#mark lewisohn

[james-winston]

Went to see Mark Lewisohn’s show back in June 2023 (Hornsey Road, so focused on the later years of The Beatles), and he played the This Week interview, where he deliberately rewound and paused at this moment:

Then he talked about how this was a reminder of how close they’d both been, and how he feels (probably like we all do), that The Beatles break up was especially sad because of what it did to John and Paul’s relationship. That it led to them saying things they probably regretted.

Then he pointed back at that image and said, “but that, that’s the truth.”

[thewalrusespublicist]

Hello thewalrusespublicist! I appreciate your research and attitude to empiric evidence and I truly do like your blog.

I am reaching out to you because I'm interested in what is your view on people who hold some position of authority in the beatledom who hold the belief that Paul's grief and love for John is to a certain degree performative.

For example, Yoko said that only after John's death it became important for Paul to let the world know that John loved him and that Paul himself loved John (implying he's doing it for clout) and that it was up to her to pick up the scraps every time Paul hurt John when he opened up to him and that nobody has ever hurt John the way Paul did. She also said the love has been lost both ways.

Mark Lewisohn also claimed that he thinks Paul was obviously shocked by the news but that he wasn't really mourning evidenced by the fact that he had been spreading untruths very soon after John's death (and because he's an experienced Paul McCartney observer).

Now, what is curious to me is why Yoko is apparently claiming something else publicly (there is also an audio of her and Sean celebrating Paul's reviews tanking) and privately to Paul (who claimed she called to tell him John really loved him. This reminds me of the recent "Yoko called Paul to ask him whether John was gay as if she didn't know" controversy).

Personally, I do tend to at least question Paul's claims of Yoko calling him because it makes no sense to me at all she would be doing that, I am also of the opinion that "All We Are Saying" is not John being positive about Paul at all (especially if you read the whole thing, not just excerpts), rather just very hurt and there is an audio interview for the Love You Make book with Paul calling John and Yoko 'suspicious people' about six months before John's death and more.

I completely understand how people view the opinion that someone is faking their grief as callous and I think it's completely believable for someone to grief their loved one for the rest of their life but I think it's also important to take an emotional step back to see whether there may not be any truth to the fact that it may not be completely as it seems in this particular case without the need to through ourselves out there for a person we don't know personally.

And if Yoko and Lewisohn are talking out of their asses, why?

Hi Anon,

Thank you for your question!

You have sent me a very complex question, which I have a very simple answer to:

Yoko and Lewisohn are talking out of their asses.

I'll explain my reasoning in two sections.

I am well aware that I do have a strong, yet informed, opinion on this which others will disagree with and people are entitled to those opinions as I am to mine. I have a background studying death practices and culture around death and also listen to a lot of podcasts and videos on the topic of death and grief. I would highly recommend anyone that thinks Paul is over-egging or being slightly performative about his grief to listen to accounts of other people that have gone through traumatic loss. Their stories and responses to the loss are near identical in many cases to what Paul has said about John. They dream about their loved ones, think about them everyday and WANT to talk about them all the time. To say that Paul partially wants to talk about John all the time is because we the viewer, listener etc. want to hear him talk about John all the time is in my mind a pretty distasteful and unfair mischaracterization of Paul and reduces him down to a showman stereotype rather than a real person. It's rare that grieving people get the platform that he has to talk about a loved one to the extent that he has. One example I will use from a podcast I have been listening to is a man who among other losses lost his brother in a traumatic way when he was in his early twenties. He felt he couldn't talk about it or process it for years until his mid fifties where he wants to talk about it constantly and does so by spreading the message through his podcast.

My question related to this is: how widespread are we meant to believe the performance is? Is he performing to interviewers over many hours like during the Man on the Run interviews where Morgan became convinced he thought of John all the time? Is he performing whilst bursting into tears during private interviews which are meant to be used for biographies and not for public engagement? Is he performing to his music friends by crying in front of them about a dream he had with John as late as 2019? Was he performing when he made the painting of his and John's faces merged, the classical musical piece recounting John's dying moments and the upcoming movie with John as a main character? Or is all of this actually an extremely human reaction of a man who has lost a soulmate of his?

