Oh.. :-) … Look At These Two Sweet And Shy Boys!

The Beatles, photographed by Jean-Marie Perier

“This band was like… They were like a single person. It was an odd phenomena, in fact, that they seemed to move together and think together. It was almost like a little family unit.” - Eric Clapton, Living in the Material World

Paul’s adorable reactions to John’s teasing

“You remember little things about people. I remember sort of seeing him and he comes in and gives me a hug and says ‘touching is good.’ I’ll never forget that. Touching is good. So I do a lot of hugging now.“

-Paul McCartney on John Lennon

1965 Beatles Interview

Source: YouTube

Nobody ever said anything about Paul’s having a spell on me or my having one on Paul! They never thought that was abnormal in those days, two guys together, or four guys together! Why didn’t they ever say, “How come those guys don’t split up? I mean, what’s going on backstage? What is this Paul and John business? How can they be together so long?” We spent more time together in the early days than John and Yoko: the four of us sleeping in the same room, practically in the same bed, in the same truck, living together night and day, eating, shitting and pissing together! All right? Doing everything together! Nobody said a damn thing about being under a spell.

John Lennon,  All We Are Saying, David Sheff (1980)

Paul McCartney and John Lennon backstage at the Finsbury Park Astoria, London, 1963 - photographed by Val Wilmer

“The thing about me and John is that we were different, but we weren’t that different. I think Linda put her finger on it when me and John were like mirror images of each other. Even down to how we started writing together, facing each other, eyeball to eyeball, exactly like looking in the mirror.” - Paul McCartney, Uncut, July 2004

Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away. There’s something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t. After that you’ve got to get trepanned or you’ve got to meditate for the rest of your life. You’ve got to make a decision which way you’re going to go. I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.’ It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.’ In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great, but I wanted to go to bed after a while. I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, 'Go to bed? You won’t sleep!’ 'I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.’ I thought, now that’s enough fun and partying, now … It’s like with drink. That’s enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip, so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. 'Yeah, I think so.’ I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.“

Paul McCartney for Barry Miles in “Many Years From Now” 1997)

Now, if I write a song, I’m always cross-checking in my mind, ‘Would John have let me write that line or is it just too soppy?’ Sometimes, I just think, ‘Too bad, it’s my song.’ But I’m always cross-checking with him.

Paul McCartney on writing in a post John Lennon world (2010 Daily Record Interview)

“I said that [playing down how much he and McCartney collaborated], but I was lying…. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball…. In those days we absolutely used to write like that — both playing into each other’s noses”.