Paul said: “That song just gets me. I’m singing it, and I think I’m OK, and I suddenly realise it’s very emotional”Dan Haygarth Liverpool Daily Post Editor and Regeneration Reporter
16:30, 05 Aug 2025
Paul McCartney opened up about one of his most emotional songs(Image: Danny Lawson/PA Wire)
Towards the end of their time in The Beatles, Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s relationship became tumultuous. Artistic differences had emerged and the two had differing opinions on the band’s business and commercial approach.
The problems worsened after the band’s 1970 acrimonious split, as the former songwriting partners traded barbs in a series of songs aimed at one another. In response to the split, Paul filed a High Court lawsuit in December 1970 to dissolve the band’s contractual agreement. The court ruled in his favour in March 1971 and Paul’s relationship with his former bandmates was very much strained.
The clouds lifted, fortunately, and Paul was able to reconcile with the three other Beatles, making up with John before his death in 1980. John and Paul rekindled their friendship in the mid-1970s and jammed together at a recording session in 1974.
The two almost reunited on stage two years later, when they were offered $3,000 for The Beatles to come back together and play a set on US TV show ‘Saturday Night Live’.
That didn’t happen but Paul was very happy that he made up with his old friend before his death. About it, Far Out magazine reported that Paul said: “I was very glad of how we got along in those last few years, that I had some really good times with him before he was murdered. Luckily, our last meeting was very friendly. We talked about how to bake bread.”
John’s murder in 1980 shocked the world and it led Paul to write one of his most emotional songs. ‘Here Today’ featured on his 1982 album ‘Tug of War’ and was a tribute to John, taking the form of an imaginary conversation the two may have if he were still alive – in which Paul wanted to make sure the feud had truly ended.
The Beatles, in their bathing suits, rehearse in the Deauville Hotel, Florida, in 1964(Image: Bettmann Archive)
In a 1982 interview with the Los Angeles Times about the album, Paul said of ‘Here Today’: “One of the feelings you always have when someone close to you dies like that is that you wish you could have seen him the day before to square everything up and make sure he knew how much you really cared.
“The song is about saying to John, ‘Do we really have to keep this sort of thing [the feud] up?’ But we never got around to doing it. I guess we never felt any urgency about it.
“We were behaving like we were going to live forever, which is what everyone thought in The Beatles days, right? I mean, we never thought we were going to die.”
‘Here Today’ has become a fixture of Paul’s live set lists, including on last year’s European leg of the Got Back tour. However, in an interview with the Guardian in 2004, he said it is one which he can struggle to play due to its emotion.
He explained: “At least once a tour, that song just gets me. I’m singing it, and I think I’m OK, and I suddenly realise it’s very emotional, and John was a great mate and a very important man in my life, and I miss him, you know?
“It happened at the first show, in Gijon: I was doing fine, and I found myself doing a thing I’ve done in soundcheck, just repeating one of the lines: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’
“I did that and I thought, ‘That’s nice – that works.’ And then I came to finish the song, to do the last verse, and it was, ‘Oh s**t – I’ve just totally lost it.'”
In that interview, Paul also revealed the inspiration behind two of the song’s lines – “What about the night we cried / Because there wasn’t any reason left to keep it all inside.”
He explained: “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 p****d 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.”