Now for Yoko and Lewisohn, lets start with Lewisohn as it's more straightforward. First up, never ever trust a man who says that he is a very experienced Paul McCartney observer. Above all because Paul's nearest and dearest have struggled to know what he's thinking, let alone a biographer who has never been on intimate terms with him. Lewisohn had at some point had personal dealings with Paul and had grown to not like him and grew biased against him. A perfect example of this bias is Lewisohn claiming that Paul stopped the Wings magazine because he no longer looked good in pictures, despite it being in the direct aftermath of Linda's death. In Lewisohn's world, Paul's vanity and egotism trumps all private feelings of grief and loss and the root of his behaviour. I personally cannot agree with this take and find that example with the Wings magazine alone shockingly insensitive and shallow. And what untruths are these exactly? What he said in a phone call that was meant to be private and was him ranting? Or something else? I can't think of an untruth Paul said directly but please correct if wrong.

As for Yoko, its integral to remember that Yoko said those comments publicly and privately were at two very separate stages in time. She said those things privately close to John's death when the two were having a truce period and Paul and Linda came round to see her. I am surprised you would question the veracity of Yoko saying these things to Paul as Paul to my knowledge has never lied in that way about anything like that and it's in my opinion highly uncharacteristic for him to lie like that so close to John's death about something that is so personal to him and then repeatedly over the years. This is a man who questioned whether John loved him for years, he isn't going to lie about something that emotionally significant for him. As for the calling to tell him John might be gay, she was telling random guests that at the dinner table and had previously sent random postcards to Paul about his horoscope pre John dying, it's not that unlikely.

For the public statements, she said those excerpts when her relationship with Paul was once again in the pits. Paul was doing well at the time and the fact of the matter is imv that Yoko and Paul naturally don't get on as people, don't understand each other and the history between them makes it worse. And Paul was right in that interview, Yoko and John were suspicious people, and Yoko is quite paranoid and has a history of saying things that are true to her rather than an objective truth. She said stuff like that publicly because it hurts Paul, it puts Paul down in the press, she's insecure about John's legacy and was the ear to a lot of John's rants about Paul and her and John shared in a lot of distorted thinking. I'm not saying that Paul hasn't done anything that Yoko wouldn't fairly feel hurt and distrustful about, but overall she is a poor source on what Paul thinks or feels, especially when she's mad at him.

And finally for the not very nice quotes going back and forth between the two, yes I am of the opinion that there was a lot between John and Paul that needed to be sorted still in 1980. However, that doesn't mean that people don't grieve as a result, the grief becomes more complex and in some ways more traumatic. It's rare that human relationships run smoothly or without difficulty or that grievers only have positive feelings. I get the strong impression that Paul also holds rage and confusion towards John, that doesn't negate the love and grief though.

I think most telling on how Paul feels and fared in the aftermath of John's death are his actual nearest and dearest who out of anyone would have the best grasp on his private thoughts. Mike McCartney said that John was a soulmate to Paul and people didn't realise the amount of love there, Linda said that no one could understand the depth of bond John and Paul had, Paul's son James said he didn't feel comfortable talking about John with his dad as it's too delicate a topic and Paul had been knocked for six by John dying and all the children found John's stool for him as a Christmas present as they knew how important it was to their dad. If the people who know him best in the world talk about a soulmate connection and emotional devastation in reaction to John's death, i'm far more inclined to believe them than anyone else.

[bodhbdearg]

Did Mimi "squat" Mendips?

In my recent review of the book The Making of John Lennon by Francis Kenny (2018), I noted a story from John's half-sister, Julia Baird, who claimed that Mimi got her house "Mendips" via squatting. A couple of people enquired if that claim was true so I looked into it in more detail.

The claim seems to originate in Julia's memoir Imagine This (2007). Julia doesn't specify her own source for the story but it was presumably another family member, as Julia herself was not born when these events supposedly took place (around 1945). Elsewhere in the book she describes hearing many family stories from Mimi's sister Anne ("Nanny") when Nanny was in her old age, so that indicates that the story may come from her.

