![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/John-Lennon-Paul-McCartney-Split-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
Mon 20 July 2026 17:00, UK <\/p>\n
By the time The Beatles<\/a> broke up, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were learning that it was best to just agree to disagree.<\/p>\n For the good of the band, there were some arguments simply left untouched, and the pair would have to grimace their way through recording sessions and hope an opportunity to gripe about it would come up later. In fact, Lennon famously slated McCartney\u2019s masterpiece<\/a> Sgt Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, reductively describing the aspiring concept album as just a bunch of songs.<\/p>\n But learning to co-parent The Beatles was what continued to make them great during their periods of innovation. They knew that their yin and yang artistic approach was what actually made them the perfect pairing, counterbalancing each other\u2019s lightness and darkness while simultaneously overlapping at crucial musical moments.<\/p>\n For the most part, keen Beatles fans can tell whose song is whose, and they can easily be categorised through the lens of said difference. There\u2019s a fundamental sweetness to McCartney\u2019s melody writing<\/a> that is easily identifiable, while Lennon\u2019s digs deeper into introspection, giving The Beatles their more surrealist edge. <\/p>\n But what about the songs that exist in the overlap? What about a song like \u2018In My Life\u2019, which feels part Macca and part Lennon? Well, that\u2019s seemingly a sore subject for the pair who never agreed on the truth of how that came about.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs I recall, he didn\u2019t have a tune to it,\u201d McCartney claimed, \u201cI said, \u2018Well, you haven\u2019t got a tune, let me just go and work on it\u2019. And I went down to the half-landing, where John had a mellotron, and I sat there and put together a tune\u2026 I recall writing the whole melody. And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyse it.\u201d<\/p>\n McCartney is right; there is very much a \u2018Paulness\u2019 to the melody that floats through the ether. But then the lyrics feel inherently Lennon, for their existentialism couldn\u2019t have possibly come from the mind of Macca. So maybe, this was something that felt increasingly rare during the latter stages of The Beatles: a song that both Lennon and McCartney worked on in equal parts? No, it appears not, as a disgruntled Lennon was quick to refute Macca\u2019s claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n \u201cPaul helped with the middle eight,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cI wrote that in Kenwood [his home at the time]. I used to write upstairs where I had about ten Brunell tape recorders all linked up. I still have them, I\u2019d mastered them over the period of a year or two. I could never make a rock and roll record, but I could make some far-out stuff on it. I wrote it upstairs, that was one where I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, there was a level of cooperation on the track which is undoubtedly what made it one of their very best. However, the harmless disagreement over the finer details of the song foreshadowed the wider problems<\/a> that lay ahead for the band after \u2018In My Life\u2019 and Rubber Soul.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\")
<\/a> The Far Out Beatles Newsletter<\/p>\n