversed the order to "McCartney-Lennon". According to McCartney, a band meeting in April 1963 settled the matter: Lennon's name would come first. With "She Loves You" in August 1963, the credit reverted to "Lennon-McCartney" and stayed that way on all subsequent official releases. In 1976, McCartney's band Wings released their live album Wings over America with credits for five Beatles songs reversed to place McCartney's name first. Neither Lennon nor Yoko Ono objected publicly at the time. Decades later, however, the dispute reopened. McCartney's 2002 live album Back in the U.S. again used "Paul McCartney and John Lennon" for Beatles songs. When Ono objected specifically to McCartney's request to reverse the credit on "Yesterday", McCartney claimed he and Lennon had made a private agreement permitting either of them to reverse the credit on future releases. By 2003 he relented, saying: "I'm happy with the way it is and always has been. Lennon and McCartney is still the rock 'n' roll trademark I'm proud to be a part of - in the order it has always been." The legal dimensions of the credit order were examined in a 66-page article in the Pepperdine Law Review in 2006. In January 2017, McCartney filed suit in US district court against Sony/ATV Music Publishing to reclaim ownership of his share of the catalog, invoking a provision of US copyright law allowing authors to reclaim copyrights assigned to a publisher after 56 years. McCartney and Sony reached a confidential settlement in June 2017.

• 8. Legacy and Reach

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  According to Guinness World Records, "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song. In 1963, The Sunday Times called Lennon and McCartney the greatest composers since Ludwig van Beethoven. Songwriter Ellie Greenwich, a Brill Building professional, spoke for a generation of American music industry figures when she described the British Invasion's arrival: "We were all ready to say, 'Look, it's been nice, there's no more room for us. It's now the self-contained group.'" The partnership became a template others were measured against. Lennon himself cited the Rolling Stones' Jagger-Richards partnership as something the Lennon-McCartney model inspired. Squeeze's Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were tagged the "new Lennon-McCartney" by music writers; Tilbrook said they "got a bit pompous" as a result, while Difford noted the comparison was "very useful" for radio attention but worried it placed an unfair burden on Tilbrook. In 1980, Record Mirror applied the comparison to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark founders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, describing them as "becoming the Lennon and McCartney of the electronic world". George Harrison, who was explicitly left out of the formal partnership when Lennon and McCartney privately rejected the idea of including him in 1962, said the effect was a sense of being sidelined: "In a way, I felt like an observer of the Beatles, even though I was in them." Years later, McCartney acknowledged that Harrison had made vital uncredited contributions to Lennon-McCartney songs, including the guitar riff in "And I Love Her". The sons of both men, Sean Lennon and James McCartney, eventually wrote a song together: "Primrose Hill".