(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 13 April 2025 19:15, UK
To say the music of Paul McCartney and John Lennon is inseparable is an understatement. While the two would certainly have preferred a clean split between them when The Beatles broke down, the ties went deeper than just that band, those albums, those years. Their connection was foundational, and still is foundational for McCartney, who continues their legacy. Everyone can see it, but for George Martin, he had a front-row seat to it, witnessing first-hand.
He saw it from start to finish, near enough. Sure, he wasn’t there when the boys first met or when they first started writing songs in their childhood kitchens, laying those first bricks. But when they brought that into the studio for the first time and started figuring out when their music sounded like a real, recorded way, Martin was on hand.
From then on, he watched on as they moved through everything. He watched as Lennon and McCartney got to grips with being hit makers in the early 1960s, as they started becoming more influenced by the counterculture, bringing more modern folky references into the studio. He saw them become more and more experimental after they cancelled touring, helping them push their sound into new and truly groundbreaking places.
All of this also means that he wanted them eventually splinter. As Lennon began wandering down one path, Martin looked on as McCartney travelled another and the duo started firing insults at each other from their different landing points. However, from his vantage point, he could see the fact that the two musicians were being ignore to – without one another, some of their best work, even the stuff solely written by the, would not have existed.
“The thing that irritates me the most is that John was the rocker and Paul was the ballad man,” Martin once said, claiming that it is impossible and oversimplifying to attempt to categorise the two. They always crossed over, he argued, “You listen to ‘Helter Skelter’ and what the hell’s that about? Then you listen to something like ‘Julia’ or ‘Imagine’ or ‘Because’, what the hell’s that about?”
Obviously, Martin would agree that they had individual strengths. “It’s true to say that Paul had a stronger sense of melody and harmony that appealed to the main mass of the public more, and John had a kookier way of dealing with lyrics,” he said. In the Beatles, they generally played those parts. But, the point Martin is making all comes back to that foundational fact that they learnt how to do all of this together. The foundation of their musicality was a mix of the both of them and after having literally learnt how to write songs together, it was always going to be impossible to untangle the impact of one on the work of the other.
“They did influence each other enormously,” Martin said as the understatement of the century. But in particular, he saw two songs as the ultimate examples of this; “I think that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was Paul’s lyric writing, but I doubt if he would have written that unless he’d met John,” he said on McCartney’s side, hearing a degree of Lennon’s kookiness and storytelling in that strong tale. On Lennon’s side, he saw McCartney’s influence most in his solo work, coming through ironically when the duo had fallen out as he claimed, “I doubt that John would have written something like ‘Imagine’ without Paul’s influence.”
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