McLennon

Whilst the Beatles had always been marketed as a heterosexual group - in contrast with the Stones, whose image was androgynous - they were sympathetic to the homosexual population. Lennon himself was alleged to have had affairs with both men and women, and although he never openly admitted it to me, his condemnation of Britain as a land which feeds on a homosexual subsculture persuades me at this late stage that he was speaking from experience. I am sure that the break-up of the Beatles, or, more specifically, of John and Paul, must have been more traumatic than any of us suspect.

(Source: Sandra Shevey, The Other Side of Lennon)


As mild and oblique as the comment was [Paul's "You took your lucky break and broke it in two" line from "Too Many People"], it seemed to cut John to the heart. On top of the questionnaire inside the McCartney album and the lawsuit, it was like the tipping point between a divorcing couple that turns love into savage, no-holds-barred hostility. Indeed, John's wounded anger was more that of an ex-spouse than ex-colleague, reinforcing a suspicion already in Yoko's mind that his feelings for Paul had been far more intense than the world at large ever guessed. From chance remarks he had made, she gathered there had even been a moment where - on the principle that bohemians should try everything - he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality. Nor, apparently, was Yoko the only one to have picked up on this. Around Apple, in her hearing, Paul would sometimes be called John's princess. She had also once heard a rehearsal tape with John's voice calling out  "Paul ... Paul ... " in a strangely subservient, pleading way. "I knew there was something going on there," she remembers. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about."

(Source: Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life, 2008)

John was never closer to Paul than during these weeks. Though hotly competetive in songs they wrote individually outside the studio, they remained a matchless team within it, each working unselfishly to set off the other's latest brainwave at its best. Paul composed a piping intro for Lowry organ that established the drowsy riverbank atmosphere of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' before John had sung a word; he also contributed to the lyric, supplying 'Cellophane flowers' and 'newspaper taxis' to set alongside John's 'tangerine trees' and 'marmalade skies'. A half-finished song in the McCartney bottom drawer became the urgent, real-world middle passage of 'A Day in the Life' ('Woke up, fell out of bed...') that is so inspired a contrast to its out of body languor. John and Paul together devised the lyric's final touch: the drawn-out, syllable-stretching sigh of 'I'd love to tu-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou o-o-on...' Paul remembers how at the microphone they exchanged a glance, as if to say 'Should we really go on with this?' The 'nice' Beatle was as sure as the 'rebel' one that they should.

(Source: Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life, 2008)

"Once we got through Mind Games and we went into Walls & Bridges, John wanted to write again with Paul. Y'know, cause I said to him: 'Do you ever want to sit down and write with Paul again?' And he said 'Yeah, I'd love to when the time's right'. And I was sending out those feelers in the other direction. I was trying to, y'know, being the Mary Poppins that I am, but I was trying to encourage that. I'd come from the time when they were great friends and I liked the thought of them still continuing that. People can beg to differ but it doesn't have to mean you don't speak to each other for the rest of your lives. And no, he was considering writing with Paul again. He wanted to work with him again. He, they just couldn't work out the common ground at that time; it was still all that Apple stuff, you see, in the way. You know, John loved Paul, no doubt about. I remember once he said to me: 'I'm the only person who's allowed to say things like that about Paul. I don't like it when other people do.' He didn't like if other people said nasty things about Paul and he always referred to Paul as his estranged fiancée and things like that, like he did on that record 'I Saw Her Standing There' with Elton on Madison Square Garden. And he knew that his relationship with Paul was very important to him but, you know, like all great friendships they had grown apart and married different people and had different lives. But he knew what he didn't like about Paul but he also knew what he liked about Paul."

(Source: Tony Kane)

The dialogue begins with Paul working out the lyrics for "Two of Us." John jokes that the lyrics refer to drag queens and Paul kiddingly responds that perhaps Paul and Paula (an American male/female singing duo) should perform the song instead of The Beatles. Then John and Paul each take a moment to kid each other out with effeminate affectations...John fools around a bit with the lyrics and Paul mentions the connected themes of '"Get Back," "Two of Us," "Don't Let Me Down" and "Oh! Darling." John agrees, and jokes that he and Paul need to be lovers for "Oh! Darling!" Paul says that he was planning to wear a skirt on the show in any case.

