Beatles News
When death and celebrity mix, it can make for an especially compelling narrative, as was the case for a story involving John Lennon’s ghost making itself known in the studio during The Beatles’ mid-1990s reunion. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (or the “Threetles”) met in February 1994 to work on an unreleased Lennon demo that would become part of the band’s Anthology 1 compilation album.
Some corners of the internet suggest Lennon’s ghost was there in the studio with the rest of his bandmates. But are we really to believe a dead rockstar was lurking in the shadows?
The Story of John Lennon’s Ghost in the Studio
In August 2025, The Mirror published a story that cited an unlinked interview with Paul McCartney conducted by OnHike.com. For whatever it’s worth, this writer was unable to track down the primary source of this interview. But for context purposes, we’ll repeat the narrative published in the British tabloid. In the alleged conversation, McCartney recalled a series of uncanny occurrences happening mid-recording sessions.
“There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio,” he said of the sessions for Lennon’s demo, “Free As a Bird”. “Noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things. There was just an overall feeling that John was around. We put one of those spoof backward recordings on the end of the single for a laugh to give all those Beatles nuts something to do. I think it was the line of a George Formby song. Then we were listening to the finished single in the studio one night, and it gets to the end, and it goes, ‘zzzwrk nggggwaaahhh jooohn lennnnnon qwwwrk.’ I swear to God. We were like, ‘It’s John. He likes it!’”
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
A “lot of money” borrowed by George Harrison landed him his first musical instrument.
Even before he bought his first guitar, Harrison was obsessed with the instrument. His attention at school would suffer because he was “drawing guitars” and he eventually managed to convince his mother to purchase him his first guitar. It marked quite an expensive purchase too, with the £3.10 loaned to Harrison for a “little acoustic” instrument. The Beatles‘ Harrison said: “When I was thirteen or fourteen I used to be at the back of the class drawing guitars, big cello cutaway guitars with F holes, little solid ones with pointed cutaways and rounded cutaways.
“You know, I was totally into guitars. I heard about this kid who had a guitar and it was £3.10 it was just a little acoustic round guitar and I got the £3.10 off my mother, that was a lot of money in those days.” It was a similar story for McCartney, who shared early musical influences with Harrison and would end up trading his way to a guitar.
McCartney said as much on the Anthology documentary, and recalled his early years of musical influences. He said: “My dad bought me a trumpet for my birthday, at Rushworth & Draper’s (the other music store in town), and I loved it.
“There was a big hero-thing at the time. There had been Harry James – The Man With The Golden Trumpet – and now, in the Fifties, it was Eddie Calvert, a big British star who played Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White – all those gimmicky trumpet records. There were a lot of them around back then, so we all wanted to be trumpeters.
Source: Ewan Gleadow/cultfollowing.co.uk
George Martin had a natural flair for music. He was fascinated by orchestras from a young age and studied oboe at Guildhall before working in the BBC’s classical music department. After not long doing that job, Martin found his true calling at EMI in Abbey Road as a record producer. He was head of Parlophone at 29 and, in 1962, he met a band from Liverpool that had been rejected by pretty much every label in the country, one he remembered as "Not very in tune. They weren't very good." But they were special, they were the Beatles. Over the next eight years, Martin became the architect who made the ideas of the Beatles become a reality. He experimented endlessly and crafted a sound of depth for the band that would catapult them into global sensations.
George Martin Brought Class to the Beatles
Martin’s classical training was invaluable, but perhaps an initial shock to the pop system. Paul McCartney recalled the time he presented the classic “Yesterday,” and discussed the arrangements with Martin. In this talk, Martin calmly suggested putting a string quartet on the record, and McCartney responded, thinking it was a bad idea, as they were a rock and roll band. Ultimately, McCartney shared that “with the gentle bedside manner of a great producer [Martin] said to me, ‘Let us try it and if it doesn’t work we won’t use it and we’ll go with your solo version.’" This attitude from Martin shows his gentle approach as a producer, perfectly balancing his own ambitions with an artist-first mindset. A touch of class indeed.
Source: Fiona MacPherson-Amador/collider.com
The guitar featured on All My Loving was a “last-minute” idea, according to songwriter Paul McCartney.
The Beatles‘ hit would have a recognisable guitar line throughout the track, but it would be added at the very last moment. John Lennon would play the riff on the With The Beatles song, and McCartney would say this instrumental addition was a difference-maker. In his book, The Lyrics, McCartney shared the help Lennon offered to the song with the instrumental addition. While it’s difficult to pin down when the Wings frontman wrote the song (he has said he thought of the lyrics while shaving, and also wrote it on a tour bus), the song is one of the many great hits of The Beatles. It drew consistent wordplay and, released on November 22, 1963, became one of the Fab Four’s biggest, early hits. Though it has the Lennon-McCartney writing credit, it’s the latter name which is behind the song.
Lennon was full of praise for the song even after the band had broken up, saying All My Loving is a “damn good song” in an interview given months before his death. Speaking to Playboy in 1980, Lennon said: “[I]t’s a damn good piece of work … But I play a pretty mean guitar in back.”
