Paul McCartney Says John Lennon ‘Had a Really Tragic Life’: ‘I Always Admired the Way He Dealt With It’
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There’s a reason John Lennon looks so forlorn in photos, according to Paul McCartney.
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During the 2023 Tribeca Festival on Thursday (June 15), McCartney sat down for an upcoming episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast to preview the rock star’s new book 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which features nearly 300 mostly unseen photos of The Beatles in their first years as a band. Explaining why Lennon — who was no more than a teen at the time — looked especially downcast in some of the images, the Wings frontman shared that his late friend had a particularly sad upbringing.
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“[John] had a really tragic life,” McCartney recalled to O’Brien, according to Entertainment Tonight. “As a kid, his mother was decreed to not be good enough to bring him up. … His father had left the home when John was 3. So that’s not too wonderful.”
“John grew up with these sort of little minor tragedies throughout his life,” the 80-year-old musician continued. “It made me realize why he had that vulnerability. I always admired the way he dealt with it because I’m not sure I would deal with the stuff he went through that well.”
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1964: Eyes of the Storm arrived Tuesday (June 13), and was compiled by McCartney using decades-old photos he took himself on a 35mm camera. It captures a young McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr right as they were on the cusp of a level of global fame that’s since gone down in history as “Beatlemania.”
“What I love about [these photos] is the innocence,” he told O’Brien of the project. “We didn’t know we were going to [become] famous. We really wanted to be [famous], but we didn’t know.”
And though Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of cancer in 2001, McCartney also recently said that a final Beatles song was in the works thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today earlier this week. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. … So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.”
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