May Pang Said Paul McCartney and John Lennon Got Along Well Despite Their Public Attacks on One Another

After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon gave a scathing interview about Paul McCartney and his other bandmates. Both Lennon and McCartney wrote barbed songs about one another, and they fought for years over the terms of The Beatles’ separation. Still, when they saw each other, they were not hostile. According to Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, the former bandmates got along well and behaved as though they hadn’t been publicly feuding. 

Paul McCartney and John Lennon publicly fought after The Beatles broke up

In 1971, Lennon gave a scathing interview with Rolling Stone in which he aired out his problems with his former bandmates. He admitted that he did not like McCartney’s solo music and said he would never forgive him or George Harrison for their treatment of Yoko Ono.

“Ringo was all right, so was Maureen, but the other two really gave it to us,” he said. “I’ll never forgive them, I don’t care what f***in’ s*** about Hare Krishna and God and Paul with his ‘Well, I’ve changed me mind.’ I can’t forgive ’em for that, really. Although I can’t help still loving them either.”

They also bashed each other through their music. McCartney wrote about Lennon and Ono in the song “Too Many People,” and Lennon responded with the harsher “How Do You Sleep?”

“We were writing songs at each other,” McCartney said on The Howard Stern Show in 2018. “Like weaponizing songs.”

May Pang said the former bandmates were friendly with one another

At one of Lennon’s recording sessions in the years after The Beatles split, McCartney and his wife Linda stopped by. Pang, who was in the studio with Lennon, explained that the former bandmates were exceedingly polite with one another.

“John and Paul made small talk as if they had been speaking on the phone two or three times a day and had just spoken a few hours earlier,” she wrote in the book Loving John. “It was one of the most casual conversations I had ever heard. They couldn’t be the two men who not only had been trading vicious attacks with each other in public but also had squadrons of lawyers poised in battle against each other while they carved up their multimillion-dollar empire. They looked like any pair of old friends having a pleasant, low-key reunion.”

After their warm conversation, the two men began to play music together as if nothing had changed between them.

John Lennon’s son said the feud with Paul McCartney was blown out of proportion

Lennon and McCartney had reestablished a friendly relationship before Lennon’s death in 1980. Still, many people think of their relationship as a highly contentious one. Lennon’s son Sean said people have blown it out of proportion. 

“Those were crabby moments, but people made too big a deal of it,” he told The New Yorker. “It didn’t reach the level of Tupac telling Biggie Smalls that he’d slept with his wife [in ‘Hit ‘Em Up’].”