That guitar line was a last-minute addition, according to McCartney, who needed a strong riff to carry his With The Beatles track. He wrote in his book, The Lyrics, that the triplets chord structure was a spark of genius which gave the song its unique sound. He wrote: “The thing that strikes me about the All My Loving recording is John’s guitar part; he’s playing the chords as triplets.
“That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the UK at the end of the fifties.
All My Loving is a historic release from The Beatles, with it being the first song the band played on American television. Their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show saw the Fab Four play the McCartney-penned track. McCartney would suggest it was the song which catapulted The Beatles into their global success.
Source: Ewan Gleadow/cultfollowing.co.uk
Individual Beatles members got together on several occasions after the band broke up. Though they were never all in the studio as a foursome again, different duos and trios broke off from the pack, creating pseudo reunions for fans to get excited about. The one pairing that never could work things out, at least musically, was Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The two took jabs at each other in their solo discographies, making it known that at least part of their breakup as a band was to do with this fracturing relationship. Lennon tapped George Harrison for one of his most cutting songs about McCartney. Harrison found it intensely “nerve-wracking” to work on this Lennon project. Find out why below.
The title track to Lennon’s 1971 album, Imagine, is his most famous work from his post-Beatles career. The rest of the album was similarly popular upon its release, but it may not be as widespread as Lennon’s magnum opus ballad.
Other than “Imagine,” the most interesting part of this album is “How Do You Sleep?” Lennon penned this song as a reaction to his broken partnership with McCartney. He certainly didn’t set out to spare McCartney’s feelings with this song, basically undermining all of his hits up to that point.
What made this song all the more hurtful was the fact that Lennon enlisted Harrison to help out on guitar duties. It’s bad enough that your former bandmate wrote a sonic slap in the face for you; it’s another to have a second bandmate jump in on the disrespect.
Harrison’s “Nerve-Wracking” Post-Beatles Team-Up
George Harrison once spoke about the recording of this track, calling it “nerve-wracking as usual.” The quiet Beatle found working with Lennon a tenuous task. Because of the band’s fallout before their breakup, it was up in the air whether or not things would go smoothly.
Source: American Songwriter
In 1966, the Beatles famously stopped touring, despite being arguably the biggest musical act in the entire world with millions of fans who wanted nothing more than to see the Fab Four perform live.
The decision to quit touring was made for a multitude of reasons, as the members of the Beatles explained in subsequent years, but one thing was abundantly clear: the band felt far more comfortable in a studio setting than anywhere else. That was where the magic happened.
"We feel that only through recordings do people listen to us, so that is the most important form of communication," Paul McCartney said to Hit Parader in May of 1967. "Now we take time because we haven't any pressing engagements like tours to limit us. All we want is to make one track better than the last. We make all 'A' sides and never go into the studio thinking 'This will be our next single.' We just make tracks, then listen to them and decide from what we have what will be a single, what will go on to an LP."
This attitude worked out in the Beatles favor, to put it mildly, both in their native U.K. and across the big pond in the U.S. At the time of this writing, the Beatles have the most No. 1 hits on the American Billboard chart, with 20 songs having reached the coveted position.
We've decided to rank them, taking into consideration their craftsmanship and impact as a hit single, particularly as it pertained to American audiences.
20. "The Long and Winding Road / "For You Blue"
If anything, the announcement of the Beatles' breakup in April of 1970 only further propelled the success of their final album, Let It Be, which was released in the U.S. on May 18 of that year. A week prior to that, "The Long and Winding Road" was released as a single with the B-side "For You Blue." Both songs performed well enough on the radio that Billboard charted them together, resulting in the Beatles 20th and final No. 1 hit in the U.S.
19. "Hello, Goodbye"
"Hello, Goodbye" is notable for being the Beatles' first release following the death of manager Brian Epstein. It was, admittedly, not John Lennon's favorite, to put it kindly. "That's another McCartney. Smells a mile away, doesn’t it?" he later recalled. "An attempt to write a single. It wasn't a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano." The attempt worked anyway, spending three weeks at the No. 1 spot.
Source: Allison Rapp/ultimateclassicrock.com
The influence that The Beatles' 1967 album 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' had on music cannot be overstated. The psychedelic masterpiece became the soundtrack to that year's 'summer of love' and reimagined what could be done with an album.
It was the brainchild of Paul McCartney, who came up with the idea of a song by a fictional Edwardian military band. This developed into an album concept, allowing the band to move away from their mop-top image and try something a bit more creative.
Having retired from touring in 1966, The Beatles wanted to focus on experimenting in the studio and advancing their sound. They also wanted to reinvent themselves, tired with the clean-cut and fresh faced image they had during the first half of the 1960s.
About that, Paul said: "We were fed up with being The Beatles. We really hated that f***ing four little mop-top approach. We were not boys, we were men ... and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers". The band's sound had evolved over the previous two studio albums. 1965's 'Rubber Soul' is widely viewed as starting that process, before the 1966 album 'Revolver' saw The Beatles really experiment and embrace new techniques. Paul took the lead on the 'Sgt Pepper' album, having developed its concept but John Lennon was never a fan of the finished product.
