What is the meaning of life? What happens after we die? Is there a God? And who was the better songwriter, John or Paul? The perennial questions of life. So intrinsically linked to the human condition as to be unanswerable.

Maybe we should have one last go at the final one there. Who was the better songwriter, John Lennon or Paul McCartney?

John? History will remember him as perhaps more imaginative, more experimental, more political, but is this because of the rose-tinted sheen that his premature passing has given his career? Is it actually Paul? The writer of ‘Yesterday’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Let it Be’, ‘The Frog Chorus’… Perhaps they couldn’t exist without each other. Could there have been a ‘Penny Lane’ without a ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’? A ‘Back in the USSR’ without a ‘Revolution’, an ‘Imagine’ without a ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’…?

To Paul McCartney, John Lennon will always be that teenager, a year and eight months older who he wanted to sit next to on the back of the bus. At age fifteen, seventeen feels like a lifetime of experience older, and Lennon always positioned himself as the natural ring-leader from a young age. When Paul joined the group that was then known as the Quarry Men, John was every bit the one in charge. You can see it in the famed photo from the spring fete at which the pair first met. John is centre stage, sporting a drastic Teddy Boy fringe, flanked by the other Quarry Men (the line-up completed with gut-bucket and washboard, making them appear more as a Vaudeville skiffle act rather than a serious rock n roll band), exuding the confidence, charm and good looks that he would become famed for. There is no doubt that he is the leader.

So it must have been something pretty special that the young John Lennon saw in the much younger Paul McCartney to let him join a group that became from the off more of a collective than an autocracy. Lennon chose not to lead the band at just a time in rock history when more often than not bands had figure heads: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Bill Hayley and the Comets, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (the band Ringo left to join the Beatles), so it would have been expected of him to take on the role of chief and front the group, but they immediately chose not to follow this dynamic. They did briefly flirt with the idea of being Long John and the Silver Beatles, and on their first recording of ‘My Bonnie’ in Hamburg, they were billed as Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, but neither lasted because they instinctively knew that their strengths lay not in the talents of one individual, but in the way they worked and wrote together.

The Beatles were always about more than just the music. They were an experiment in the very meaning of what it is to be in a band, the dynamic continually shifting from the inside like no other group before or since. Song-writing that began as entirely synchronous developed into solo competiveness that still managed to ensure their output always complemented itself, sometimes dragging them in different directions (as they managed to do within the confines of one song with ‘A Day in the Life’), but always ending up back at the centre of what it meant to be a Beatles song, whichever of the four of them it was that took the majority of the credit for writing the song.

Toward the end of the band’s career Ringo began to find his song writing feet (‘Don’t Pass me by’ from 1968 and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ from 1969 are credited to him), but George Harrison is most definitely the underrated third songwriter in the group, and his output is often overlooked. George managed to fit in a composition on nearly every album, and in the case of Revolver, his song ‘Taxman’ not only starts the album off, but sets the tone of what follows (in many ways making it a ‘Harrison’ album). Later classics such as ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and ‘Something’ add a vital dimension to the Beatles cannon, but the vast majority of the group’s work will be remembered as the songs of Lennon and McCartney: two songwriters who considered their work so intrinsically wrapped up with each other that they gave the other one song writing credits on all their work, whether they helped write the song or not, and even for several years after the band had split.

Lennon and McCartney’s early song writing examples were all outward facing, aimed squarely at their youth audience: ‘She Loves You’, ‘Love Me Do’, ‘P.S. I Love You’, ‘From Me to You’, each one speaking directly to and thanking their teenage audience for listening to them. After this there is only really one obvious way to develop, inward, and in their mid-career phase many of the songs became incredibly personal: ‘Help!’ for example, was Lennon screaming that he was stuck on a train he couldn’t get off and his only control was in the music that he created. McCartney’s lyrical contribution in comparison was always more rudimentary: compositions such as ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ developed into the slightly more sophisticated ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ and then the simple word play of ‘Eight Days a Week’, which began the double meanings they enjoyed using in songs, continued with the Lennon led ‘Day Tripper’ (released a year later).

Although it is often said that Paul slowly took over the reins of the group, there is little doubt that John began as the more dominant Beatle (despite the band’s near unique claim of having no lead singer). Considering Lennon to be in charge, photographer Terry O’Neill placed him at the forefront of his classic photos of the group in 1963, just as they were taking off. Although the pair wrote their biggest early hits together (‘She Loves You’ was finished off in the downstairs bathroom of Paul’s childhood home) Lennon was always the one more interested in the experimentation they would eventually become known for. Just like the band’s name, he was interested in word play and the double meanings in words, and inspired by Roy Orbison’s example of transforming the meaning of one phrase into another, what began as a slow ballad with the line “Please, let me listen to your please…” became the upbeat pop classic ‘Please, Please Me’, the band’s breakthrough hit single. And then in 1964, the title of the band’s first foray into filmmaking came from Lennon’s love of Ringo’s accidental use of malapropisms, a hard day’s work, became A Hard Day’s Night. A phrase which shouldn’t make sense, but somehow does. This trick would also later be used on Lennon’s 1966’s track from Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a song famed in its time for its experimental use of backwards guitar lines and samples.

