(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 17 September 2025 17:45, UK
Conflict, arguments, and ever-rising tensions have always been a common theme within the music industry, and even the life-changing revolutionary nature of The Beatles couldn’t save them from succumbing to the same tale of infighting towards the end of their tenure.
They might have formed as childhood friends in Liverpool, bonded by an adoration of skiffle music, but the following few years certainly took their toll on The Beatles.
From their various residencies in Hamburg, playing for audiences of gangsters and hard-nosed sailors, to the endless hounding of Beatlemania, the band packed a lot into a relatively short space of time. Once you add in the copious amounts of money and unparalleled press attention that the ‘Mop Tops’ attracted, rising tensions within the band became something of an inevitability.
Those tensions became particularly prevalent post-1966, the year that the band retired from touring to focus solely on studio work. Seemingly, being cooped up in a studio with the same three other blokes for years on end doesn’t lead to a particularly harmonious atmosphere – who would have thought it? Although that degree of conflict did lead to the creation of some of the band’s greatest works, a few personal attacks and playground insults did begin to bleed into the musical material.
Namely, John Lennon and Paul McCartney occasionally penned tracks about each other, despite being one of the greatest songwriting duos to ever grace the airwaves. The most notable examples of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘diss tracks’ arrived after The Beatles’ break-up in 1970, with ‘How Do You Sleep?’ being perhaps the most vicious of those songs. However, one song, which Macca claims Lennon wrote about him, has roots going all the way back to The White Album.
Originally titled ‘Child Of Nature’, the song never made it to the final tracklisting of that 1968 double album, eventually seeing the light of day as ‘Jealous Guy’ on Lennon’s 1971 solo album Imagine. “He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon,’” recalled McCartney in a 1985 interview with Playgirl.
“He wrote ‘I’m Just a Jealous Guy’, and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy.”
Paul McCartney
Conversely, Lennon himself once claimed that the lyrics, denoting a jealous, insecure lover, were actually autobiographical in nature. “The lyrics explain themselves clearly: I was a very jealous, possessive guy. Toward everything. A very insecure male. A guy who wants to put his woman in a little box, lock her up, and just bring her out when he feels like playing with her,” he revealed to David Sheff in 1980.
“She’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world – outside of me – because it makes me feel insecure.”
Lennon’s account of the song does seem more likely when examining the lyrics along with his historically poor treatment of women, particularly his first wife, Cynthia Powell. However, it is also easy to imagine the songwriter claiming, off-handedly, that the song was actually about McCartney as a kind of throwaway insult – in a similar fashion to claiming that the only thing Macca ever did was ‘Yesterday’ within the lyrics of ‘How Do You Sleep?’.
After all, the pair were constantly at each other’s throats during the final years of The Beatles and the early years of their respective solo careers. Like any break-up, some things were surely said in the heat of the moment that do not live up to closer scrutiny.
Related Topics
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.