Julia's account is as follows:

By this time [around 1945] Mimi and George had moved into a new home. The house she and George rented in Vale Road, backed on to an identical one, called Mendips, in Menlove Avenue. The two back gardens were separated only by a fence, so Mimi had a clear view of what was going on in the other house. One day she noticed that the tenants were moving out of Mendips. Mimi wasted no time. She immediately started to pile up the Vale Road furniture beside the fence at the bottom of the garden. She then manhandled it over the fence into the other back garden. Within the day, Mimi and George were the new occupants of 251 Menlove Avenue, fronting on to the main thor- oughfare into town. The owner of the house only found out when it was a 'fait accompli'. Which meant that Mimi was a squatter! The law was strongly weighted in favour of tenants during those dark war days. The woman who owned the house had been waiting to sell it when the previous tenants left. Now, she had no choice but to sell to the new incumbents, Mimi and George, if she wanted to realise the money from the house. Mimi was very pleased with herself. As the occupant she was able to drive a hard bargain, relying on possession being nine- tenths of the law.

This account posits Mimi and George as squatting the house first, then buying it at a good price, benefitting from favourable laws towards tenants during wartime.

I then checked Tune In: The Extended Edition, because if anyone is likely to have investigated this claim using primary documentation, it's Lewisohn. He doesn't mention the squatting claim (though he does use Baird's book as a source for other things) and has this to say about the purchase of Mendips:

The purchasing deposit [for Mendips] was paid with money inherited from Francis Smith's [Uncle George's father] suicide, beyond which George and Mimi had a mortgage with the Leek & Moorlands Building Society - the monthly repayments met partly with rental income (from letting out The Cottage to Mimi's sister Harriet) but mostly through prudent budgeting.

Now, I know Lewisohn is famous for his attention to detail, but even that seems like a lot of information for something as mundane as a house purchase. I wondered if he dug up all that documentation (I'm assuming he has documentation) - down to the name of the building society - specifically to counter the claim of squatting - without explicitly mentioning it? I don't know, but the level of detail, even for Lewisohn, is striking.

The thing is, these two accounts don't necessarily contradict each other. Baird has Mimi and George squatting first, then buying - presumably they could be using the exact same deposit and mortgage as Lewisohn describes. While Lewisohn's account doesn't mention squatting, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Lewisohn's account has the advantage of being backed up by documentation (again, assuming he has documentation) while Baird's is a reported account from someone (Nanny, probably) who wasn't there, and which Baird also did not witness herself. But, at the same time, Baird is literally family, so will have been privy to oral accounts that, even if distorted, could have a grain of truth and by their nature wouldn't leave a paper trail.

Albert Goldman's biography, for all its flaws, was fairly thoroughly researched, and there's no mention there of squatting, fwiw.

My feeling is Baird's anecdote is so oddly specific that it's likely it has some basis in truth, but could be distorted and exaggerated. It isn't proved or disproved by Lewisohn's documentation of the eventual purchase of Mendips. Baird also has another account - this time something she did experience herself - of another Stanley sister (Harriet "Harrie") seemingly taking over a house that Baird and her sister were under the impression John had bought for their use. It's not proof of anything, but if true, may indicate a pattern of behaviour among at least two of the Stanley sisters regarding the getting and keeping of houses.

[dragonbunny25]

I like visiting r/beatles for technical discussions about the songs (it's the one thing I think they do more of than tumblr), but when it comes to exploring the nuances of the band dynamic or the interpersonal relationships or some deep analysis of the Beatles themselves, they're the worst.

Don't get me started on their discussions of the wives/girlfriends. Came across a post a few days ago with photos of John and Cynthia where people were commenting stuff like, "he was clearly never in love with her", and "poor John, she seemed like a bore, nothing special."

Yeah let's sweep all those beautiful love letters he wrote to her in Hamburg under the rug, why don't we. Sure those don't mean anything. And let's make broad, general statements about the entire personality of a woman they've never met, but their gut feeling is telling them this, so it must be right, you guys.

So uninformed about the topic yet stating their shallow opinions with such confidence it's like I'm at a frat party.

Or hell, to make a Beatles comparison: It's like that podcast where Mark Lewisohn claimed John couldn't have been a heroin addict because he was "too productive". Cause apparently he's an expert on drug addicts as well.

That's it, rant over lol.