(Source: Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicles of the Beatles' Let It Be Disaster, 1997)


Also,'beatlemania420' suggested a very good point to me-"Before one gig on a solo tour, John dedicated a song to "'an old estrainged fience' of mine named Paul". I'm not sure if this pertains to that but I fet it should be mentioned.-Yes it certainly does deserve to be mentioned, thank you for the helpful information mate



Paul responds by throwing himself totally into the performance, singing in a hoarse, fulsome shout that simultaneously summons and sends up the melodramatic emotionality of 1950s doo-wop and R&B. Apart from its wonderfully nuanced lead vocal, "Oh! Darling" is an expression of musical minimalism. It matches a relentlessly simple accompaniment with a relentlessly repetitive lyric that offers a promise good behaviour ("I'll never do you no harm") as the prelude to a desperate plea ("If you leave me, I'll never make it alone"). Given the state of relationships among the Beatles during this time, it is hard to imagine that Paul's rendering of this heartbroken sentiment, however satiric, did not have some basis in his sense of rejection by John.

(Source: Jonathan Gould, Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America, 2008)

Q: "Now that Paul is the only bachelor Beatle, do you find that the girls gravitate more to him than they do to the rest of you fellas? How do you feel about that?"

JOHN: "They always did!"

RINGO: "Yeah."

(laughter)

PAUL: "Well, the thing that we found... We found after all this business, of all the buttons that say 'I love Ringo,' "I love John,' John's were outselling everyone's."

JOHN: "A rather distinctive Beatle."

PAUL: "A distinctive Beatle."

(Source: Press conference, New York, August 22, 1966)

Q: "You're taking your mothers to Australia, is this correct?"

JOHN: (joking, somewhat morbidly) "Well, Paul and I aren't."

(Source: Press conference, Hong Kong, June 8, 1964)


"I was just really sad, y'know, cos we'd [Paul and John] loved each other – although you wouldn't have called it that then." - Paul

(Source: Q, November 2007)

"My view is that these things are there whether you want them or not, in your interior. You don't call up dreams, they happen, often the exact opposite of what you want. You can be heterosexual and be having a homosexual dream and wake up, and think, 'Shit, am I gay?' I like that you don't have control over it. But there is some control -- it is you dreaming, it is your mind it's all happening in." - Paul (on painting and other...stuff)

(Source: Karen Wright, "Luigi's Alcove," Modern Painters, Autumn 2000)

That was what John had lacked, a father figure, though he had an uncle in Edinburgh who was a dentist, not to say an aunt called Harriet. "John might sing about being a working-class hero but he was nothing of the sort. The rest of us knew nobody called Harriet." We talked a bit about John. "I did love him," he said, suddenly, "and I know he loved me."

(Source: Maureen Cleave, "The Gospel According to Paul," London Evening Standard, August 26, 1993)

When Lennon and McCartney found women who served as substantial life partners, the women upset the group's intense homosocial bond by taking the places previously held by the other Beatle as best friend/partner. As Jim O'Donnell's book title, The Day John Met Paul, suggests, there is an elemental Adam and Eve quality to the union of Lennon and McCartney within the world of rock-and-roll...It is interesting to note that the breakup of the Beatles was largely at the time attributed to the "intrusion" of a woman into the Beatles' recording sessions; when Yoko Ono joined Lennon, the homosocial union of the Beatles was disrupted. That Ono's presence threatened Lennon's male partners to the extent claimed in popular myth speaks of the intense bond or marriage that had predated Ono's arrival.

(Source: Ann Shillinglaw, "'Give Us a Kiss': Queer Codes, Male Partnering, and the Beatles," The Queer Sixties, 1999)

Q: "This is a double-barreled question directed at both George And Paul, who are the two remaining..."

GEORGE: (anticipating the question) "We're not getting married, no."

(laughter)

Q: "You're both the only bachelors, and you're not gonna give us any indication of what your matrimonial plans might be?

GEORGE: (jokingly) "Well, soon we're gonna just get an answering service for that question."

