When Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met, McCartney made it his mission to impress the older boy. Lennon was already in a band, and McCartney was eager to show he could play music as well. Cynthia Lennon said McCartney and Lennon were very different at this point, but they complemented each other well. Still, it was clear to Cynthia — and, she believed, McCartney — that Lennon was cooler.
“Paul’s organized, conscientious way of going about things — he wrote down all the lyrics in a notebook he carried with him — was in sharp contrast to John’s ‘anything goes’ style,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Paul turned up for appointments on time, looking well turned out; he was a perfectionist and you always knew he’d washed behind his ears. John arrived late, looking as though he’d just fallen out of bed.”
When Cynthia met McCartney, he had already formed a close relationship with Lennon. Though she could tell they worked together well, she was struck by how different they were. Lennon’s more laid-back style intrigued McCartney, and he tried to emulate it himself.
“In those days, Paul tried hard to impress John, posing and strutting with his hair slicked back to prove that he was cool, because John was very much the leader,” she wrote. “It was his band, and he had the final say about who got in and who didn’t, and what they played.” Unfortunately for McCartney, Cynthia said he couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Then, he was everything Paul wanted to be — laid-back, self-assured, and in charge,” she wrote. “As the schoolboy he still was, Paul could only aspire to those things.” “There was a lot of aggression around Liverpool; there were lots of Teddy boys, and you had to try to avoid them if you saw them in alleyways,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “If, like John, you were a guy who had lived on his own, you had to put up some kind of a front. So he grew long sideburns, he had a long drape jacket, he had the drain-pipe trousers and the crepe-soled shoes. He was always quite defensive because of that.”
Before McCartney saw Lennon performing at a church fête, he said he did his best to avoid him. “I would see him from afar, from the bus,” he said. “This Ted would get on the bus, and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me, because he was just that much older. This was before I got to know him.”
