Popular music was never the same after The Beatles burst onto the scene in the early 1960s, clad in matching suits and mop-top haircuts. By singing cheerful love songs, the Fab Four soon amassed legions of screaming fans, spawning a phenomenon known as Beatlemania.
The Liverpool foursome crafted songs that took rock and roll to new heights, quickly moving away from simple radio-friendly hits towards more experimental sounds. Proving themselves to be stellar songwriters and innovative musicians, The Beatles defined popular music, becoming the biggest band in the world.
Although The Beatles were made up of four members, most songs were penned by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who demonstrated talents that forced George Harrison and Ringo Starr into a backseat role. While Starr didn’t seem to mind so much, Harrison’s lack of autonomy within the band eventually drove him to temporarily walk away, frustrated with Lennon and McCartney’s intense control.
Harrison was a fantastic songwriter when given the chance to showcase his skills, crafting some of the band’s most successful hits, like ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’. Yet, McCartney was often reluctant to hear Harrison’s ideas, instead relegating him to the background to focus on his own compositions.
That didn’t mean that McCartney wasn’t a fan of Harrison’s work, and he was impressed by his bandmate’s ability to write so many consistently great songs. The pair simply took different approaches to writing music, as evidenced in a quote from McCartney, in which he discussed the making of The White Album’s ‘Martha My Dear’.
In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, McCartney explained, “When I taught myself piano I liked to see how far I could go, and this started life almost as a piece you’d learn as a piano lesson. It’s quite hard for me to play, it’s a two-handed thing, like a little set piece.”
“In fact I remember one or two people being surprised that I’d played it because it’s slightly above my level of competence really, but I wrote it as that, something a bit more complex for me to play,” he added. “Then while I was blocking out words, you just mouth out sounds and some things come, I found the words ‘Martha My Dear.’”
McCartney added: “So I made up another fantasy song. I remember George Harrison once said to me, ‘I could never write songs like that. You just make ’em up, they don’t mean anything to you.’ I think on a deep level they do mean something to me but on a surface level they are often fantasy like Desmond and Molly [‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’] or ‘Martha My Dear.”
Evidently, Harrison and McCartney were very different writers, but their individual talents allowed The Beatles to become one of the greatest and most influential bands of all time.
