Paul McCartney spoke about what drove him and John Lennon to write music

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Paul McCartney said 'I succumbed to the temptation' as he revealed John Lennon 'incentive'

Paul spoke about what drove him and John Lennon to write music

By Dan Haygarth 

Liverpool Daily Post Editor and Regeneration Reporter

28 Jun 2025

The Beatles pictured on their arrival in London, following a tour of Australia in 1964(Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Paul McCartney and John Lennon were the driving creative force behind The Beatles. The majority of the band's songs were written by the two and credited to Lennon-McCartney, irrespective of how collaborative the writing process was.

In the early days, John and Paul wrote together. But as the 1960s went on and creative differences between them came to the fore, they often wrote independently before presenting songs to one another for final tweaks. They began writing together after meeting at a Woolton church fete in 1957.

Their first works were composed at Paul's childhood home on Forthlin Road in Allerton and at John's aunt Mimi's house on Menlove Avenue. They wrote hit after hit until The Beatles went their separate ways in 1970.

Every song written by John and Paul for The Beatles received that joint credit.

About their partnership, Music and Musicians magazine's Wilfred Mellors wrote in 1972: "Opposite poles generate electricity: between John and Paul the sparks flew. John's fiery iconoclasm was tempered by Paul's lyrical grace, while Paul's wide-eyed charm was toughened by John's resilience."

In a 1980 interview with Playboy, John said about working with Paul: "(He) provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn't write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock 'n' roll.

"But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs - 'In My Life', or some of the early stuff, 'This Boy' - I was writing melody with the best of them."

As for why they wrote the songs, a clip from a BBC interview with Paul from the 1980s that recirculated on social media recently shed some light.

The clip from the BBC archive showed the now-83-year-old quizzed by Sue Lawley about approaching the age of 40, his career and the difficulties of fame.

Paul was in a jovial mood during the chat and took a light-hearted approach to some of the early questions. Sue asked him about what drives him to continue to write songs, then more than a decade after achieving unimaginable success with The Beatles.

He replied: "I could’ve just dried up because there’s no incentive because that was the early incentive, if you’re honest about it. For most people it is just to be successful, to earn money. We used to talk about ‘writing a swimming pool’.

"It was one of those between John and I - you know, you need a pool here, we’d better go and write it. We’d try and write hits for the things we needed or whatever.

The Beatles soon after their arrival in Washington, USA, playing in the snow outside the Coliseum where they were scheduled to perform before a sell-out audience in February 1964(Image: Central Press/Getty Images)

"But that’s not really the incentive actually. I think if I didn’t get paid for it, I think I’d still do it."

Sue then made the point that Paul owned a swimming pool, to which he replied: "I have actually Sue, I succumbed to the temptation but I’ve got kids now, see, so that’s different. I never did get one until I got children."

The clip then showed a later part of the interview, in which Paul was asked about his response to John Lennon's 1980 death. Sue asked him if he contemplated retreating from the public eye after his former bandmate's murder.

He said: "Oh yeah, not half, yeah. I did. But what’s the good? What can you do? You just think, you think a lot. You think for many weeks after it and you try and work it all out but you come down to, there’s nothing you can do."

Then asked if it altered his lifestyle, Paul said: "No it just, I thought it all, went through it all and thought ‘is there any way that and really just decided, no."

"I think if it had been the other way around and you’d been asking John that question I think you’d find he’d say ‘No, you’ve just got to do what you do, really’."