[torchlitinthedesert]

I was writing about how Paul started writing with John, and how that story has been told. Once you’ve noticed that Paul wrote songs first, you can’t unsee it. And you can’t help spotting which writers just haven’t noticed, and who is actively going LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL when they have to mention Paul bringing songwriting into the group. (I’m curious to see how the new Ian Leslie book handles this; the first review I’ve seen says the partnership “began in earnest in 1962”, which suggests Leslie has at least looked beyond the usual “they met at Woolton Fete and almost immediately started writing together” take.) Anyway, here’s a LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL compilation, because some of these are outrageous

During the 1960s, the official band narrative presents JohnandPaul as a unit, keeping their contributions carefully balanced. Here’s Hunter Davies, the jumping-off point for most later accounts:

[Paul] played a couple of tunes to John he had written himself. Since he’d started playing the guitar, he had tried to make up a few of his own little tunes. The first tune he played to John that evening was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.

Not to be outdone, John immediately started making up his own tunes. He had been elaborating and adapting other people's words and tunes to his own devices for some time, but he hadn't written down proper tunes till Paul appeared with his. Not that Paul's tunes meant much, nor John's. They were very simple and derivative. It was only them coming together, each egging the other on, which suddenly inspired them to write songs for themselves to play.

After the breakup, rock journalism tended to take John’s side, and downplay Paul. Here’s Philip Norman in Shout! (1981), doing a virtuoso hatchet job:

Paul McCartney had always used his guitar to help him make up tunes. His main objective in the Quarry Men, however, was to oust Eric Griffiths from the role of lead guitarist. One night at the Broadway Conservative Club, he prevailed on the others to let him take the solo in a number. He fluffed it and, later, in an attempt to redeem himself, played over to John a song he had written, called I Lost My Little Girl. John, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul - and by Buddy Holly - he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.

Did you think, dear reader, that writing your own songs might be a significant artistic breakthrough? No, no, it’s just a backup weapon in Paul’s Machiavellian plot against poor Eric. This is his “main objective”, and he’s manipulated the others into letting him grab a solo. Norman has, by the way, already admitted that the Quarrymen all recognised that Paul was a stronger musician than the rest of the group. Is it reasonable for the best guitarist to want to play a solo? Clearly not.

For maximum whiplash, compare Norman telling the same story 27 years later, in John Lennon: The Life (2008).

The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, “I Lost My Little Girl,” had been written in 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become “When I’m Sixty-four” (which he thought “might come in handy for a musical comedy or something”).

For a fifteen-year-old Liverpool schoolboy - indeed for any ordinary mortal - this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock’n’roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practiced only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.

Just imagine if Norman had published that second version in 1981. Shout! was one of the most influential Beatles books, shaping the narrative for decades to come. Even Norman now admits its extreme bias, but you can still see its lingering influence. (Also, what a natural-born hater Norman is. When he puts his Paul-bashing on hold, he makes up some fictional songwriters to despise instead.)

Next up we have Mark Lewisohn, who doesn’t write Paul as the Evil Grand Vizier, but keeps shuffling the pack to put John front and centre whenever a breakthrough happens. His prologue to Tune In is a snapshot of John and Paul writing together at the very beginning of their partnership:

Towards the end of 1957, John wrote Hello Little Girl and Paul came up with I Lost My Little Girl; the similarity in their titles was apparently coincidental but both were steeped in [Buddy Holly and] the Crickets’ sound…Buddy Holly was the springboard to John and Paul’s songwriting. As John later said: “Practically every Buddy Holly song was three chords, so why not write your own.” Stated so matter-of-factly, it could seem that writing songs was an obvious next move, but it wasn’t. Teenagers all over Britain liked Buddy Holly and rock and roll, but of that great number only a fraction picked up a guitar and tried playing it, and fewer still, in fact hardly anyone, used it as the inspiration to write songs themselves. John and Paul didn’t know anyone else who did it, no one from school or college, no relative or friend… and yet somehow, by nothing more than fate or fluke, they’d found each other, discovered they both wrote songs, and decided to try it together.

When Lewisohn disagrees with the accepted narrative, he’s usually very keen to show you all his evidence for why everyone else is wrong. Here he suggests John wrote Hello Little Girl first, without discussion. Then he quotes John on getting the idea to write songs, before discussing what an important innovation that was. Right at the end, he says they both wrote independently - but John is in prime position throughout.

As you read on, he acknowledges Paul’s pre-Quarrymen songs, framing them as juvenilia (“exceptional for a first attempt by a boy on the cusp of 14”). Giving I Lost My Little Girl a later date than everyone else, Lewisohn notes that when Paul performed it on MTV Unplugged, his “vocal includes a Holly hiccup, pinpointing its creation to post-September 1957”. (Because the way Paul sings something in 1991 must be exactly how he sang it from the beginning.) Lewisohn also ignores the many interviews in which John says he started writing after seeing Paul’s example.

