Q: 'When I’m Sixty-Four'? A: Paul. I think I hepled Paul with some of the words, like "Vera, Chuck and Dave" and "Doing teh garden, digging the weeds."

(John Lennon, 1972, interview for Hit Parader)

I thought it was a good little tune but it was too vaudevillian, so I had to get some cod lines to take the sting out of it, and put the tongue very firmly in cheek. "Will you still need me?"' is still a love song. "Will you still look after me?"', okay, but "Will you still feed me?"' goes into Goon Show humour. I mean, imagine having three kids called Vera, Chuck and Dave! It was very tongue in cheek and that to me is the attraction of it.

(Paul McCartney in Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, 1994)

Q: 'When I’m Sixty-Four'? A: Paul’s completely. I would never even dream of writing a song like that. There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.

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

Grow old along with me The best is yet to be When our time has come We will be as one <…> Grow old along with me Two branches of one tree Face the setting Sun When the day is done

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

All through the taping of 'Starting Over,' I was calling what I was doing 'Elvis Orbison': 'I want you I need only the lonely.' I'm a born-again rocker, I feel that refreshed, and I'm going right back to my roots. It's like Dylan doing Nashville Skyline, except I don't have any Nashville, you know, being from Liverpool. So I go back to the records I know - Elvis and Roy Orbison and Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis.

(John Lennon, interview with Jonathan Cott, December 5, 1980)

…Only the lonely Know this feeling ain't right There goes my baby There goes my heart They're gone forever So far apart But only the lonely Know why I cry <…> Only the lonely Know the heartaches I've been through* Only the lonely Know I cry and cry for you Maybe tomorrow A new romance No more sorrow But that's the chance You gotta take…**

(Only the Lonely, Roy Orbison, 1961)

*And if I make it through It’s all because of you

**Why must we be alone? It's real love. It's real

No need to be alone It's real love

Give me just one more chance And I'll show you Take up the dance where we left off

If we must start again Well we will know for sure That I will love you

Hold me close, hold me tight, make me thrill with delight Let me know where I stand from the start I want you, I need you, I love you With all my heart Every time that you near, all my cares disappear* Darling, you're all that I'm living for I want you, I need you, I love you More and more <...> Won't you please be my own? Never leave me alone 'Cause I die every time we're apart I want you, I need you, I love you With all my heart

(I Want You, I Need You, I Love You, Elvis Presley, 1958)

*But when I see you, darling It's like we both are falling in love again It'll be just like starting over (over)

Oh, Please Lend your little ear to my pleas Lend a ray of cheer to my pleas Tell me that you love me too Please Let me hold you tight in my arms I could find delight in your charms Every night my whole life through Your eyes reveal that you have the soul of An angel white as snow How long must I play the role of A gloomy Romeo? Oh, Please Say you're not intending to tease Speed that happy ending and please Tell me that you love me too

There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.

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

Grow old along with me The best is yet to be When our time has come We will be as one <…> Grow old along with me Two branches of one tree Face the setting Sun When the day is done

'I was going down to New Orleans to help out on Paul's last album "Venus and Mars", but I was too busy being happy at the time. If you're reading this Paul, I'm sorry I couldn't make it … <…> However, early "75 saw a settlement which finally sorted out some of the legal tangle. To musicians like Lennon no business matter is something they relish, so the interminable legal wrangling must have become a source of both inconvenience and frustration. Now much of it's over John has no reservations about discussing it:

'All it did actually was to get us paid directly-the main thing about the settlement was to release the monies to ourselves. It did not break all our ties with each other, because it's a bit more complicated than that and we're pretty well tied up in many ways. <…> 'I didn't leave for tax reasons. In fact I was an idiot, I just came over here [USA], and after I'd been here about six months decided to stay. If I'd done it properly I should have informed all the right authorities and I would have got one year's drop-out tax-some vast amount of money. I think I got some kind of a bargain later on but I missed the big bargain that everyone else leaves for. I just never thought about it … goofy here missed it. <…> Anyway, I missed a million pounds or something. What I'm saying is, it'll come some other way, I'm not going to sweat about it.'

(For the New Year John has a message for all, 'I said stay alive in '75-and that goes for '76 too.' As we go to press we hear that John Lennon has won his appeal and has got his green card. This means he can now stay in America, or more to the point, he can leave America and return. Nice one John.)

