Paul McCartney Reflects on How a Shared Passion With John Lennon Led to the Creation of The Beatles

Paul McCartney is the subject of a new installment of the Audible audio series Words + Music titled The Man On The Run. The three-hour presentation looks at McCartney’s life and music career following the 1970 breakup of The Beatles.

The feature includes interview clips of McCartney recorded during the making of the documentary Man On The Run, which got its TV premiere in February on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.

[RELATED: Paul McCartney Featured in New Installment of Audible’s ‘Words + Music’ Audio Series That Includes Previously Unheard Interview Clips]

The audio presentation includes interview segments that didn’t appear in the movie. In one of these segments, Paul reflects on how The Beatles amazingly came together after he, John Lennon, and George Harrison met as teenagers in their hometown of Liverpool, England.

“I was just some kid living in this house in Liverpool, and through a friend of mine I met this other guy who was living in his house,” McCartney explained. “And that turned out [to be] John. And I happened to have a neighbor, George, and none of us had any musical knowledge at all, but we liked guitars. So we were learning guitars, each separately.”

Paul went on to discuss how he and Lennon initially bonded about various shared interests.

“When I got together with John, it was lovely, because I said to him … ‘Well, what kind of things do you like?’” McCartney shared. “And … he liked literature. So we talked about Lewis Carroll and ‘Alice In Wonderland’. In his house, they had the whole set of Winston Churchill’s books, and John read a lot of them. So we could talk about stuff like that. I liked literature and stuff.”

John Lennon Was the First Person Paul McCartney Met Who Also Liked Writing Songs

Not surprisingly, one of the main things McCartney and Lennon had in common was a love of writing songs.

“And then [John] said, ‘And I like songwriting,’” Paul remembered. “I said, ‘What?! Oh, so do I.’ And you know, no one had ever said that to me. No one had ever agreed with my love of songwriting, or I’d never had an opportunity to agree with anyone else’s. I didn’t know anyone who wrote songs. So it was great.”

After finding out about Lennon’s interest in songwriting, Paul and John quickly decided they should get together and collaborate.

McCartney recalled inviting Lennon to work on tunes at his house.

“My dad was very understanding, ’cause he’d been in a jazz band when he was a kid,” Paul pointed out. “So, he knew that if you wanted to do music, you had to rehearse. So, he was very sympathetic to that. So, yeah, that’s how we’d started. It’s very simply learning how to write songs, learning how to play together, learning how to get a band together, and then learning how to get little gigs.”

How McCartney’s Early Experience with The Beatles Influenced Wings

McCartney then explained that the organic way he and Lennon began writing songs together influenced him when he decided to put together his post-Beatles band Wings.

“I thought, ‘Well, I could get a big supergroup,’ cause that was happening at the time,” he noted. “[I thought,] ‘I could ask … Ginger Baker if he wanted to be on drums, or I could get a bunch of stars,’ but it didn’t appeal to me. And I thought, ‘No, it’s gonna be hard, but we should start like The Beatles started,’ which is like with nothing virtually, knowing not really how to do it and not having any songs.”

You can check out the Words + Music episode The Man On The Run now at Audible.com.

Other Recent McCartney News

The Man On The Run documentary is available now on demand at Prime Video. McCartney also recently released a companion soundtrack album featuring a selection of Wings songs.

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Meanwhile, Paul recently announced plans to play his first two concerts of 2026. The shows will take place on March 27 and 28 at the intimate Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.

(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)