Obviously, these distraction tactics sell Paul short. But I think they harm John, too. If you’re interested in him as an artist, don’t you want to know how he developed? What he learned, how he used those influences to shape his own voice? How he and Paul worked, together and apart? How they saw their partnership, how that fed into their competitiveness, ambitions, or insecurities? Mary Sue Blorbo Leader John is no good to me. And, more than 60 years on, memories have faded and sources have died; we’ve lost so many chances to look at how they really worked. John and Paul both deserve better.

[letterboxd-loggd]

Evolver 62 (2026) Chris Purcell

April 6th 2026

[eppysboys]

"Brian’s other companion was Rita Harris, a NEMS employee. She’d been at Great Charlotte Street several months when a deep friendship dropped into place at the company’s annual staff dinner-dance, Christmas 1959. He seems to have confided in her from the start: “He was not a very happy person. He was so lonely. He said no one was really happy but that one should aim to be reasonably content. He admitted he was a homosexual and talked about it frequently: it used to make him very depressed. He hated himself for it, and never remembered being any other way.”

The intimacy of Brian’s revelations—his need to confide, and hers to listen—stirred something. Love developed on both sides, though it wasn’t consummated. He spoke to Rita of his private life using the record-business term “new releases”—he once wrote saying, “The New Release has stopped selling. Trouble is that having sold quite well for quite a time, it’s difficult to clear away bad stock.” (This sounds like a longish relationship—Brian had precious few of these.)

Through staff appointments, Brian kept friends close by. Ray Standing, another Great Charlotte Street employee, saw a pattern: “I think there were nine blokes working at Nems at one time and only three of us were straight. The Walton Road shop was OK because that was his dad’s store, but when Brian opened up in town that’s when they started to flock in, so to speak. - Tune In, Mark Lewisohn

[tavolgisvist]

The boat called Yoko and The boat called Paul

accidental - more or less - coincidences

1 To look in the eye

You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away…

(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, 1997)

“This is sort of what went on the ’60s a bit. You thought, Well if I’m going to go with this person for the rest of my life, like John and Yoko or me and Linda, I really ought to look them in the eye all the time. And John and Yoko really did spend a lot of time (stares manically). And it got fairly mad, they’d sit there looking at each other, going It’s gonna be all right, it’s gonna be all right. After a couple of hours of that you get fairly worn out.”

(Paul McCartney, interview with Paul Du Noyer, 1989)

2 David Bailey photo session January 1965

and

Susan Wood photo session 26 November 1968

3 White walls

'Paul had a nice idea about opening up white houses, where we would sell white china, and things like that, everything white, because you can never get anything white, you know, which was pretty groovy…'

( John Lennon , December 1970, Jann Wenner interview for Rolling Stone magazine)

It's difficult starting write from scratch with Yoko there. 'Cause I start writing songs about white walls. Just 'cause, you know, just 'cause I think she…I think John and Yoko would like that, you know. And they wouldn't.

(Paul McCartney, Get Back sessions)

.

4 Tittenhurst

"I knew the house, because John and I had been to look at it with the other Beatles couples a year ot two earlier. [...] For a crazy moment we's considered buying it and all move in together, in a kind of Beatles commune. How strange that now it was John and Yoko's home."

(Synthia Lennon, John, 1988)

5 Chalk and cheese / Cows and cheese

‘When I caught sight of him, when John brought him home for the first time, I thought “Oh-ho, look what the cat’s dragged in,”’ Mimi later recalled. ‘He seemed so much younger than John–and John was always picking up waifs and strays. I thought “Here we go again, John Lennon… another Shotton.”’ Even Paul’s immaculate manners could not thaw her. ‘Oh, yes, he was well-mannered–too well-mannered. He was what we call in Liverpool “talking posh” and I thought he was taking the mickey out of me. I thought “He’s a snake-charmer all right,” John’s little friend, Mr Charming. I wasn’t falling for it. After he’d gone, I said to John, “What are you doing with him? He’s younger than you… and he’s from Speke!”’ After that, when Paul appeared, she would always tell John sarcastically that his ‘little friend’ was here. ‘I used to tease John by saying “chalk and cheese”, meaning how different they were,’ she remembered, ‘and John would start hurling himself around the room like a wild dervish shouting “Chalkandcheese! Chalkandcheese!” with this stupid grin on his face.’”

(Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman, 2016)

Q: "Why did you collaborate with Yoko on this LP?" JOHN: "It's like a play and we're acting in it. It's John and Yoko - you can take it or leave it. Otherwise (laughing) it's cows and cheese, my dear! Being with Yoko makes me whole. I don't want to sing if she's not there. We're like spitiual advisors. When I first got out of the Beatles, I thought, 'Oh great. I don't have to listen to Paul and Ringo and George.' But it's boring yodeling by yourself in a studio. I don't need all that space anymore."

(John Lennon, The September 29th 1980 issue of Newsweek)

6 Names

.

.

7 Two lovers on the beach

PAUL: ...We just write the songs first, and then uh, just shove ‘em in anywhere, as George said. Especially in the uh, sunset scene at the very end of the picture, where the two lovers – that’s George and Ringo – are coming towards each other on the beach… [general laughter] And they just finally meet – well, actually they don’t quite meet, they just run past each other, and both dive into the sand and as they do... JOHN: [in background] They both light a cigarette. PAUL: [laughs] Yeah, that’s it. The sun goes down

(May-June, 1965, Twickenham Film Studios, interview with Elliot Mintz)

gifs by thebeatlesordie

8 Paris

1961

John and I went hitchhiking. George and I did it a couple of times too. It was a way to get a holiday. Maybe our parents booked holidays, but we wouldn’t have known how to. So we would head out, just the two of us, with our guitars. John was older, but I was in on the decision about where we might go. He’d got a hundred pounds from his uncle, who was a dentist in Edinburgh, for his twenty-first birthday, and we decided we’d hitchhike to Spain by way of Paris.

(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present , 2021)

John: "Paris has always been the object of English romanticism, hasn't it? I fell for Paris first of all, even before Hamburg. I remember spending my 21st birthday there with Paul in 1961 . . ." <…> Aunt Mimi told the Liverpool Echo that she remembered the time that John slipped off to Paris to "sell his paintings" and that some unsuspecting Frenchman has a Lennon original on his wall.

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

Gustafson [Johnny Gustafson of the Big Tree] happened to bump into them the day they left, Saturday, September 30. “They both had bowler hats on, with the usual leather jackets and jeans. They said they were off to Paris, so I walked down to Lime Street station and watched them go. They were an incredible pair: always great fun, irreverent and so close.

(Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn, 2013)

I remember, we tried to hitchhike to Spain once, but we only got as far as Paris. We liked it so much, we stayed there, just the two of us. We were in this little hotel in Paris; it was so cheap it had fleas. My mum was a nurse, we were very hygienic, then you end up there – bloody hell! Those things bring you together.

(Paul McCartney, January 2021, UNCUT)

In October 1961 John turned 21. That was the big birthday then. Mater came down from Scotland to celebrate this special day with the family at Mendips. I remember her fussing over John, ruffling his hair and saying how wonderful he was. Her present was a gift of £100, which she told John was ‘from Mummy’. I had the same myself, on my 21st, and used it for a deposit on a house. John spent his on a trip to Paris with Paul. They meant to hitch-hike to Spain, but only got as far as Paris. They wore leather jackets and bowler hats to hitch rides, as a gimmick, to show people they weren’t ruffians. It worked. They got rides and had a wild, drunken time for ten days.

 (Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon by Julia Baird, 2007)

As Jürgen says, “It sounds conceited but it’s the truth: they really wanted to look like me.” At their request, he took them to the weekend flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, at the northern end of Métro Line 4. Searching through the racks, John bought a green corduroy jacket like Jürgen’s, Paul found an eye-catching patterned polo-neck, and they looked for—though didn’t find—the Vollmer style of shoes, “like half-boots.” Their most daring purchase was two pairs of flared trousers, similar though different to the bell-bottoms worn by sailors—but the first time John and Paul wore them was also the last. As John would explain, “They were flapping around, and we felt like fools in anything that wasn’t skintight, so we sewed them up by hand that very night’—a comment that conjures up the quaint image of Lennon and McCartney working away with needle and thread under a murky light in a Montmartre hotel room. But alteration was essential: they knew precisely how the trousers, if left unchanged, would be received back home. What was OK in Paris would not be OK in Liverpool; the Beatles’ audience was mixed male and female and they didn’t want to alienate either by, in John’s words, coming across queer.’

