As The Beatles’ lead songwriters for many years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent many an hour with their noses to the proverbial grind, chipping away at melodies and chord progressions until the glimmering pearl of a song emerged.
Like any partnership, the Lennon-McCartney songwriting factory had its peaks and troughs. There were moments when they were unstoppable, and then there were times when even sharing the same room seemed unimaginable. After the Fab Four’s split in 1970, Lennon was able to evaluate his career with McCartney with the clarity afforded by distance, leading to the assertion that, at one time, their partnership was suffused with the “hysteria” of new love.
In All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon discussed the once “fruitful” partnership: “Well, it was fertile in the way a relationship between a man and a woman becomes more fertile after eight or ten years,” he began. “The depth of The Beatles’ songwriting, or of John and Paul’s contribution to The Beatles, in the late ’60s was more pronounced; it had a more mature, more intellectual — whatever you want to call it — approach,” he continued. “We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers.”
In comparing early albums like Hard Days Night to latter-day works like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, Lennon divided his partnership with Paul into two distinct eras: “The early stuff — the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it — was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship,” he confessed. “And the Sgt. Pepper–Abbey Road period was the mature part of the relationship.”
Bringing the marriage metaphor to its logical conclusion, Lennon then opened up about how the partnership might have evolved if The Beatles had stayed together: “It wouldn’t have been the same. But maybe it was a marriage that had to end. Some marriages don’t get through that phase.”
Lennon’s analogy certainly has legs. A Hard Days Night simmers with passion and optimism, reflecting The Beatles’ powerful sense of destiny following their rise to the top of the British charts throughout 1963. Having secured themselves as household names in their homeland, they set their sights on the rest of the world – embarking on a tour of Europe before making a trip across the Atlantic to break America.
Within a year, John and Paul’s musical love affair had resulted in the birth of a powerful new fan hysteria: Beatlemania.
