After John Lennon met his wife Yoko Ono in 1966, the couple were inseparable. Paul McCartney has now said (once again) that their presence “had an impact on the dynamics within the group”.
“You had to learn to deal with Yoko, who was literally in the middle of the recording session,” explains the musician in the current episode of his 12-part podcast series “McCartney: A Life In Lyrics.” The Beatles member also tells his podcast partner and poet Paul Muldoon: “Everything that bothers us is disturbing. We would allow that and not make a fuss. And yet I don’t think any of us particularly liked it.”
“It was interference with work. We had our own way of working. The four of us worked with George Martin. And that was basically it. And we’ve always done it that way. Since we weren’t very confrontational, I think we just kept it under wraps and moved on,” says the Briton, reflecting on his dealings with Yoko Ono, who was married to Lennon from 1969 until his death in 1980.
Back in 2016, McCartney commented on the group’s feelings towards her colleague’s partner. “Most bands couldn’t handle that. “We dealt with it, but not particularly well, especially because we were so close to each other,” the British singer-songwriter tells US-based ROLLING STONE. “We weren’t sexist, but the girls didn’t come to the studio – they preferred to leave it to us. When John met Yoko, she was not in the control room or at John’s side. She was in the middle of the four of us,” the musician continued. Meanwhile, the band members and Yoko Ono would behave like “buddies”.
Most recently, Paul McCartney expressed his delight in his podcast about the fact that Russians were listening to their music illegally between the 60s and 80s. “Everyone in Russia remembers the time of the Beatles and how you had to smuggle records, or how there were little rooms where you could [die Musik] could play and didn’t want anyone to know. They didn’t want the authorities to know that they were listening to this banned group, and we loved the idea that we were being smuggled along with Levi’s jeans. “It was like a real cultural arrival,” explains the musician. Furthermore, in the first episode, which appeared on October 4th, McCartney decoded the content of the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby”.