During an appearance on BBC Radio, Paul McCartney has opened up about the “cruel” and “nasty” behaviour of his late Beatles bandmate John Lennon following the group’s breakup.
When asked about his song ‘Too Many People,’ McCartney replied (via Ultimate Guitar): “‘Too Many People,’ this song was written a year or so after The Beatles break-up. At the time, John [Lennon] was firing missiles at me with his songs, and one or two of them were quite cruel.”
“I don’t know what he hoped to gain, other than punch me in the face, the whole thing really annoyed me.”
He continued: “I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I’m not really that kind of writer, so it was quite veiled. It was the 1970s equivalent of what might today be called a diss track.”
“An idea of too many people preaching practices, it was definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do. I just got fed up being told what to do, so I wrote this song.”
“The first verse and the chorus have pretty much all the anger I could muster, and when I did the vocal on the second line, ‘Too many reaching for a piece of cake,’ I remember singing it as ‘piss of cake.'”
“Again, I was getting back at John but my heart wasn’t really in it. ‘You’ve made this break so good luck with it,’ it was pretty mild, I didn’t really come out with any savagery.”
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“It’s actually a fairly upbeat song, it doesn’t really sound that vitriolic. And if you didn’t know the story, I don’t know that you’d be able to guess the anger behind this writing.”
“It was all a bit weird and a bit nasty, and I basically said, ‘Let’s be sensible.’ We had a lot going on for us in The Beatles, and what actually split us up was the business stuff, and that’s pretty pathetic, really, so let’s just try to be peaceful, let’s maybe give peace a chance…”
“‘Too many people sharing party lines, too many people are grabbing for a slice of cake and a piece of the pie…’ The sleeping late thing, whether that was accurate, whether John and Yoko [Ono] actually slept in late or not, I’m not sure.”
“Although John was a later riser when I would drive to Waybridge, so we could ride together. They were all references to people thinking that their own truth was the only truth, which was certainly what was coming from John…”
“I had been able to accept Yoko in the studio sitting on a blanket in front of my amp. I worked hard to come to terms with that, but then when we broke up and everyone was flailing around, John turned nasty.”
“I don’t really understand why. Maybe because we grew up in Liverpool where was always good to get the first punch in the fight.”
McCartney continued on to open up about The Beatles’ breakup, revealing how he found out that Lennon was leaving the band.
“The whole story, in a nutshell, is we were having a meeting in 1969, and John showed up and said he’d met this guy Allen Klein – and then the matter of fact, John told us he was leaving the band. It is basically how it happened.”
“It was three to one because the other two went with John so it was looking as Allen Klein was gonna own our entire Beatle empire. I was not too keen on that idea.”
“John actually had Allen Klein and Yoko in the room suggesting lyrics during writing sessions. In the [Lennon’s ‘diss’] song ‘How Do You Sleep,’ the line, ‘The only thing you did is ‘Yesterday,” was apparently Allen Klein’s suggestion.”
“And John said, ‘Hey, that’s great – put that in.’ I can see the laughs doing it and I had to work very hard not to take it too seriously, but at the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Wait a minute! All I did was ‘Yesterday’?'”
“I suppose that’s a funny pun but all I did was ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Let It Be,’ ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Lady Madonna…’ Fuck you, John!”
“I had to fight them for my bit of The Beatles, and in fact, for their bit of The Beatles, which many years later they realized and almost thanked me for.”
“Nowadays, people get it but at the time, I think the others felt they were the ones being hurt by my actions. Allen Klein already had a history with The Rolling Stones.”
“I said, ‘Oh, this guy has got such a bad reputation.’ And good old John says, ‘He got badly talked about, he can’t be all bad.’ John had this kind of distorted thinking which was amusing sometimes.”
“But not when someone was going to take everything that John, George [Harrison], Ringo [Starr], and I owned, and really worked hard to get.”
“So I stood up as the sensible one and said, ‘This is not good.’ Klein wanted 20 per cent, and I said, ‘Let him have 10 per cent if you have to go with him.’ ‘Oh, no, no, no, he wants 20.’
“It seemed to me they were all just fucking out of it and making no attempt to do anything sensible.”
“A lot of hurts went down during that period in the early 1970s, them feeling hurt, me feeling hurt, but John being John, he was the one that wrote hurtful songs. That was his bag.”
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Check out Paul McCartney discussing John Lennon and The Beatles’ breakup:
