In 1984, Paul McCartney released his fifth solo album, Give My Regards to Broad Street, the soundtrack to the film of the same name. Fourteen years on from the break-up of The Beatles, the album saw McCartney revisit some of his best-loved work with John Lennon, with reinterpretations of classic songs such as Yesterday (from Help!), Eleanor Rigby (from Revolver) and The Long And Winding Road (from Let It Be). Naturally, while promoting the album with interviews with the world's media, McCartney was often asked about his friendship with Lennon, and, four years on from Lennon's murder, he shared memories of his late friend which shed light on their relationship as never before.
"These are like psychiatrists' questions, I'm trying to work them out for myself," he told the Washington Post's Richard Harrington at one point.
Harrington had asked McCartney if he resented the popular conventional categorisation of the two Beatles - "one raw, driven, deep; the other romantic, sweet, flippant".
"My character comes out more flippant," McCartney acknowledged, "but I know it isn't. I know. I used to talk to John. He was no more deep than I am. We were equally flippant.
"If you look at John's upbringing and my upbringing, mine made me into a very different kind of person," he continued. "My upbringing was very warm, a very comfortable childhood, not a rich upbringing. His family was richer than mine, nobody knows that. John made himself out to be the big working-class hero—he was the least working-class in the group.
"John's father left home when he was three, John went to live with his aunt and uncle, the uncle died; the kid's got to be starting to think, 'It's my fault'. John's mother lived with a waiter that he didn't really approve of - and in those days that really wasn't clever for your mum to be living in sin. John had all of this shit going down... He had all these personal problems and he learned to create a shell, so that if anyone came at him with something, he'd just say piss off, I'll hit you. That comes of insecurity."
In a Playboy magazine interview conducted around the same time, McCartney reflected on the fact that both he and Lennon lost their mothers while in their mid-teens,
"Actually, that was one of the things that brought John and me very close together," he recalled. " Our way of facing it at that age was to laugh at it - not in our hearts, but on the surface. It was sort of a wink thing between us. When someone would say, 'How's your mother' John would say, 'She died.' The person would become incredibly embarrassed. After a few years, the pain subsided a bit, but I think it helped our intimacy and trust in each other."
McCartney went on to admit that he definitely looked up to Lennon, adding, "we all did." He also revealed that Lennon wasn't given to dishing out praise easily: "If you ever got a speck of it," he reflected, "a crumb of it, you were quite grateful."
The former Beatle also went on to acknowledge that the songwriting partnership he shared with his old friend would be impossible to replicate with other musicians.
"I like collaboration," he told Playboy, "but the collaboration I had with John - it's difficult to imagine anyone else coming up to that standard. Because he was no slouch, that boy. He was pretty hot stuff."
But, perhaps in a bid to play down the huge mythology around the Lennon and McCartney partnership, with commendable honesty, McCartney also confessed, "We were the biggest nickers in town. Plagiarists extraordinaire."
Give My Regards to Broad Street may be no-one's favourite McCartney album, but from what he shared with the world's press, it felt like revisiting his storied past allowed McCartney to move forward, at peace with his memories at last.
