Paul McCartney Says John Lennon ‘Had a Really Tragic Life’: ‘I Always Admired the Way He Dealt With It’

There’s a reason John Lennon looks so forlorn in photos, according to Paul McCartney.

During the 2023 Tribeca Festival on Thursday (June 15), McCartney sat down for an upcoming episode the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast to preview the rock star’s new book 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which features nearly 300 mostly unseen photos of The Beatles in their first years as a band. Explaining why Lennon — who was no more than a teen at the time — looked especially downcast in some of the images, the Wings frontman shared that his late friend had a particularly sad upbringing.

“[John] had a really tragic life,” McCartney recalled to O’Brien, according to Entertainment Tonight. “As a kid, his mother was decreed to not be good enough to bring him up. … His father had left the home when John was 3. So that’s not too wonderful.”

“John grew up with these sort of little minor tragedies throughout his life,” the 80-year-old musician continued. “It made me realize why he had that vulnerability. I always admired the way he dealt with it because I’m not sure I would deal with the stuff he went through that well.” 

1964: Eyes of the Storm arrived Tuesday (June 13), and was compiled by McCartney using decades-old photos he took himself on a 35mm camera. It captures a young McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr right as they were on the cusp of a level of global fame that’s since gone down in history as “Beatlemania.”

“What I love about [these photos] is the innocence,” he told O’Brien of the project. “We didn’t know we were going to [become] famous. We really wanted to be [famous], but we didn’t know.”

And though Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of cancer in 2001, McCartney also recently said that a final Beatles song was in the works thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today earlier this week. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. … So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.”