PAUL: (jokingly) "We're both queer anyway, you know."

(laughter)

PAUL: "Write that one in your magazines!"

(Source: Press conference, Los Angeles, August 29, 1965)

(Personally one of my faves ^,^, I died and went to heaven when I found this )Q: "Now two of you have gotten married, and you all live in good domestic splendor. Has this affected your writing, Paul and John?"

PAUL: "No."

JOHN: "No, it's easier to write with cushions than on pieces of hard bench..."

(laughter)

JOHN: "Remember, we were on hard benches before we made it, in an unknown cellar in Liverpool. And it's much easier... on a nice cushion."

(Source: Interview, British Calendar News, June 12, 1965)

Even in social situations, the Lennon-McCartney bond seemed well-defined. The unlikely pair spent many evenings together browsing through the record stacks in the basement of NEMS, hunting for new releases that captured the aggressiveness, the intensity and the physical tug about which they debated talmudically afterwards over coffee. Occasionally John invited Paul and his girlfriend, a welsh nurse named Rhiannon, to double-date.

To John's further delight, he discovered Paul was corruptible. In no time he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool… "John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins," says Charles Robert, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ribble bus. "It was like the rest of us didn't exist." They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn't just music on their agenda, it was mischief. "In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time after carrying a cocky-watchman's lamp. The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn't get out of the house because they had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn't open. And we had to escape through a window."

(Source: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005)

It never occurred to Paul just how much he missed John. More than anyone else, John had been his friend for ten years, to say nothing of his collaborator, his sidekick, his shadow. Not only had they played music together, they'd hung out together, dreamed together, fucked together, become famous together. Grown up together. "We were each other's intimates," he acquiesced. By the barest amounts, the relationship had given him "security, warmth, humor, wit, money, fame...." At first Paul held out hope that the separation was temporary, admitting that "Nobody" - especially himself - "quite knew if it was just one of John's little flings and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week's time and say, 'I was only kidding.'" But as the weeks, then months, ticked away, Paul finally realized it wasn't a joke. Convinced that John was now abandoning him, increasingly jealous of his relationship with Yoko - and Allen Klein - Paul atoned for the loss with anger. He was angry at the Beatles, but even angrier at John. It took another six months for him to admit the extent of his heartbreak. "John's in love with Yoko," Paul confessed to a reporter from the 'Evening Standard',"and he's no longer in love with the three of us." But for all intents and purposes, he might as well have been talking about himself.

(Source: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005)

"I wrote to AIR studios at Montserrat and I recorded with Paul for 'Tug Of War'. I did 'Get It' with him and I played rhythm guitar on 'Ebony And Ivory', which was a No. l song. I was there eight days and the night before I was leaving, I sat out on the patio and a song came to me. [Sings a snatch of 'My Old Friend.'] I never wrote it down and the next day I said to Paul, 'I am better at singing than I am at talking and this is what I want to say.' Paul and Linda had tears in their eyes when I sang it, and Linda said, 'Carl, how did you know that was the last thing that John ever said to Paul?' I was spooked by that, and she said, 'As we left the Dakota, John patted Paul on the shoulder and said, "Think about me every now and then, my old friend."' That song sent chills over my body and Paul and Linda believe that John Lennon visited my mind. He was speaking to Paul through me." -Carl Perkins

(Source, Carl Perkins, interview, 1990)

"I've got used to the fact - just about - that whatever I do is going to be compared to the other Beatles. If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul's bowing." -John

(Source: Rolling Stone, 1975)

"I wrote all those songs with him, so what could I say to people? Well, we were kids. I mean, we slept together. Top-n-tailed in beds and hitch-hiking and stuff. So, I mean, we, we were just totally, you know...mates." -Paul

(Source: Interview, BBC Breakfast, 2005)

Q: "So you think with Linda [Paul]'s found what he wanted?"

JOHN: "I guess so. I guess so. I just don't understand...I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted."

