John Lennon on the Beatles Reforming - Press Release (1973)

"Although John and Yoko and George, and George and Ringo have played together often, it was the first time the three ex-Beauties have played together since, well, since they last played together. As usual, an awful lot of rumours, if not downright lies, were going on, including the possibility of impresario Allen De Klein of grABKCo playing bass for the other three in an 'as-yet-untitled' album called I Was a Teenage Fat Cat. Producer, Richard Perry, who planned to take the tapes along to sell them to Paul McCartney, told a friend, 'I'll take the tapes to Paul McCartney.' The extreme humility that existed between John and Paul seems to have evaporated. 'They've spoken to each other on the telephone, and in English, that's a change,' said a McCartney associate. 'If only everything were as simple and unaffected as McCartney's new single "My Love," then maybe Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis would be reunited with the Marx Bros., and Newsweak could get a job,' said an East African official - Yours up to the teeth - John Lennon and Yoko Ono."

George Harrison on "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)" (1973)

"I once read in the newspaper what Roger McGuinn, of the Byrds, had said. He was about the only one who spotted it, that 'My Sweet Lord' was a prayer, and that's all it was. I had a lot of letters from people saying, 'Oh, you're lost. Why don't you come to church.' They missed the point. With 'Give Me Love,' again it was a personal thing for me and if anybody else got off on it, well, there it was. But it was awareness of what we need, just give me love, thank you. So, at that period, I was really involved and doing a lot of chanting on these little wooden beads during the whole session. It was just a personal thing. Sometimes you open your mouth and you don't know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord and whoever likes it."

John Lennon on Living in America and Britain (1974)

"I don't necessarily want to stay here all the time. I would like to be free to travel anywhere. I like to think of the world as a kind of global village. And the one thing my money gave me was freedom to travel about that village. But the thing is that, just as Paris is the place every artist wanted to be in the last century, America is the centre of the rock world today. This is where it all began. This is the place where rock started and there is still so much energy here. I don't want to become an American citizen or anything. I just want to be allowed in and out like most other British people. Of course there are times when I miss Britain badly and I feel like climbing on a plane and going home. It's the little things you miss, like decent sausages, or a pub I know in London, or seeing the autumn in beautiful places, like Surrey or Wales. I still consider myself as an Englishman and I'll stay that way until I die."

John Lennon on "Band on the Run" (1973)

"It's a good album. I think it's the best he's done."

Paul McCartney on Allen Klein and the Beatles' Money (1973)

"The Beatles could reform now that the manager Allen Klein is no longer involved. When Klein was there, the road was closed against the four of us ever working together. Now, as far as I am concerned, the road is open again. I saw Klein as a sharp operator who could only do harm with the Beatles. The others disagreed. Now they have come round to my way of thinking . . . There's no reason why we should not all work together again now. Klein was one of my main worries. He promised the Beatles the earth but the only one to make any real profit was Klein. At last the others have decided that it was simply not in their best interest to have him as manager . . . Klein takes a percentage and if he could have had his way he would have owned the Beatles lock, stock, and barrel. As it is, the money we earn goes into a central pot. Even some of the money I get with Wings goes into the pot. Every time we say we'd split the pot, Klein would say, 'Think of poor old Ringo, he'll get far less than anyone. You'll have to give him some of your share.' Now I hope it's possible we can all own our own out of what we have earned and divide the pot between the four of us. We've all lived well but we have never touched a penny of the lump of money we have earned as Beatles."

John Lennon on the Beatles' Red and Blue Albums (1973)

"Allen Klein knocked out the basic list for the Red and Blue albums and then we'd just look down it and say, 'Yes, no,' and so on. I made sure they put that picture which I got Linda to take of the same pose as our very first album . . . No one can release old Beatles product without an okay from each of us. I like packages, you know. I approve of anything I would buy myself. I'd buy the Beatles' one . . . I asked for George Martin to reproduce the tracks. I was involved in that respect, just checking on the condition of them, because I didn't want lousy versions going out. I wanted them to be as it was. I asked Capitol/EMI, 'Please ask George Martin to take care of this . . . at least he knows what to do. I don't want some strange guy, you know, making dubbed versions of it and putting it out . . .' I want to talk to George Martin, why were we always putting drums on the right and why wasn't it in the middle? I was surprised. I always thought in terms of mono. Anyway, I wasn't that sold on stereo."

Linda McCartney on the James Paul McCartney TV Special (1973)

"The American critics were very square about it, I mean really square. They said Paul was too cute and what that has to do with it, I don't know! I think everybody expects God to appear whenever Paul does anything. Personally, I liked the show. But we had to compromise a lot in it, like a lot of our ideas were not in it. You see, it depends if you are going towards the critics or the people. The people loved it."

Paul McCartney on "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" (1973)

"This was originally a little thing I couldn't get words to, except for the first phrase. But the words just came to me the day we were due to record, and I think it's turned out quite well."