<…>

Q: "I read somewhere that you were very moved by the whole thing." [John and Elton John at Madison Square Garden 28 November 1974] JOHN: "I was moved by it, but everybody else was in tears. I felt guilty 'cause I wasn't in tears. I just went up and did a few numbers. But the emotional thing was me and Elton together. Elton had been working in Dick James's office when we used to send our demos in and there's a long sort of relationship musically with Elton that people don't really know about. He has this sort of Beatle thing from way back. He'd take the demos home and play them and… well, it meant a lot to me and it mean a hell of a lot to Elton, and he was in tears. It was a great high night, a really high night… <…> Q: "You went through a period of really heavy involvement in radical causes. <…> How did all of this affect your work?" JOHN: "It almost ruined it, in a way. It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet. Even if it does go ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, da-deedle, deedle, it. <…> I realized that we were poets but we were really folk poets, and rock & roll was folk poetry - I've always felt that. Rock & roll was folk music. Then I began to take it seriously on another level, saying, "Well, I am reflecting what is going on, right?" And then I was making an effort to reflect what was going on. Well, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work as pop music or what I want to do. It just doesn't make sense. You get into that bit where you can't talk about trees, 'cause, y'know, y'gotta talk about 'Corruption on Fifty-fourth Street'! It's nothing to do with that. <…> …I've come to learn something big this past year. I cannot let the Top Ten dominate my art.<…>Because if I let the Top Ten dominate my art, then the art will die. <…>I'm an artist. I have to express myself. <…>The art is more important than the thing and sometimes I have to remind meself of it. Because there's a danger there, for all of us, for everyone who's involved in whatever art they're in, of needing that love so badly that… In my business, that's manifested in the Top Ten." <…> I'm a freakin' artist, man, not a fuckin' racehorse."

(Paul McCartney, April 16th 1971, interview with Richard Merryman for Life Magazine)

 So that's why when people ask me for a precis of my story, I put, 'born, lived, met Yoko.' because that's what it's been about.

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

‘I told John on the phone the other day that at the beginning of last year I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership. It’s taken me a year to realise that they were in love. Just like Linda and me.’

(Paul McCartney, interview, Evening Standard, April 21-22, 1970)

"And I've changed. The funny thing about it is that I think alot of my change has been helped by John Lennon. I sort of picked up on his lead. John had said, 'Look, I don't want to be that anymore. I'm going to be this.' And I thought, 'That's great.' I liked the fact he'd done it, and so I'll do it with my thing. He's given the okay. <…> I think what John did [Paul's talking about Get Back cover but it's linking with the other things too] was tremendous from the point of view of 'Okay, so we are actually going to go our own ways.' You just can't be as tied together as we were for so long a period of time, unless you all live in the same house. From then onward it was to be a question of living your own life, which was the first real turn-on for me in a long time -- and this coincided with my meeting Linda. So early in 1970 I phoned John and told him I was leaving the Beatles too. He said, 'Good! That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.'

(Paul McCartney, April 16th 1971, interview with Richard Merryman for Life Magazine)

Q: "What was Paul's attitude to you as things progressed?"

YOKO: "Paul began complaining that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording, and that I should be in the background." JOHN: "Paul was always gently coming up to Yoko and saying, 'Why don't you keep in the background a bit more?' I didn't know what was going on. It was going on behind my back."

Q: "So did that contribute to the split?"

JOHN: "Well, Paul rang me up. He didn't actually tell me he'd split, he said he was putting out an album. He said, 'I'm now doing what you and Yoko were doing last year. I understand what you were doing.' All that shit. So I said, 'Good luck to yer.'"

(John Lennon, September 1971, interview with Peter McCabe and Robert Schonfeld)

Remember Linda's on it ['McCartney' album] too, so it's really a double act.

(Paul McCartney, April 9th 1970, press release 'McCartney')

Q: "If you got, I don't know what the right phrase is… 'back together' now, what would be the nature of it?"

JOHN: "Well, it's like saying, if you were back in your mother's womb… I don't fucking know. What can I answer? It will never happen, so there's no use contemplating it. Even is I became friends with Paul again, I'd never write with him again. There's no point. I write with Yoko because she's in the same room with me."

YOKO: "And we're living together."

JOHN: "So it's natural. I was living with Paul then, so I wrote with him. It's whoever you're living with. He writes with Linda. He's living with her. It's just natural."

(John Lennon, September 1971, interview with Peter McCabe and Robert Schonfeld)

Allen was there, and he will remember exactly and Yoko will, but this is exactly how I see it. Allen was saying don’t tell. He didn’t want me to tell Paul even. So I said, “It’s out,” I couldn’t stop it, it came out. Paul and Allen both said that they were glad that I wasn’t going to announce it, that I wasn’t going to make an event out of it. I don’t know whether Paul said “Don’t tell anybody,” but he was darned pleased that I wasn’t going to. He said, “Oh, that means nothing really happened if you’re not going to say anything.”

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

'John had made it clear that he wanted to be the one to announce the split,' Linda McCartney explained years later, 'since it was his idea.' 'He wanted to be first,' her husband confirmed. 'But I didn't realise it would hurt him that much or that it mattered who was first.'

(You Never Give Me Your Money. The Beatles: After the Breakup by Peter Doggett, 2009)

We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us that was what he was going to do. <...> So he rang me up that day and said I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing, I’m putting out an album, and I’m leaving the group too, he said. I said good. I was feeling a little strange, because he was saying it this time, although it was a year later, and I said “good,” because he was the one that wanted the Beatles most, and then the midnight papers came out.

(John Lennon and Yoko Ono, September 1971, interview with Peter McCabe and Robert Schonfeld)

‘Wedding Bells’ is what it was. ‘Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.’ We used to sing that song, Gene Vincent did it. It was like an army song and for us the Beatles became the army. We always knew that one day ‘Wedding Bells’ would come true, and that was when it did.