(Source: Peter McCabe & Robert Schonfeld, St. Regis hotel interview, September 5, 1971)

"In the beginning it was a constant fight between Brian and Paul on one side and me and George on the other. Brian put us in neat suits and shirts and Paul was right behind him. I didn't dig that and I used to try and get George to rebel with me. ... My little rebellion was to have my tie loose, with the top button of my shirt undone, but Paul'd always come up and put it straight." -John

(Source: Interview, Rolling Stone, 1975)

"I was kind of crying when I wrote it ['Here Today']. It's like a dialogue with John. One of my feelings even when he used to lay into me was that he really didn't mean it. I could always see why he was doing it. There was this spectre of me, which I understand because he had to clear the decks just like I did. In the song, John would hear me saying that and say 'Oh, piss off, you don't know me at all. We're worlds apart. You used to know me but I've changed.' But I felt I still knew him. The song is me trying to talk back to him, but realising the futility of it because he is no longer here, even though that's a fact I can't quite believe, even to this day. The 'I love you' part was hard to say . A part of me said, 'Hold on. Wait a minute. Are you really going to do that?' I finally said, 'Yeah, I've got to. It's true.' -Paul

(Source: April 1982 interview promoting "Tug of War")

Q: "John, did you entirely write your book or were you given help?"

JOHN: (jokingly) "No, I mean-- who's gonna help you with a thing like that!"

(laughter)

JOHN: "No, if I write... You get ghost writers for novels and things."

PAUL: (whispering to get John's attention) "John-- John."

JOHN: "Oh. Well, I wrote in the beginning, he (Paul) wrote the intro, and helped with a couple of the stories. He was only mentioned on one because they forgot. But that's all."

(Source: Press conference, Sydney, June 11, 1964)

"One time Paul had a chick in bed and John came in and got a pair of scissors and cut all her clothes into pieces and then wrecked the wardrobe. He got like that occasionally, it was because of the pills and being up too long." -George (Mhmm, that was the reason ok...ok Johnny.... )

(Source: The Beatles, Anthology, 1995)

"The thing about me and John is that we were different, but we weren't that different. I think Linda put her finger on it when she said me and John were like mirror images of each other. Even down to how we started writing together, facing each other, eyeball to eyeball, exactly like looking in the mirror. That's how songs like 'I Want To Hold Your Hand" were written." -Paul

(Source: Uncut, July 2004)


Q: "Is there a song on your album 'Imagine' that refers to Paul... lines about a pretty face and the sound of Muzak?"

JOHN: (smiling) "Er, there's a song which COULD be a statement about Paul. It could be interpreted that way. But then, it could be about an old chick I'd known."

(Source: Hit Parader, 1972)

"[Paul] said it was written about Julian. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian then. He was driving to see Julian to say hello. He had been like an uncle. And he came up with 'Hey Jude.' But I always heard it as a song to me. Now I'm sounding like one of those fans reading things into it...Think about it: Yoko had just come into the picture. He is saying 'Hey, Jude' - 'Hey, John.' Subconsciously, he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying 'Bless you.' The Devil in him didn't like it at all, because he didn't want to lose his partner." -John

(Source: Playboy, 1980)

"I have some juicy stuff I could tell about John. But I wouldn't. Not when Yoko's alive, or Cynthia." -Paul (My second fave )

(Source: Hunter Davies, "off-the-record" telephone conversation with Paul, May 3, 1981)

"Tell me, babe, how do you sleep at night?"..."Oh, how do you sleep, brother?" -John

(Source: Anthology version of "How Do You Sleep?")

"['Here Today' was] a song saying, 'Well, if you were here today you'd probably say what I'm doing is crap. But you wouldn't mean it, 'cos you like me really.' It's one of those 'come out from behind your glasses, look at me' kind of things. It was a love song about my relationship with him. I was trying to exorcise the demons in my own head, because it's tough when you have somebody like John slagging you off in public. He was a major influence on my life, as I suppose I was on his. But the great thing about me and John was that it was me and John, end of story. Everyone else can say, 'Well, he did this and so-and-so.' But that's the nice thing, that I can actually think when we got in a little room it was me and John who wrote it, not any of these other people who think they all know about it. I was the one in the room with him." -Paul

(Source: Bill Harry, The John Lennon Encylopedia, 2001)

"They had became supremely indifferent to it all, as women and girls continually prostrated themselves. I was convinced that they would all end up homosexuals, out of sheer boredom with conventional sex." -Bob Rogers, a reporter and observer of the Beatles' backstage antics during their 1964 tour of Australia (I know it aint proving anything but I couldnt resist ^,^)

(Source: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005)

The question to Harry [Nilsson] was "Did [John] miss the Beatles?"...Harry answered, "Someone told me a few minutes ago they saw John walking on the street once wearing a button saying, 'I Love Paul.' And this girl asked him, 'Why are you wearing a button that says, "I Love Paul"?' John said, 'Because I love Paul.'"

