For McCartney it was an eight-day week. While for Lennon only sleeping was the font of creativity. Stuart Maconie on John and Paul’s opposing approaches to life and songwriting

July 1957, the month that two teenage teddy boys called John Winston Lennon and James Paul McCartney first met at a church fête in suburban Liverpool, was also the month that Harold Macmillan told the nation they’d “never had it so good”. What “Supermac” was suggesting was that the British working class – which three-quarters of the Beatles belonged to – was enjoying a period of unparalleled economic prosperity, employment opportunities and job security. The forthcoming sixties would indeed prove to be a good time to be a British worker, and over the next decade no one would work harder, better, more profitably or more productively than The Beatles. But, from their very first meeting, the two principal singer-songwriters of the band displayed contrasting attitudes to work and leisure.

Their differing backgrounds explain why. John may have liked to think of himself as a working-class hero but he grew up in a semi-detached house, opposite the golf club in leafy Woolton, with an indoor bathroom, telephone, servants’ bells and even a name: The Mendips. “That was very posh,” McCartney later reflected. “No one had houses with names where I came from.” He lived here with his haughty, proto-Hyacinth Bucket Auntie Mimi and Uncle George, a milkman and bookmaker from a family of dairy farmers. By contrast, the McCartneys lived in a terraced council house on suburban Forthlin Road.

Paul’s dad was a keen semi-pro musician – a fine trumpeter until he lost all his teeth, a common experience in the less dentally enlightened 1940s and 50s – but Jim McCartney also held down a day job as a salesman at the Cotton Exchange, earning £5 a week. Jim and Mary, Paul’s late mum, were keen for young Macca to train to be a teacher. His influential tutor, Alan Durband at Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, also tried to steer him this way. “We can’t all be Tommy Steele, you know!” he said of Paul’s musical aspirations. In the mid-1960s when Paul visited his old teacher in his new Aston Martin, Durband reflected: “You wouldn’t have got that on a teacher’s wages.” But Paul did, at his dad’s insistence, work several jobs with a local parcel delivery company, SPD, and then Massey and Coggins, a coil winding and electrical engineering company, before throwing in his lot full time with the Silver Beatles, as they were then known, in March 1961.

John’s CV looks rather different – indeed, the Previous Employment section is particularly sketchy. He spent a few weeks in the summer of 1958 toiling at the Viscount Restaurant at Speke airport (later, of course, to be renamed after him) where he is alleged to have spat in the butties he was making as only “rich pricks” could afford to fly. Apart from this, his full-time occupation seems to have been boozing in Ye Cracke pub on Rice Street and confounding his tutors at Liverpool College of Art.

Whereas Paul was a bright and enthusiastic student, intellectually curious if ultimately seduced by the hedonism of rock’n’roll, John nurtured a lifelong suspicion of anything that smacked of artistic or academic achievement – or indeed hard graft. Were it not for The Beatles – and Paul’s particular organisational and creative vigour – John could have become the classic and perennial underachiever. Intelligent but uninterested, capable but distracted, fond of drawing, jokes and rock’n’roll but blithely hostile to any notion of craft or diligence.

In their very first broadcast interview, a hot scoop for Wirral-based hospital radio station Radio Clatterbridge in October 1962, when Paul was asked whether The Beatles was his band, he immediately demurred: “Oh no, John’s the leader”.

This was certainly true in the beginning. The 16-year-old Lennon formed The Quarrymen, his pre-Beatles skiffle outfit while still at school in 1956. But once he was in musical partnership with Paul, if John retained the title of CEO of the fledgling enterprise, it was by dint of the astringency and assertiveness of his domineering personality, rather than any perceivable work ethic. (Which is not to say that the teenage band didn’t work astonishingly hard – during their 1960-62 stints playing clubs on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn they put in eight hours a night of exhausting, throat-shredding rock’n’roll hopped up on Preludin slimming tablets, beer and the occasional bratwurst.) But by the height of Beatlemania in 1965, McCartney had tacitly assumed a leadership role, which stepped up another level after the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967. Paul’s critics – a shrinking cohort these days – have always seen this as evidence of his megalomania and control freakery. His supporters – of whom I am one of many – find him simply a man who believed raw, native talent also needs a little energy and application.

As The Beatles developed, the life, opinions and – crucially – songs of Lennon and McCartney started to reflect their differing attitudes to work and leisure. Few artistic partnerships have ever embodied such an elegant contradiction. John frequently seemed to view work as a nuisance imposed first by school and family and subsequently late-stage capitalism, as exemplified by managers and record companies. Paul approached his vocation like a man who, if denied a recording studio, would simply build one in the garden and then cheerfully book himself in for the afternoon session.

