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Together, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were among the most influential songwriting duos of all time. The pair met as teenagers and went on to form the Beatles. They were good friends for years, but McCartney said they were different in many ways. Lennon was more reckless than him and often encouraged him to take risks. McCartney said that when he refused, Lennon respected it. 

A black and white picture of Paul McCartney and John Lennon sitting at a table in front of microphones.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon | Bettmann/Contributor via Getty

Paul McCartney was impressed by John Lennon when they first met

Lennon and McCartney met in 1957 at a church party where Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen, played a show. McCartney was immediately impressed by Lennon’s skill.

“Ah yes, I remember it well. I do actually,” McCartney wrote in a statement, per the book The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After the Breakup. “My memory of meeting John for the first time is very clear. My mate Ivan Vaughan took me along to Woolton here and there were The Quarrymen, playing on a little platform. I can still see John now — checked shirt, slightly curly hair, singing ‘Come Go With Me’ by The Del Vikings. He didn’t know all the words, so he was putting in stuff about penitentiaries — and making a good job of it. I remember thinking, He looks good — I wouldn’t mind being in a group with him.’”

Paul McCartney said John Lennon respected his boundaries

McCartney said that he had always been sensible and more risk-averse than his Beatles bandmates. He was the last to try LSD because he worried about how it would affect him.

“I thought: ‘Well, that could be a double-edged sword,’” he told GQ in 2018. “You know, we could be ending up in a loony bin, and ‘Sorry, Paul — I didn’t mean to give you so much’ or ‘It was the wrong batch’ or something. I’m very practical, and my father was very sensible and raised me to be a sensible cat.”

He said that Lennon was different, and often encouraged him to take risks. 

“John always wanted to jump over the cliff,” McCartney said. “He once said that to me. ‘Have you ever thought of jumping?’ I said, ‘F*** off. You jump, and tell me how it is.’ That’s basically the difference in our personalities.”

Though McCartney was more cautious, he said his bandmate didn’t judge him for it.

“Yeah, but this is the good thing about John and I — I’d say no,” McCartney said. “And he knew me well enough that if I said no, I meant no, and I’m not frightened of being uncool to say no. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say, ‘You’re f***ing crazy,’ because I didn’t need to say that.”

Sean Lennon said their later feud was blown out of proportion

After The Beatles broke up, Lennon and McCartney publicly feuded. They wrote barbed songs about each other, and Lennon dismissed McCartney’s music in interviews. Despite this, Lennon’s son Sean said people blew the feud 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].” 

Similarly, Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, said that though the former bandmates insulted each other in the press, they got along in person.

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