(Source: Geoffrey & Brenda Giuliano, The Lost Lennon Interviews, February 17, 1984)

"We were in Key West in 1964. We were due to fly into Jacksonville, in Florida, and do a concert there, but we'd been diverted because of a hurricane. We stayed there for a couple of days, not knowing what to do except, like, drink. I remember drinking way too much, and having one of those talking-to-the-toilet bowl evenings. It was during that night, when we'd all stayed up way too late, and we got so pissed that we ended up crying - about, you know, how wonderful we were, and how much we loved each other, even though we'd never said anything. It was a good one: you never say anything like that. Especially if you're a Northern Man." -Paul, explaining the "what about the night we cried?" line in "Here Today"

(Source: Guardian Unlimited, 2004)

"The line [the walrus was Paul] was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. It's a very perverse way of saying to Paul: 'here, have this crumb, this illusion, this stroke - because I'm leaving.'" -John

(Source: Playboy, 1980)

John: "I was trying to put it 'round that I was gay, you know-- I thought that would throw them off... dancing at all the gay clubs in Los Angeles, flirting with the boys... but it never got off the ground."

Q: "I think I've only heard that lately about Paul."

John (jokingly): "Oh, I've had him, he's no good." (OMG... )

(Source: Hit Parader, 1975)

Q: "If John Lennon could come back for a day, how would you spend it with him?"
Paul: "In bed."

(Source: Q magazine, 1998)

JOHN: "And, in the same respect, the creativity of songwriting had left Paul and me... well, by the mid-Sixties it had become a craft. And yet...a different kind of thing comes in. It's like a love affair. When you first meet, you can have the hots for twenty-four hours a day for each other. But after fifteen or twenty years, a different kind of sexual and intellectual relationship develops, right? It's still love, but it's different. So there's that kind of difference in creativity, too. As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it's happening. One takes to drugs, to drink, to knock oneself out..."

Q: "When you say the creativity went out of your relationship with Paul by the mid-Sixties, that's a little hard to believe. There are a lot of people who feel that the period between 1966 and 1970 was the most fertile musical period."

JOHN: "It wasn't. Well, it was fertile in the way a relationship between a man and a woman becomes more fertile after eight or ten years. The depth of the Beatles' song-writing, or of John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles, in the late Sixties was more pronounced; it had a more mature, more intellectual - whatever you want to call it - approach. We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn't when we were teenagers. The early stuff - the 'Hard Day's Night' period, I call it - was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship. And the 'Sgt. Pepper - Abbey Road' period was the mature part of the relationship. And maybe, had we gone on together, maybe something interesting would have come of it. It wouldn't have been the same. But maybe it was a marriage that had to end. Some marriages don't get through that phase. It's hard to speculate about what would have been."

(Source: Playboy, 1980)

"If I am on my own for three days, doing nothing, I almost completely leave myself. I'm at the back of my head. I can see my hands and realize they're moving, but it's like a robot who's doing it. I have to see the others to see myself. Then I realize there is someone like me so it's reassuring. We were recording the other night, and I just wasn't there. Neither was Paul. We were like two robots going through the motions. We do need each other alot. When we used to get together after a month off, we used to be embarrassed about touching each other. We'd do an elaborate handshake just to hide the embarrassment... or we did mad dances. Then we got to hugging each other. Now we do the Buddhist bit... arms around. It's just saying hello, that's all." -John

(Source: Hunter Davies, The Beatles, 1968)

"Paul and I know each other on a lot of different levels that very few people know about." -John

(Source: Playboy, 1980)