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Writing in 1978 about wanting to spend less time with music and more time with his family, he said: "The lesson for me is clear. I've already 'lost' one family to produce what? Sgt Pepper? I am blessed with a second chance". He added: "If I never 'produce' anything more for public consumption than 'silence', so be it. Amen."
Source: Dan Haygarth/liverpoolecho.co.uk
In 1974, David Bowie was fresh off his reign as the glam-rock’s biggest act. After his breakthrough success that began with Ziggy Stardust and continued through Diamond Dogs, he was about to make a turn toward soul and funk with his next album, Young Americans.
Despite his success, he could still be in awe of his idols. When the opportunity to meet John Lennon arose that year, Bowie was beside himself. Like millions of teens in the 1960s, he had been a Beatles fan. His own career began to take off in the mid 1960s, during which time he flirted with influences ranging from the Rolling Stones to the Who to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. But while Bowie never dabbled in the Beatles’ style of pop, but he was enamored of the group, and John Lennon in particular.
“Oh hell, he was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas. “I felt such kin to him in as much as that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside, on the periphery of what was the mainstream — and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered populist and make it work. He would take the most odd idea and make it work for the masses.
“And I thought that was just so admirable. I mean, that was like making artwork for the people and not sort of having it as an elitist thing. There was just so much about him that I admired. He was tremendous, you know?”
By 1974, Bowie had moved to New York, the same city to which Lennon had emigrated in 1971. It was perhaps inevitable the two would meet. It happened soon after at a party given by actress Elizabeth Taylor. All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
“I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way,” Bowie recalled of their meeting. As his longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti revealed in a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 4, Bowie was intimidated by the former Beatle.
“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” he recalled. When shortly after the party Lennon scheduled a visit to Bowie, the singer insisted Visconti come along “to buffer the situation.”
Source: guitarplayer.com/Elizabeth Swann
Paul McCartney and John Lennon's songwriting skills didn't just benefit The Beatles. The dynamic duo penned numerous tracks that became hits for other artists during the 1960s.
In the early part of the decade, The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein leveraged John and Paul's talent to boost other artists he managed. He would commission them to write songs or distribute songs they'd already written to other artists in his roster, such as Cilla Black and Bootle-born Billy J. Kramer and his band The Dakotas.
But it wasn't just Epstein's artists who benefited. John and Paul also wrote 'I Wanna Be Your Man', The Rolling Stones' first hit, and gifted songs to bands like Badfinger ('Come and Get It') and Peter and Gordon ('A World Without Love'), which turned into massive successes. Meanwhile, McCartney confirmed he was in floods of tears as he tried to write an 'emotional' song.
Peter and Gordon, in particular, reaped significant benefits from John and Paul's work. Paul had written 'A World Without Love' when he was just 16, reports the Liverpool Echo.
When he moved in with then-girlfriend Jane Asher in 1963, her brother Peter Asher (of Peter and Gordon) heard the song and asked if he could have it. Paul didn't think the song was up to par for The Beatles to record, so he was happy to give it away, having already offered it to Billy J. Kramer. Peter then recorded it with Gordon, and it was released in February 1964 on an album of the same name. It soared to number one in both the UK and the USA.
It marked the inaugural song credited to John and Paul that wasn't performed by The Beatles to climb the charts. Paul subsequently penned the track 'Nobody I Know' for Peter and Gordon as a follow-up to their chart-topper, before the duo recorded another Lennon-McCartney composition 'I Don't Want to See You Again'. Paul then chose to launch an experiment. With the next track he crafted for Peter and Gordon, he opted to use a pseudonym.
Source: John O'sullivan, Dan Haygarth/irishstar.com
Paul McCartney has been accused, on several occasions, of being corny. He might be guilty, but is it a bad thing? As he famously said, Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs / And what’s wrong with that? In our opinion, nothing. Sometimes a song needs a little extra sentiment to be good. If you can let go of your corny-meter and enjoy what they have to offer, the three McCartney songs below are stunners.
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is one of McCartney’s cheesiest Beatles offerings. The instrumentation is silly to say the least, but the earnestness with which McCartney delivers his story makes it work. The former Beatle delightfully tells a macabre tale, reveling in the dark humor of it all. Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer / Came down upon her head, McCartney sings with a marked grin.
The juxtaposition between the lyrics and the melody of this song is mounting. It’s part of what could make listeners consider this song corny, and his bandmates reject this idea at first listen. In the end, McCartney believed enough in this song to get it a spot on Abbey Road. Not just any artist could’ve pulled off something so outlandish and gotten away with it. It speaks to McCartney’s confidence as an artist.
“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
All of the Beatles highlighted their affinity for nonsensical lyrics at one time or another. The band was so popular and beloved that they could release a song with no point and make it a hit. McCartney gave that approach a spin with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
This is one of the songs that coined John Lennon’s phrase, “Paul’s granny sh**.” His bandmates chalked this song up to sentimental dribble. While some listeners might share that opinion, others appreciate the upper this song is.
Source: American Songwriter/Alex Hopper