From the onset of Beatlemania, John found the unprecedented mania surrounding life in the Fab Four too taxing for his essentially somnolent nature. In 1966, he wrote his great hymn to the idle life “I’m Only Sleeping”, a song which is not merely a joke about oversleeping – and being constantly woken up by McCartney for afternoon songwriting sessions – but practically a manifesto. Lennon reframes inactivity as philosophical resistance. The world insists on constant motion and productivity, but Lennon calmly points out that lying in bed thinking interesting thoughts might be the more rational activity. Don’t spoil his day, he’s miles away. In a London Evening Standard piece of 4 March 1966, his journalistic confidante Maureen Cleave wrote, “He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England.” Lennon told her: “I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with anymore.”

McCartney was always the more dynamic of the duo. He tended to celebrate effort and engagement as positives. Even scenes about ordinary life usually involved purposeful movement. Consider “Penny Lane,” a song filled with bus drivers, barbers and bankers going about their business: the tone is affectionate rather than ironic. Work is simply part of the texture of life. His “Paperback Writer” has taken years over his magnum opus and needs a steady job. Even amid the dreamy haze of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul is looking forward to the age of 64, when, after a life of scrimping and saving, he and his family can rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight “if it’s not too dear”.

This difference occasionally irritated Lennon, as evidenced in “We Can Work It Out”, where McCarney’s optimistic “Try to see things my way” verses rub up against John’s angsty middle-eight response of life being too short for “fussing and fighting, my friend”. To Lennon, McCartney’s enthusiasm could look suspiciously like hard work, a slightly square thing for such a gear rock star to be seen embracing. Yet Lennon also relied on it. Without McCartney’s persistence, many Beatles songs might have remained half-finished sketches.

Leisure, meanwhile, occupied very different roles in their lives. Lennon treated it as the natural state of being. The famous honeymoon “bed-ins” he staged with Yoko Ono in 1969 transformed inactivity into performance art. Staying in bed for peace was both a political gesture and a comic demonstration that sometimes doing nothing is the most dramatic action available. McCartney’s idea of leisure was more pro-active. When The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, Lennon largely withdrew into domestic and psychedelic contemplation. McCartney, however, began seeking new projects. He attended avant-garde concerts and explored the London art scene, helping John Dunbar, Peter Asher and Barry Miles set up their famous Indica bookshop – the very venue where John would meet Yoko for the first time in 1966. What looked like leisure was also research.

This divergence could be seen in stark relief after The Beatles’ acrimonious breakup in 1970. Riled by McCartney’s August 1971 dig at him and Yoko, “Too Many People” from Ram, John swiftly retaliated with “How Do You Sleep?” on September 1971’s Imagine. Following a move to New York, a handful of albums and an 18-month “lost weekend” with personal assistant May Pang, Lennon stepped away from the music business from 1975-80, dedicating himself to raising his and Yoko’s son Sean, baking bread and sailing. His treasured “house-husband” period was a genuine attempt to escape the machinery of professional creativity.

McCartney, by contrast, only managed a brief, unhappy period of drunken torpor on his Scottish farm before he pulled himself together. Forming a new band with wife Linda and former Moody Blues guitarist/singer Denny Laine in 1971, he got a van and started turning up unannounced at universities, playing to students for 50p a pop. Wings would go on to tour the world, releasing seven albums and a steady stream of hit singles during their ten-year existence. Critics often mocked Macca’s relentless productivity, but it reflected his fundamental comfort with work as a way of structuring life. The album titles – Red Rose Speedway, Band on the Run, Wings at the Speed of Sound – reflect those choices.

Lennon, returning to music in 1980 for a tragically short comeback with Double Fantasy, gently defends his withdrawal on “Watching the Wheels”: “No longer riding on the merry-go-round / I just had to let it go”.

John and Paul’s personal philosophies most brilliantly collided in Sgt Pepper‘s extraordinary climax, “A Day in the Life”. Lennon’s dreamlike verses drift through surreal newspaper reports, existential reflections and abstracted melancholy. McCartney’s mid-section abruptly introduces a brisk morning routine: “Woke up, fell out of bed/Dragged a comb across my head.” While Lennon contemplates the strangeness of existence, McCartney rushes to catch the bus. The song’s and The Beatles’ genius lies in how naturally these perspectives coexist. And in the end, both John and Paul made their life’s work out of play, conveying with their songs that the undiminished natural consequence of that is joy.

This article is from the new issue of the Idler (#110) July 2026 – out now.

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