Paul McCartney says John Lennon ‘didn’t know the words’ during The Quarrymen performance where they met

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A chance encounter that would bring The Beatles together had John Lennon forget the words to a song he was performing, Paul McCartney says.

Recalling the moment the pair met in an episode of Anthology, McCartney suggested Lennon’s performance was partly improvised. A mutual friend introduced the pair at the village fete where The Quarrymen were performing, and for McCartney, it was a real turning point. Lennon would also recall the moment the pair met in interviews given before his death in 1980, with the Imagine hitmaker saying he performed Bee Bop a Loo La during the performance. McCartney recalled: “I had a friend at school, Ivan Vaughn. We were great mates.”

“One day he said ‘do you want to come to the Woolton village fete?’ and I said, ‘yeah,’ so we went along one Saturday afternoon, and I remember coming into the field of the fete and just a bit over there there was a wagon and on the back was this a little stage and up on the stage were a few lads, and there was one particular guy at the front with a chequered shirt and a sort of kind of blondish kind of hair, little bit curly, sideboards, looking cool.

“He was playing guitar, one that was guaranteed not to crack, not a very good one, but he was making a very good job of it and I remember being impressed. He was doing a song by The Del Vikings called Come Go With Me and the thing about it was he obviously didn’t know the words, but he was pulling in lyrics from blues songs.

“So instead of going ‘come little darling come and go with me’ which is right, he’d then go ‘down down down to the penitentiary’ and he’d be doing the stuff he’d heard on Big Bill Broonzy records and I thought, ‘that’s clever, he’s pretty good.’ That was John.”

Lennon would say of the encounter: “Paul met me, the first day I did Bee bop a loo la live on stage. A mutual friend brought him to see my group, The Quarrymen.” The pair would go on to have a writing partnership that created some of the greatest songs of all time.

Though the pair were writing together during their time in The Beatles, a song McCartney wrote after the Fab Four had split up angered Lennon. The Ram song Too Many People from McCartney does not name drop Lennon or Yoko Ono, but does hit out at the “lucky break” The Beatles had afforded Lennon. McCartney sings of Lennon making his “first mistake,” which he said was taking his “lucky break” and breaking it in two.

Lennon was enraged by the comments made by McCartney, and shared as much with the readers of Crawdaddy Magazine. He wrote: “I heard Paul’s messages in Ram – yes there are dear reader! Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh!

“I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things. So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day’. A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad. What am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter’, sung – get it?”