(Tune In by Mark Lewisohn, 2013)

PAUL: We went to Paris – we were supposed to be in Spain, but we couldn’t get past Paris, we enjoyed that so much – on the strength of his hundred quid [given to him] when he was twenty-one. We went hitchhiking. We kind of said, “Well, look, I mean, we can get to Spain on this,” you know, a hundred quid, and he was kind of um… I mean, I don’t think he was funding me as much as he was spending. JULIA: Yeah, yeah. PAUL: And I’d be there for the banana milkshake. [Julia and Paul laugh] You know, I’d just happen to be there while he was spending. I think I kind of paid my own way. But we hitched, we hitched out. And we used – we realised that in – hitching, in those days, was much safer, obviously, than it is to hitchhike now – and we realised that we had to have a bit of a gimmick. So we both had these leather jackets and we had bowlers, we got bowler hats. We thought that’ll take the edge of the kind of hoodie look, you know, that sort of ruffian look, in these bowlers. And you kind of go, “Hey!” and people would stop, you know, because this is just a couple of daft guys in bowler hats, they don’t look like a threat. So we hitched down to Hoek van Holland or somewhere, Harwich, Hoek van Holland or somewhere like that, got over to Paris anyway. Got a bit drunk on the French beer, which was great, ‘cause we’d been drinking beer, the British stuff, and we felt we could handle that, but it was this foreign stuff, it really went to our heads. So we had a quite fun crossing there… It was great, it was so adventurous. I’d never done anything like that, I know I’d never been out of Liverpool. I’d been to Pwllheli, Skegness, and Leamington Spa. That had been the whole of my travels, you know. So it was very exciting to get off on your own with a mate like John.

(Paul McCartney interview with Julia Baird, 1987)

We knew what it was like to go on the cross-channel ferry; we knew what it was like to try and hang out in Paris. We would walk for miles around the city, sit in bars near Rue des Anglais, visit Montmartre and the Folies Bergère. We felt like we were fully paid-up existentialists and could write a novel from what we learnt in a week there, so we never did make it to Spain. We’d been together so much that if you had a question, we would both pretty much come up with the same answer.

(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present , 2021)

1969

'Between us,' Yoko says, 'we were very psychic. We knew all the time what the other was thinking, what was going to be said by the other, our responses, everything. It was sometimes unnerving.'

(Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman, 1993)

John and Yoko, still in Paris, had tried to get married on the cross-channel ferry but were refused permission to board The Dragon at Southampton because of “inconsistencies in their passports”. Peter Brown at Apple found that they could get married on the British-governed island of Gibraltar. <…> John: “We chose Gibraltar because it is quiet, British and friendly. We tried everywhere else rst. I set out to get married on the car ferry and we would have arrived in France married, but they wouldn’t do it. We were no more successful with cruise ships. We tried embassies, but three weeks’ residence in Germany or two weeks’ in France were required.

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

"On March 19, 1969, I saw John Lennon again in Paris, late in the morning. He had arrived at the Plaza Athénée during the night accompanied by his new girlfriend, Yoko Ono. They left with me in a taxi to visit the Puces. Once on rue des Rosiers in Saint-Ouen, John asked me to show them this place that he found "magical". That was the word he used."

(Henry Pessar)

John and Yoko perusing the stalls at the flea market, Porte de Clignancourt, in particular purchasing jeans from an old lady who appears oblivious to the stature of the person she is serving (photo by Henry Pessar)

Their [John and Yoko] wedding was unconventional but romantic. Based in Paris for a couple of weeks in March 1969, they decided to charter a plane and marry in Gibraltar. <….> 'We are two love birds,' he said. 'Intellectually we didn't believe in getting married. But one doesn't love someone just intellectually. For two people, marriage still has the edge over just living together.' <…> They had their honeymoon, he explained, before the wedding. 'Just eating, shopping and looking round Paris. In love in Paris in the spring was beautiful. We're both tremendous romantics!' <…> Back in Paris after only a seventy-minute stay in Gibraltar, John and Yoko went to the Plaza Athenee Hotel. <…> John said that from then on they would do everything together, as artists and as husband and wife.

(Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman, 1993)

9 Number 9

He believed the sign of a marriage 'written in the stars' was that the names of John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon together featured the letter 'o' nine times.

(Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman, 1993)

…And nine was a hugely significant numeral to the Lennons, a magic integer that seemed to mysteriously recur throughout John’s life. Yoko would rattle off the number’s many repeated appearances: John was born on the ninth of October. She was born on the eighteenth of February (one plus eight). The first home he lived in—his grandfather’s house—was at 9 Newcastle Road. Paul McCartney’s last name has nine letters…

(We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me by Elliot Mintz, 2024)

10 Two Virgins and Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

Two Virgins

recorded 3-4 (or 19–20) May 1968, released 29 Nov(UK), 11 Nov 1968 (US)

August 31 Private Eye announced that John and Yoko’s forthcoming album would have a full-frontal nude cover. September 15 Around this date, John and Yoko photographed themselves in the nude, from the front and rear, intending to use the shots as cover artwork for their rst collaborative album. November 11 John: “Originally, I was going to record Yoko, and I thought the best picture of her for an album would be naked. So after that, when we got together, it just seemed natural for us both to be naked. Of course, I’ve never seen my prick out on an album before.”

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

Autumn 1968:

As the meeting was drawing to a weary close, John, not this day with Yoko, who hadn’t seemed particularly connected with what was going on, said he wanted to play us a tape he and Yoko had made. He got up and put the cassette into the tape machine and stood beside it as we listened. The soft murmuring voices did not at first signal their purpose. It was a man and a woman but hard to hear, the microphone having been at a distance. I wondered if the lack of clarity was the point. Were we even meant to understand what was going on, was it a kind of artwork where we would not be able to put the voices into a context, and was context important? I felt perhaps this was something John and Yoko were examining. But then, after a few minutes, it became clear. John and Yoko were making love, with endearments, giggles, heavy breathing, both real and satirical, and the occasional more direct sounds of pleasure reaching for climax, all recorded by the faraway microphone. But there was something innocent about it too, as though they were engaged in a sweet serious game. John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit. However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence. After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.” The others muttered something and the meeting was over.

(Michael Lindsay-Hogg (filmmaker), Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, 2011)

Inevitably, many people bought Two Virgins for the cover alone: for some of the Beatles’ younger fans, it was to be their first ever glimpse of grown-ups in the nude.

(Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, 2020)

Paul: So what’s the point behind Two Virgins? <…> Paul: Is there any need to do this in public, Mr. Lennon?

(Get Back sessions, January 14th, 1969)

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

recorded 9, 10 October 1968; released 22 Nov (UK), 25 Nov 1968 (US)

designing the White Album poster during Sept-Oct 1968

I was up on the flat roof [in Rishikesh] meditating and I’d seen a troupe of monkeys walking along in the jungle and a male just hopped on to the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular. Within two or three seconds he hopped off again, and looked around as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and she looked around as if there had been some mild disturbance but thought, Huh, I must have imagined it, and she wandered off. And I thought, bloody hell, that puts it all into a cocked hat, that’s how simple the act of procreation is, this bloody monkey just hopping on and hopping off. There is an urge, they do it, and it’s done with. And it’s that simple. We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t. So that was basically it. Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? could have applied to either fucking or shitting, to put it roughly. Why don’t we do either of them in the road? Well, the answer is we’re civilised and we don’t. But the song was just to pose that question. Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? was a primitive statement to do with sex or to do with freedom really. I like it, it’d just so outrageous that I like it.

(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, 1997)

PLAYBOY: “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” LENNON: That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That’s how it was getting in those days. We came in and he’d made the whole record. Him drumming. Him playing the piano. Him singing. But he couldn’t—he couldn’t—maybe he couldn’t make the break from the Beatles. I don’t know what it was, you know. I enjoyed the track. Still, I can’t speak for George, but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that’s just the way it was then.

(John Lennon, 1980, All We Are Saying by David Sheff, 2020)

The song’s (very) slightly risqué lyric, all two lines of it, heightened the vague air of controversy surrounding the album. McCartney was already in trouble with the press for allowing a minuscule nude picture of himself to be included on the set’s free poster.

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

“All this work, all this talent — and what [the press] fixate on is one small picture.”

(Derek Taylor)

To be continued, I suppose