Rock
No one compares to the Two of Us: Sir Paul McCartney praises John Lennon as best ever collaborator
Sir Paul McCartney believes his teenage friendship with John Lennon helped establish a bond that no other collaborator could match.
Sir Paul McCartney says no collaborator has ever lived up to John Lennon - because the two Beatles' bond was formed when they were teenagers.
The Get Back rocker was just 15 when he met a 16-year-old John at a summer garden fête at St. Peter's Church in Woolton, Liverpool, where John's skiffle band The Quarrymen were playing. The pair were introduced by mutual friend, Ivan Vaughan, and after Paul showed John how to tune a guitar and play Eddie Cochran's Twenty Flight Rock a friendship that would change the course of music history was formed.
In the decades since The Beatles split in 1970, McCartney has co-written songs with numerous artists, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Cash, Rihanna and Kanye West, as well as working with esteemed producers like ELO star Jeff Lynne, Nigel Godrich and Mark Ronson.
But Paul admits he has never felt as comfortable with anyone as he did with John - who was shot dead in December 1980 aged 40.
Speaking on the Song Exploder podcast, he said: "Working with John Lennon was something that happened when we were kids. Neither of us really knew how to write songs so it just grew organically. Because John and I had such a natural relationship that had matured together I’m inevitably comparing whoever the next person is that I’m writing with.
"As time went on and The Beatles broke up and I was no longer writing with John I did try writing with a couple of other people. Having worked with John, now for someone to just come into the room we don’t necessarily know much about each other it does make it a bit harder, I must admit."
McCartney and Lennon at the beginning of The Beatles
McCartney worked closely with producer Andrew Watt on his latest solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and the two share five songwriting credits on the LP, including Home to Us which features Paul's former Beatles member Sir Ringo Starr.
The singer/songwriter quickly discovered their working relationship felt very natural and after one meeting in Los Angeles at Watt's studio, the tracks just started flowing.
McCartney said: "I met Andrew in LA. My manager said, ‘There’s this guy called Andrew Watt. Would you like to meet him?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him.’ I liked some of the music he’d done but I didn’t know him. I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Just go and have a cup of tea or something.’ I didn’t particularly think we would work together. I thought let’s just see if we like each other.
"So I went over to his studio, which is in the basement of Charlie Chaplin’s old house, and we were sitting around chatting. I started to show him a couple of ideas just in general conversation. He followed on, so we were just sitting there throwing ideas around and we writing the first song on the album. That was it. We just met, cup of tea and a song appeared. Kind of lucky, really."
McCartney admits that they never formally agreed to work together on the LP and just carried on meeting up to write and record.
He said: “I don’t I ever did. I had enjoyed the experience of writing the first track so I think it was just like, ‘Okay, what are you doing next Thursday?’ We just kept on. We got our diaries out and found the next date and picked it up.
“I brought this song over and I said, ‘Let’s finish it up because I think this could work on the album.’ On this track I said to him in the studio, I said, ‘Andrew, look, one of the reasons I got with you is because you’re a pop producer and I’m waiting for you to pop these songs up. What are you going to do with them?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m just letting you lead the song.’ I said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t. On this one particularly you should do just do your thing on it.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yeah, really, I thought the song could take that kind of treatment. Do you what you would do with this song and I don’t even think about what I would want from it.’ So he just started cooking.
“His engineer was called Paul, of course because I was called Paul we had to call the other Paul 'Billy', so he ended up as Billy. Andrew just started shouting at him, ‘Do that, do this, take that out, lose that, put that up.’ And I think he gave it a little more of a pop sensibility which was kind of what I was looking for. He just put a couple of other little things on it. There’s a nice little harmony, which I think really helped."
