John could be very harsh about his own work
John Lennon pictured in 1966(Image: Getty Images)
John Lennon was not afraid to criticise The Beatles’ work. Especially after he left the band, there were a number of occasions when John took aim at and challenged the songs of his main creative collaborator Paul McCartney, with whom he wrote the majority of the band’s output.
John expressed his dislike for a number of songs written by Paul. These included ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da‘, which recording engineer Geoff Emerick said John “openly and vocally detested” and ‘Let It Be’, during the recording of which John took aim at the song’s message, asking: “Are we supposed to giggle in the solo?”
He continued to pour cold water on the 1970 classic after The Beatles broke up. Asked about the track in a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said: “That’s Paul. What can you say? Nothing to do with The Beatles.
“It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be’.”
Paul also revealed in a 2018 interview with CBS that ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ was the only song that John complimented him about. In that interview, Paul was asked if John ever complimented him for his signwriting. He answered: “Once – in the whole time.
“I think it’s ‘Revolver’, it was ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, (it) was one of my songs on it but John sort of just (said) when it finishes, ‘that’s a really good song that, I love that song’.”
Paul said his response to that was: “‘Yes he likes it’. You know, I’ve remembered it to this day. It’s pathetic really.”
But John could also be quite hard on himself. He said he was ashamed of his vocals on ‘Twist and Shout’ and described his 1967 track ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ as “garbage”.
The Beatles at Abbey Road in 1967(Image: BIPs/Getty Images)
It wasn’t the only time he used that word to describe a Beatles track of his. John wrote a number of songs during the band’s 1968 trip to India, including ‘Polythene Pam’ and ‘Mean Mr Mustard’, which both featured as part of the closing melody of the 1969 album ‘Abbey Road’.
Paul wrote most of the tracks which made up the melody, which John described as “junk … just bits of songs thrown together”. He was also hard on his own contributions.
About ‘Mean Mr Mustard’, he told Playboy in 1980: “That’s me, writing a piece of garbage. I’d read somewhere in the newspaper about this mean guy who hid £5 notes, not up his nose but somewhere else. No, it had nothing to do with cocaine.”
In The Beatles Anthology, John is quoted as saying: “In ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ I said ‘his sister Pam’ – originally it was ‘his sister Shirley’ in the lyric.
“I changed it to Pam to make it sound like it had something to do with it (‘Polythene Pam’). They are only finished bits of crap that I wrote in India.
The news article said to have inspired ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ was in the Daily Record on June 7, 1967. Headlined “A Mean Husband Shaved in the Dark”, it featured a man called John Mustard.