Paul McCartney ‘Could Only Aspire’ to Be as ‘Cool’ as John Lennon, Said Cynthia Lennon

When Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met, McCartney made it his mission to impress the older boy. Lennon was already in a band, and McCartney was eager to show he could play music as well. Cynthia Lennon said McCartney and Lennon were very different at this point, but they complemented each other well. Still, it was clear to Cynthia — and, she believed, McCartney — that Lennon was cooler.

Paul McCartney looked up to John Lennon when they first met

When Cynthia met McCartney, he had already formed a close relationship with Lennon. Though she could tell they worked together well, she was struck by how different they were.

“Paul’s organized, conscientious way of going about things — he wrote down all the lyrics in a notebook he carried with him — was in sharp contrast to John’s ‘anything goes’ style,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Paul turned up for appointments on time, looking well turned out; he was a perfectionist and you always knew he’d washed behind his ears. John arrived late, looking as though he’d just fallen out of bed.”

Lennon’s more laid-back style intrigued McCartney, and he tried to emulate it himself.

“In those days, Paul tried hard to impress John, posing and strutting with his hair slicked back to prove that he was cool, because John was very much the leader,” she wrote. “It was his band, and he had the final say about who got in and who didn’t, and what they played.”

Unfortunately for McCartney, Cynthia said he couldn’t quite pull it off.

“Then, he was everything Paul wanted to be — laid-back, self-assured, and in charge,” she wrote. “As the schoolboy he still was, Paul could only aspire to those things.”

He said he felt intimidated by his older bandmate

Before McCartney personally knew Lennon, he had heard of him. Lennon had gained a reputation in Liverpool that frightened him.

“There was a lot of aggression around Liverpool; there were lots of Teddy boys, and you had to try to avoid them if you saw them in alleyways,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “If, like John, you were a guy who had lived on his own, you had to put up some kind of a front. So he grew long sideburns, he had a long drape jacket, he had the drain-pipe trousers and the crepe-soled shoes. He was always quite defensive because of that.”

Before McCartney saw Lennon performing at a church fête, he said he did his best to avoid him.

“I would see him from afar, from the bus,” he said. “This Ted would get on the bus, and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me, because he was just that much older. This was before I got to know him.”

Others saw Paul McCartney, not John Lennon, as the backbone of The Beatles

Though Lennon started The Beatles, some early fans viewed McCartney as the band’s strongest asset. McCartney was driven and had the most musical training.

“Paul was really the one keeping them together,” Liverpool guitarist Brian Griffiths said in the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “John in those days wasn’t such a good singer, George [Harrison] was very shy, Stu [Sutcliffe] was still a learner on the bass, and Pete Best had only just come into the band. He knew all about minor and diminished seventh chords, whereas John was still hanging round guitarists in other bands, saying, ‘Go on, show us a lick.’”

As time went on, McCartney was the one who pushed the band to write and record new music.