John Lennon on Visiting Paul McCartney in New Orleans (1975)

"I was supposed to be going down to join Paul in New Orleans, but my personal life sort of interfered with that. I was just too busy being happy. I reconciled with Yoko . . . we're happier than ever before. It's like the old, old story, when you get someone back that you've lost, it is better than ever. We were so wrapped up in each other that I just never made it to New Orleans, sorry Paul."

Paul McCartney on Britain, Family, and Taxes (1977)

"We'll never leave England, despite tax problems. We plan to stay here and so does the Wings pop group. There's no point in living somewhere just for convenience sake, so far as money is concerned. I like it here, so does Linda and so do the children. It's the best place to bring up the kids. I've even taught the missus how to make a cuppa. I am also pleased that our new baby will be a British citizen. I don't mind which it is, but we're expecting another girl. We're used to girls."

Frank Sinatra, Jr. on the Beatles (1977)

"The Beatles have ruined the world! The Beatles are to blame for almost everything that's wrong with the young generation. You name it and it's their fault. I rue the day that the Beatles were, unfortunately, born into this world. They are, in my mind, responsible for most of the degeneration that has happened, not only musically but also in the sense of youth orientation and politically, too. They are the people who made it first publicly acceptable to spit in the eye of authority."

Did John Lennon Believe in God?

For his answer in 1972, watch his response in the clip below:


"Not really, no. I think there's like a oneness or whatever it is, underlying energy or whatever the hell it is, and I just don't accept the religions."

Brian Epstein on Meeting the Beatles

"I saw the Beatles at a midday session, and I liked them enormously. I immediately liked the sound that I heard. I decided that I should at least talk to them and find out, for my own satisfaction, what it was that made them tick. So I pushed my way through to the front and got within speaking distance, allowing for all the noise that was going on. I heard their sound before I met them. I actually think that's important, because I think it should always be remembered that, in fact, people hear their sound and like this sound before they meet them. They are important, but I immediately liked what I heard, and I thought that it was something that an awful lot of people would like. They were fresh, honest and had, what I thought, a sort of presence and star quality, whatever that is."

John Lennon on the Beatles Playing in Hamburg, Germany

"We had to play all the tunes for hours and hours on end. That's why every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. The Germans like heavy rock, you know, so we had to really keep rocking all the time, and that's how we got stomping. It was all four in the bar, because the drummer, Pete Best, could only do four int he bar on his bass drum. So, everything we did was just boom, boom, boom, boom, like that."

Paul McCartney on the Death of John Lennon's Mother

"John was devastated. He loved his mum more than anything, but at that age, you're not allowed to be devastated, particularly not teenage boys. You just shrug it off. I know he had private tears. It's not that either of us were remotely hard-hearted about it, it shattered us, but we knew that you had to get on with your life. We were like wounded animals and, just by looking at each other, we knew the pain that we were feeling, but we weren't going to break down and cry because you just didn't do that kind of thing."

John Lennon on George Harrison and Cynthia Powell

"When George was a kid, he used to follow me and my first girlfriend Cynthia. We would come out of the art school together and he'd be hovering around . . . Cyn and I would be going to a coffee shop or a movie and George would follow us down the street two hundred yards behind. Cyn would say, 'Who is that guy? What does he want?' And I'd say, 'He just wants to hang out. Should we take him with us?' She'd say, 'Oh, okay, let's take him to the bloody movies.' So we'd allow him to come to the movies with us. That's the sort of relationship it was."

John Lennon on "Golden Slumbers"

"That's Paul's, apparently from a poem that he found in a book, some eighteenth-century book where he just changed words here and there . . . He laid the strings on after we had finished most of the basic tracks. I personally can't be bothered with strings and things. I like to do it with the group, or electronics, you know. I can't be bothered with the hassles of the musicians and all that bit, you know. It's such a drag trying to get them together, but Paul digs that. So, that's his scene, and it was up to him where he went with the violins, really, and what he did with them. I think he just wanted a straight kind of backing, you know, nothing freaky . . . White Trash has just done a cover of 'Golden Slumbers.' They made quite a good version of that. It's pretty similar to the track we did, except they've done some nice things with a big organ, a church organ playing a solo. They've done it quite gutsy."

The Beatles in the Studio Recording "And I Love Her" (1964)

Paul McCartney: "Written at Wimpole Street, it was the first ballad I impressed myself with. It's got nice chords in it. George played really good guitar on it. It worked very well. I'm not sure if John worked on that at all. The middle eight is mine. I wrote this on my own. I can see Margaret Asher's upstairs drawing room. I remember playing it there."

Paul McCartney on "You Never Give Me Your Money"

"This was me directly lambasting Allen Klein's attitude to us. No money, just funny paper. All promises and it never works out. It's basically a song about no faith in a person."

John Lennon on "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window"

"This wasn't to do with the American fans. It was when Paul and I went to America to publicize Apple about two years ago, and we were just in the flat we were staying in and he just came out with that line, 'She came in through the bathroom window.' So, he had it for years, and he eventually finished it. Most of the songs [on the album] were started back then, except for 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and 'Golden Slumbers.'"