What Happened to the 100 Songs John Lennon and Paul McCartney Wrote When They First Started Playing Together?

Paul McCartney and John Lennon go way back. They lived in the same neighborhood as teenagers and started playing music together shortly after meeting one another. During those first few years, the duo wrote over 100 songs together. Today, those songs are lost. Here are two accounts of what happened to them, and a look back at the early days of Lennon and McCartney. 

Young Paul McCartney and John Lennon were very different, but got along great

When McCartney met Lennon, they couldn’t have been more different. McCartney got good grades. He had a strong moral compass, bordering on self-righteous. Lennon, on the other hand, was a trouble-maker. He had emotional outbursts and could be cruel to his peers and authority figures alike. Plus, there was a two-year age difference between them. But the boys’ interests drew them together. They were both incredibly passionate about music, and they worked well together.  

John and Paul’s first 100 songs

McCartney and Lennon spent a lot of time at McCartney’s house playing music. They practiced together, taught each other new tricks, and worked out harmonies. They were pleased to discover their voices sounded good together.  

“Their voices complemented each other perfectly, with Paul’s sweet, round tones softening the edges of John’s strained nasality, the harmony they produced, an intertwining that seemed to melt into a third, unheard voice, was lovely,” reads the Beatles biography The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. 

They also wrote lots of songs. 

According to the book, it wasn’t long before “an affectionate songwriting competition developed.” It was a competition that set the stride for their songwriting practice for years to come. 

In those first two years of playing together, they wrote over 100 songs.

Unfortunately, today, the songs are gone. According to TLYM, Jane Asher, McCartney’s girlfriend, threw them away when cleaning her boyfriend’s home in London. However, McCartney was quoted in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present saying that he was the one who lost the notebook of songs. 

“About 10 or 15 years ago, I found that school exercise book,” he said. “I put it in my bookcase. I’ve since lost it. I don’t know where it is. I think it might show up somewhere. It’s the first Lennon and McCartney manuscript.”

The Quarrymen

Before Lennon met McCartney, he was in a group with some boys in the neighborhood called the Quarrymen. After Lennon and his fellow Quarrymembers heard McCartney play guitar, they invited him to join. It wasn’t long before the Quarrymen started to feel like the John and Paul Show. 

“As soon as Paul became a member of the Quarrymen he had a lot to say about their music,” reads TLYM. “Characteristically, he started to tell the other band members how to play and when. What’s more, he wanted to play lead guitar, which a bespectacled boy named Eric Griffiths was playing at the time. Paul badgered Griffiths until he quit, then moved into his spot.”

Griffiths was only the first casualty. Soon after, both Lennon’s friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan left the group. According to TLYM, “they were replaced with other, ever-changing musicians who played around the Lennon-McCartney core.”

Lennon and McCartney kept practicing, kept improving, and kept writing songs. Only for them to be lost one day in the future.