In the immediate aftermath of The Beatles, no one was reflecting on it kindly. George Harrison was busy basking in the limelight of his solo work. Paul McCartney was busy with a new band. John Lennon was in full swing with his new projects while also getting involved in protest culture, and Ringo was just doing whatever Ringo did. But while taking themselves off to elsewhere, Lennon especially couldn’t resist flinging some insults in the direction of McCartney, never reflecting on the band with much sweetness as the wound was seemingly still sore.
It makes sense. This was a band they’d launched as teenagers, spent basically their entire youth and early adulthood as a group in, and now it had collapsed. The end of any era is complex, the end of any friendship is painful, but as the worlds of professionalism, creativity and personal relationships all blurred into one in the band, the untying was always going to be hard.
That was especially the case between Lennon and McCartney. The two were the closest of friends and the tightest of collaborators. The whole reason songs are registered to the two of them, even if one or the other never went near the track, reflects that spirit of teamwork, honouring the impact and influence they had on each other.
Arguably, the breakdown in that relationship killed the band more than anything else. Things started to collapse the second they started struggling to work together and then decided to cut each other off altogether. By the time McCartney sued the band and put the final nail in the coffin of their friendship, things were already dark, as the strained connection had leached into the way they treated and talked about each other’s talent.
Suddenly, despite their obvious admiration for one another, they were throwing insults. But one of Lennon’s sharpest backstabbing knives seemed to come from insecurity more than anything.
“The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day,” Lennon sings in ‘How Do You Sleep?’, a savage diss-track against McCartney. He’s essentially calling him a has-been, but the reference to the song ‘Yesterday’ seems to knock on a long-running insecurity he held about that hit.
“I think ‘Yesterday’ really triggered his insecurity that Paul may up and leave and become a solo star,” biographer Ian Leslie wrote about the song, “I don’t think Paul was ever going to do that, but I think John worried about that.”
Coming early in the band’s career, ‘Yesterday’ is a key example of a Lennon-McCartney song that was only touched by one of them: McCartney. He claims the song came to him in his sleep, with the artist waking up to the melody with no work needed. For Lennon, perhaps the idea that things came so easily to his bandmate made him turn a little green with envy, or worry he was being left behind. Perhaps the later insult towards the song in that cruel track was merely another reflection of a weakness in Lennon, lashing out at his old friend rather than addressing it.
However, with more time to heal, he was kinder. “I have had so much accolade for ‘Yesterday’. That’s Paul’s song and Paul’s baby. Well done. Beautiful,” Lennon said in 1980, but couldn’t resist adding a more emboldening, “I never wished I’d written it.”
