Amongst the sea of fans of The Beatles are pockets of people who revel in the salaciousness of their intra-band drama. Fans who point a metaphorical gun to your head and force you to decide between John Lennon and Paul McCartney as your favourite Beatle, as a means of dividing the fan base into two camps.
They are largely the same people who are quick to remind you that George Harrison and Paul McCartney didn’t, in fact, like each other. Which, as we all know, is nonsense. The truth is, the band were four unofficial brothers, who for the most part of a decade, spent nearly every day with one another, sharing the intimate space of musical ideas.
But the keyword in there, being brothers. Because essentially, any intra-band rivalry was treated with the same flippance as that of siblings. Sure, they would lock horns, dispute ideas and come the end of their tenure, write diss tracks about one another. But to think there was anything other than a deep-running respect and loyalty between the four is complete codswallop, and that extends to the relationship between Harrison and Macca.
But yes, of the four, they were probably the two inhabitants of each spectrum’s end. Harrison famously rolled his eyes at McCartney’s playful indulgence, writing songs that veered too far on the silly for his liking, while McCartney was perhaps the chief stifler of Harrison’s songwriting contributions in the great days of The Beatles.
But does that mean they didn’t collaborate? Of course not. The very essence of the entire band’s ideas would have been hashed out collectively. But then again, where is the true evidence of a Harrison and McCartney track that proves their powerful partnership?
“It says on the label that it was me and George, but I think it was actually written by me,” McCartney said about their early Quarrymen track, ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’. In keeping with the warring narrative, McCartney creates somewhat of a power dynamic in the creation, later adding, “George played the guitar solo!”
Continuing, “We were mates and nobody was into copyrights and publishing, nobody understood – we actually used to think when we came down to London that songs belonged to everyone. I’ve said this a few times but it’s true, we really thought they just were in the air, and that you couldn’t actually own one. So you can imagine the publishers saw us coming! ‘Welcome, boys, sit down. That’s what you think, is it?’ So that’s what we used to do in those days – and because George did the solo, we figured that he ‘wrote’ the solo.”
But these halcyon days of excited artistry didn’t last long, as the pair wouldn’t directly collaborate on another track until 1995, long after the dissolution of the band. The bulk of The Beatles’ discography never saw the pair sit down together, and in 1995, they sought to make that right, penning ‘All For Love’.
In memory of Lennon, who passed 15 years prior, McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr all camped out in Macca’s studio to write the song, which has never officially been released on any platform. It would have undoubtedly been an intimate session that would have rocked the world had it been public, but perhaps dampened the sentimentality of recording once again, without Lennon present.
So with just a Quarrymen song and an unheard Beatles song to their name, maybe critics are right, and deep down, the sibling rivalry was fuelled by something more genuine?