Inside John Lennon and Paul McCartney's 'irreplaceable' bond ...

The Beatles are arguably one of the biggest boybands in music history, dominating the charts during the 1960s and 1970s.

Over that ten-year period, the group released 13 studio albums which saw them reach wild and unprecedented success.

But amid all the monumental highs came devastating lows as tensions rose surrounding creative differences and challenging business decisions started to drive a wedge between the fab four.

While Ringo Starr and George Harrison had a brief departure from the group, it wasn’t until John Lennon left the band in 1969 that things came to an end. The Beatles announced their official split in 1970, leading to years of bitterness to follow.

As fans mourn the death of John Lennon – who passed away 44 years ago today – let's take a look inside his complicated friendship with Paul McCartney and their years-long feud.

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Shared loss 

While their passion for music brought them together, it was their shared sense of tragedy that really bonded John and Paul.

McCartney sadly lost his mother, Mary, to breast cancer in October 1956 when he was just 14. Just two years later, Lennon lost his mother, Julia, when he was 17-year-old after she was killed by a speeding car.

McCartney told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2019: “We had a kind of bond that we both knew about, we knew that feeling. I never thought that it affected my music until years later. I certainly didn’t mean it to be. But it could be, you know, those things can happen.”

Many fans believed that those painful losses led to some of the group’s more powerful songs such as 1965’s Yesterday, which came to McCartney in a dream, and 1970’s Let It Be.

Close bond  

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, McCartney revealed that the pair always understood that their friendship could never be replicated.

He told the outlet: “John and me, we were kids growing up together in the same environment with the same influences. He knows the records I know, I know the records he knows.

"You’re writing your first little innocent songs together. Then you’re writing something that gets recorded. Each year goes by, and you get the cooler clothes. Then you write the cooler song to go with the cooler clothes.

“We were on the same escalator – on the same step of the escalator, all the way. It’s irreplaceable – that time, friendship and bonding.”

Lennon gushed in one of his final interviews before he was shot dead on December 8, 1980: “He’s like a brother. I love him. Families - we certainly have our ups and downs and our quarrels. But at the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, I would do anything for him, and I think he would do anything for me.”

Band breakup  

However, the fairytale soon came to an end. What began as a group collaboration that saw them achieve 20 number one hit singles, quickly dissolved into tension.

According to Rolling Stone, at one session in January 1969, McCartney pleaded with his bandmates: “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this. What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I don’t see an awful lot of support.”

But the musician was reportedly met with stone-cold silence that later signalled the beginning of the end, with the band announcing their split the following year. The group were utterly shocked when they learnt that Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had started using heroin.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, McCartney said: “This was a fairly big shocked for us because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far-out.”

‘Dream over’ 

Ultimately the group decided to go their separate ways following contract disputes, creative disagreements and one too many heated arguments.

Their break-up caused further fallouts between the pair when McCartney refused to push back the release of his solo debut Let It Be to come out first in 1970. He also beat Lennon to the punch when he officially announced the group had disbanded.

Lennon told the publication at the time: “I wanted to do it and I should have done it. I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record. I started the band, I disbanded it. It’s as simple as that... the dream is over.”

But McCartney countered that The Beatles breakup was because of “straight forward jealous” and that he wasn’t to blame since “Ringo left first, then George, then John. I was the last to leave! It wasn’t me!”

Angry letter  

However, the end of the band didn’t mean the end of the musician’s rivalry. A letter from Lennon – estimated to have been written around 1971 which was auctioned off by Boston’s RR House in 2016 – captured the extent of their feud.

Written on the letterhead of Bag Productions Inc – Lennon and Oko’s joint company, it reads: “I was reading your letter and wondering what middle-aged cranky Beatle fan wrote it” - a cruel dig at McCartney’s wife, Linda.

One of the fieriest passages reads: “Do you really think most of today’s art came about because of The Beatles? I don’t believe you’re that insane – Paul – do you believe that?

“When you stop believing it you might wake up! Didn’t we always say we were part of the movement – not all of it? – Of course, we changed the world, but try and follow it through. GET OFF YOUR GOLD DISC AND FLY!”

Overdue make-up

From the summer of 1973 to early 1975, Lennon disappeared from the public eye and slipped into a creative period of his life which he dubbed Lost Weekend – which included an accidental reconciliation with McCartney.

Lennon was at Burbank Studios on March 28, 1974 where he was producing a record for Harry Nilsson – when Paul and his wife stopped by.

Lennon revealed in a later interview: “I jammed with Paul. We did a lot of stuff in L.A, though there were 50 other people playing, all just watching me and Pail.”

Currently this is the only recorded instance of them playing together again before Lennon’s untimely death. The session’s tape came out on a bootleg release, A Toot and a Snore in ‘74.

Emotional dreams

Years after their surprising jam session, the pair remained friends and would occasionally speak from time to time. McCartney told the BBC: “I would make calls to John occasionally. We just talked kids and baking bread.”

As they began to repair their relationship, the unthinkable happened when Lennon was gunned down near his Dakota home in New York City back in 1980.

Speaking on the Jonathan Ross Show, McCartney confessed: “It was a really big shock in everyone’s life, a bit like Kennedy. It was just so sad that I wasn’t going to see him again, we weren’t going to hang out.”

Nowadays, McCartney still dreams about his former best friend during an appearance on The Late Show in September 2019. He explained: “The thing is when you’ve had a relationship like that for so long, it was such a deep relationship.

"I love it when people revisit you in your dreams. So, I often have band dreams and they’re crazy... I have a lot of dreams about John. And they’re always good.”

Arguably his most poignant memory was a seemingly mundane one a few years after the band split. McCartney told Rolling Stone: “He hugged me. It was great, because we didn’t normally do that. He said, ‘It’s good to touch’. I always remembered that – it's good to touch.”