The one singer John Lennon and Paul McCartney called their greatest hero

faroutmagazine.co.uk

The one singer John Lennon and Paul McCartney called their greatest hero

Tim Coffman

 

Mon 8 December 2025

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Any pop singer of the past 50 years who says that they haven’t taken at least a few cues from John Lennon and Paul McCartney is either lying or working with someone influenced by them.

The songwriting duo behind The Beatles have written the entire rule book of what pop music should sound like, and even if some of their songs can seem dated to younger ears, there’s no doubt that pop music would have changed for the worse had they not started everything back in the early 1960s. But they were rock and rollers, too, and they would do anything to follow in their heroes’ footsteps.

Then again, it wasn’t clear whether or not rock and roll was a fad by the time that the Fab Four started making music. Elvis Presley had turned the genre into a mecca from the moment he started shaking his ass, but that didn’t give rock legitimacy. It only proved that it could make money, but Lennon and McCartney felt that they could make high art if they worked together on making the right songs.

It’s not like ‘Love Me Do’ or ‘Thank You Girl’ were brilliant pieces of poetry or anything, but when listening to the way that the melody lands, they were already understanding what made people like the same rock songs they love. And even when they started venturing into new territory on records like Revolver or Abbey Road, there were still the lingering sounds of people like Chuck Berry off in the background.

Because if you talk to any other rocker from around their time, there’s no question that Berry was the beginning of everything. Before him, the sounds of rock and roll had been the likes of rockabilly and blues, but when Berry kicked up the tempo and started singing about kids that loved to play the guitar all night long, those lads from Liverpool had a greater purpose in life. Most people wouldn’t have made it out of Liverpool, but McCartney knew he wanted to follow Berry’s lead.

Aside from the energetic songs, McCartney felt that hardly anyone could match what Berry did, saying, “It was so thrilling. It was a world we didn’t know existed. You couldn’t imagine a time when oldie rock and roll was brand new, but there it was. He was a huge influence on us and we copied a lot from his guitar style. I always saw him as a poet. He continued to influence us for years and years and years.”

And despite Lennon wanting to move on from traditional rock and roll during his solo career, he could never bring himself to give up Berry’s influence, saying, “Berry is the greatest influence on earth. So is Bo Diddley and so is Little Richard. There is not one white group on earth that hasn’t got their music in them. And that’s all I ever listened to.” But when looking at their vocal styles in the band, Lennon was clearly more of a Berry acolyte.

Whereas Macca could reach up into the same stratospheric range that Little Richard got so effortlessly, Lennon had the kind of voice that could tell a story over top of those bluesy chords. He was still at the height of his revolutionary phase back in the mid-1970s, and even on an album that was trying to be as progressive as Some Time in New York City, ‘New York City’ is the kind of record that Berry could have easily written himself had he been born in the middle of Manhattan.

So while everyone can debate on how Elvis Presley changed the world and Jerry Lee Lewis showed everyone what a wild man could be, there’s always only going to be one person that’s credited with starting rock and roll. Others may have had rock and roll songs before Chuck Berry, but if you look at the template for the genre, it was all there before a song like ‘Johnny B Goode’ was even finished.