The Beatles’ Paul McCartney Regrets He Never Told John Lennon He Loved Him
The Beatles fans have a lot of new material to review in 2021. Paul McCartney’s new book, The Lyrics, is out. Disney+ has the three part series The Beatles: Get Back. McCartney has been doing a lot of press for his book so you can hear lots more stories from him, including his regrets over not being more openly emotional with John Lennon.
McCartney spoke about The Lyrics in a livestream event with his co-writer Paul Muldoon on Nov. 5. Muldoon and McCartney spoke about how the book illuminated for McCartney just how much he loved his fellow singer/songwriter.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s love comes out in ‘The Lyrics’
Lennon and McCartney wrote many of The Beatles’ songs together. Even when they wrote solo, they sang together, as well as singing George Harrison and Ringo Starr’s songs. McCartney has stated that The Beatles: Get Back disproved some of his own assumptions about his alleged feud with Lennon during the recording of Let It Be. If there were still any doubt, Muldoon said The Lyrics put it to rest.
“One of the wonderful things that comes out of this book is your love for him,” Muldoon said. “It’s very moving. Some of those last meetings that you had with him where had there been some little wobble, let’s call it, in previous years, there was a great sense of your somehow having rapprochement, that you were actually somewhat back in there again.”
Paul McCartney wishes he told John Lennon he loved him while they were in The Beatles
McCartney met Lennon when they were teenagers in Liverpool. At that age, in that time, men didn’t express their emotions. Lennon died in 1980. It’s only been in recent years that “bromance” has become a word and that men expressing love for one another has become more common.
“You say that I loved him,” McCartney said to Muldoon. “As 16-year old, 17-year-old Liverpool kids, you could never say that. It just wasn’t done. So I never did. I never really just said, ‘John, love you, man.’ I just never got around to it. So now it’s great to just realize how much I love this man.”
Revisiting The Beatles made Paul McCartney a John Lennon fan all over again
Both Lennon and McCartney enjoyed solo careers after The Beatles. So did Harrison and Starr, and McCartney formed other bands like Wings. In compiling his book of Beatles and solo lyrics, McCartney got to fanboy out over Lennon.
“Now that The Beatles’ recording career is kind of finished, I’m like a fan,” McCartney said. “I just remember how great it was to work with him and how great he was. Because you’re not messing around here. You’re not just singing with Joe Blokes. You’re singing with John Lennon.”
Even if McCartney didn’t say the words, he remembered he always had a harmonious relationship with Lennon.
“It was always great to work with John from the very first thing where he said, ‘Yeah, I write songs too,’” McCartney said. “We just developed a way of working with each other and trusting each other that grew and grew. Once I wanted to go into, I don’t know, maybe something more like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or something, he’d go into something like that. We grew up together. It was like walking up the staircase and we both went side by side up that staircase. So it was very exciting.”
