McCartney/Lennon : le communiqué officiel de Paul

« But I think it’s time that I made it clear what the facts are over this long-running and rather silly dispute.

John and I wrote many songs together but in an article in Playboy magazine John very accurately divided the credit for each of the Beatles songs between us – ‘I wrote this; this one was Paul’s’ etc. – and when I ran the exercise for myself a few years back for Barry Miles’s book ‘Many Years From Now’ I found that John and I were in complete agreement as to who had done what.

« At the very beginning, the first time this ever came up was at a meeting at Brian Epstein’s office in Albemarle Street in London between Brian, John and myself. I arrived at the meeting to find that Brian and John had already independently decided the the billing would be ‘songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

« I said ‘What about McCartney/Lennon?’ They said ‘We’ll do this for now and we can change it around to be fair at any point in the future’.

« Been reassured by this, I let the matter go and our songs became known as Lennon/McCartney songs, a fact I was perfectly happy about.

« Many years later, when we were involved in ‘The Beatles Anthology’ project, instead of using the term Lennon/McCartney, the songs were been creditted as ‘written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’. I made a request to Yoko Ono to have my name put first on the song ‘Yesterday‘, which John had often admitted he had nothing whatsoever to do with.

« I felt that after 30 years this would be a nice gesture and something that might be easy for Yoko to agree with. At first she said yes, but then she rang back a couple of hours later and reversed her decision.