‘For ten years together he took my songs apart. He was paranoiac about my songs. We had great screaming sessions about them.
‘In the beginning he was a sort of fairground hero. He was the big lad riding the dodgems and we thought he was great. We were younger, me and George, and that mattered. It was teenage hero worship. I’ve often said how my first impression of him was his boozy breath all over me — but that was just a cute story. That was me being cute. It was true, but only an eighth of the truth. I just used to say that later when people asked me for my first memory of John. My first reaction was very simple — that he was great, that he was a great bloke, and a great singer. My really first impression was that it was amazing how he was making up the words.
‘He was singing “Come Go With Me to the Penitentiary” and he didn’t know one of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great.
‘He became so jealous in the end. You know he wouldn’t let me even touch his baby. He got really crazy with jealousy at times. I suppose I’ve inherited some of that…
‘It’s true I didn’t care for Stu, but I wasn’t against him personally. He just couldn’t play bass. That was all there was to it. I had a functional, ambitious-for-the-group sort of objection to him. He knew he couldn’t play. I was the one who told him to keep his back to the audience. I didn’t want him out to get the bass job. Stu himself left us, to stay on in Hamburg. John asked George first to play bass. I’ve checked that with George the other day. He remembers it well. George refused. So he asked me. I got lumbered with playing bass. It wasn’t my scheme.
‘It was the same with Pete Best. I wasn’t jealous of him, because he was handsome. He just couldn’t play. Ringo was so much better. We wanted him out for that reason.
‘The idea of Brian’s murder is crazy, but all that merchandising trouble is true. We got screwed for millions, but in the end it wasn’t worth suing everybody. We’d never get it all back and it would take such time. We knew most of them would still in the end get away with it. It was all Brian’s fault. He was green. I always said that about Brian. Green.
‘We knew he was gay, but it didn’t matter. For a while he didn’t know that we knew, and we pretended it that way. It didn’t matter. We never discussed it with him. He kept it very private. It didn’t matter. We might make faces at each other behind his back, you know if someone was dressed up in drag. We’d try to catch Brian’s eye, to see if he was blushing. But we didn’t say anything. It was all affectionate. As for that drawing with Brian in the middle of a row of kids in the Cavern, salivating. That is not true. I’ve heard of artistic licence, but that’s ridiculous. The other drawings were meant to be true, as they started with one based on a photograph, so you took this as being true. It’s just part of trying to build up Brian’s gay thing. He never sat in the Cavern. He never mixed anyway. He just stood at the very back, so no one could see him or knew he was there. There was no salivating.
‘I idolized John. He was the big guy in the chip shop. I was the little guy. As I matured and grew up, I started sharing in things with him. I got up to his level. I wrote songs as he did and sometimes they were as good as his. We grew to be equals. It made him insecure. He always was, really. He was insecure with women. You know, he told me when he first met Yoko not to make a play for her.
‘I saw somewhere that he says he helped on “Eleanor Rigby”. Yeh. About half a line. He also forgot completely that I wrote the tune for “In My Life”. That was my tune. But perhaps he just made a mistake on that. Forgot.
‘I understood what happened when he met Yoko. He had to clear the decks of his old emotions. He went through all his old affairs, confessed them all. Me and Linda did that when we first met. You prove how much you love someone by confessing all the old stuff. John’s method was to slag me off.
‘I’ve never come at him, not at all, but I can’t hide my anger about all the things he said at the time, about the Muzak, about me singing like Englebert Humperdinck…
‘If we had to start listing all the times when he hurt me. Doing that one little song on my own, compared with what he said about me…
‘When you think about it, I’ve done nothing really to him, compared with that. Anyway, he did the same with “Revolution 9”. He went off and made that without me. No one ever says all that. John is now the nice guy and I’m the bastard. It gets repeated all the time.’
But until John’s death, I said, the general image was that you were the nice guy and that John was the bastard. Neither of course was true, not completely. Things will soon shake down. Don’t worry. Keep cool.
‘But people are printing facts about me and John. They’re not facts. But it will go down in the records. It will become part of history. It will be there for always. People will believe it all.
‘Anyway, me, George and Ringo have promised to be nice guys to each other from now on. When we meet and talk now I never mention Apple. I’ve learned that. Any mention of Apple just leads to rows and slagging off…
‘I apparently hurt George Martin by default as well. I didn’t know that till I read his book. I didn’t let him do “She’s Leaving Home”. I rang him up, but he was busy, couldn’t make it for two days, or two weeks or something, so I thought what the hell, if he can’t fit me in, I’ll get someone else. I was hurt at the time, which was why I got someone else. Now he says I deliberately hurt him. Well, if that’s the only hurt I’ve done him…
‘John and I were really army buddies. That’s what it was like really. I realize now we never got to the bottom of each other’s souls. We didn’t know the truth. Some fathers turn out to hate their sons. You never know.
‘At Ringo’s wedding, I happened to go to the toilet, and I met Ringo there, at the same time, just the two of us. He said there were two times in his life in which I had done him in. Then he said that he’d done himself in three times. I happened to be spitting something out, and by chance the spit fell on his jacket. I said there you go, now I’ve done you three times. We’re equal. I laughed it off. It was all affectionate. It wasn’t a row. It wasn’t slagging off. He just suddenly said it, and we moved on. But now, I keep thinking all the time, what are the two times that Ringo thinks I put him down…?
‘I suppose we all do that. We never publicly come out with little hurts. George told me the other day of a time I’d hurt him. He’s done worse, I think, like when he said he would never play bass with me again.
‘I was very upset when they said I was just trying to bring in Lee Eastman, because he’s my in-law. In the end, they brought in Klein. As if I’d just bring in a member of the family, for no other reason. They’d known me 20 years, yet they thought that. I couldn’t believe it. John said, “Magical Mystery Tour was just a big ego trip for Paul.” God! It was for their sake, to keep us together, keep us going, give us something new to do.
‘Legally, we were mugs. I still have Lee Eastman, and he’s made a fortune. For me. I was forced to sue the Beatles, in order to prove what I knew. I didn’t want to. I went up to Scotland and agonized for three months, cut myself off, before I decided it was the only way. To sue the Beatles. It was a terrible decision.
‘I still get slagged off for it. In the history books, I’m still the one who broke up the Beatles.