If Lennon’s track ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ gave its name to the album and film, interestingly, it is probably the McCartney penned track on the same album that had the bigger impact. Although it’s a fairly standard rock n roll song very familiar from the band’s output of the time, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ remained the fastest selling single in UK pop history for some thirty years after its release. Its simple, catchy melody, driving beat and poignant lyric dispelling materialism and so predicting the coming of the hippie spirit that would cling to the legend of the sixties, captured the attention of the youth of the world like no other, it seems.

As their success spiralled, McCartney’s confidence with developing his song writing away from Lennon grew. By the mid-late sixties and the last four Beatles’ albums, Paul was the more dominate songwriter and the band’s driving force, deciding what could be said to be their ‘vision’ as a group. He gave the title to Sgt. Peppar’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the film and EP Magical Mystery Tour, much of the main material of The Beatles (The White Album) and Abbey Road and the Let it Be film and album, with Lennon positioning himself if not as a side-kick, then as something of a side show, refusing to acknowledge the overarching themes or concepts for the albums despite their clear existence. If he did not buy into the carnival performance aspect of Sgt. Peppar and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, then why was one of his key compositions for the album ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, a song written about and consisting of a cast of circus characters?

As their writing developed away from one another so too did their styles begin to drift apart, sometimes, but not always, to the group’s overall benefit. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ may both exist in the same world, both being named after places in Liverpool the pair lived near as boys, but the styles of the two songs could not be further apart. ‘Strawberry Fields’ is presented as a dreamy, surreal piece mostly at odds with their previous output, and completed with a melotone introduction. An instrument notably absent from most of rock n roll. ‘Penny Lane’ on the other hand is a clean, sharp song, led by a straightforward piano line and stark brass section. The double A-sides are quite literally two sides of the same record.

But throughout this time, how much of McCartney’s growing confidence could be attributed to following Lennon’s example? Paul’s late Beatles classic and ode to lost maternal love ‘Let it Be’ only appeared after John’s own abstract hymn to the premature loss of the mother that he never really knew, The White Album’s beautifully forlorn ‘Julia’. Paul was said to pen ‘Let it Be’ after waking from a dream about the mother he lost at age thirteen to cancer, the opening line running: “When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me”. He was looking for some guidance, perhaps sensing the growing rift in the group, and she appeared to help him, the quality of his material prolonging the band’s life, yet ironically deepening that rift further. The footage of the band rehearsing for what would eventually become the gig atop the Apple building in January 1969 shows McCartney and George Harrison bickering over what the latter will play on one of his compositions, the guitarist feeling that his role has been reduced to that of a session musician. John sits quietly cross legged next to a silent yet notably present Yoko, layering his own input to that growing rift.

It is often thought that McCartney’s output post-Beatles was safe and easy-listening, but this was far from the case during his time in the world’s biggest band. Perhaps it was his relationship with Lennon that drove him to push himself into more interesting territory, but his work from 1966-1970 was some of the most interesting lyrically and musically. The bleak tale of loss and loneliness that is ‘Eleanor Rigby’ features just McCartney’s vocals and a stark string quartet. A trick that was repeated and layered on ‘She’s Leaving Home’ from Sgt. Peppar, a story about a teenage girl running away from her familial home presumably in order to have an abortion. ‘Fixing a Hole’ from the same album relays one’s tendency to distract the mind from dwelling “where it will go” on the negative by focusing on the menial task; whilst ‘For No One’ from Revolver is a tragically sad tale about a man’s growing awareness of his wife slowly falling out of love with him. Where was this introspective, intelligent world-weary view during the Wings years? Jet! Woo woo woo!

As Paul’s tracks became more dominant and commercially successful throughout the last few years of the Beatles (the McCartney penned single ‘Hey Jude’ from 1968 sold 10 million copies worldwide and went four times platinum in the US alone), Lennon’s reaction was to retreat in the opposite direction, switching his style to anything that wasn’t a McCartney like composition: the gentle wilting hippie-fest that is ‘Across the Universe’, Abbey Road’s surreal and sardonic ‘Because’ and the grunge-like stylings of ‘(I Want You) She’s So Heavy’. Interestingly, and despite this switch toward the introspective, there was no loss in commercial viability for Lennon’s work, the joyous yet vaguely disposable ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ hitting the top spot in 1969, and the anthemic ‘Come Together’ foretelling the careers of many hard rock bands to come throughout the seventies, signalling the fact that the songwriter was still penning some of his most well-known songs as the band began to wind down and McCartney exerted his authority.

Somehow amidst these competing forces the pair also managed to pull out of the blue the last of their great duets, the opening track to Let it Be, ‘Two of Us’. The song is a poignant nostalgic imagined trip throughout their boyhood years, sung by a pair of old friends fully aware that their work together is nearly done. Knowing how much time would be given over to publically arguing and legal disputes in the coming years it’s clear to see what an accomplishment this track really is. By the time they came to record their final album Abbey Road they were barely speaking to each other, McCartney claiming he was too embarrassed to suggest singing harmony parts on ‘Come Together’.

This is even more remarkable to imagine when you consider that once upon a time their song writing had been so linked that during their mid-phase it even took on a conversational aspect. Listen again to the lyrics of ‘We Can Work It Out’ from December 1965. This could quite easily be read as a song about two lovers trying to work out their differences, but could it also be Lennon and McCartney talking to one another about their differences? The verse and chorus, sung and penned predominantly by McCartney asks the object of the song to “Try and see it my way… There's a chance that we may fall apart before too long.” Couples don’t fall apart. They break up. Groups fall apart. And then Lennon responds in the bridge with “Life is very short, and there’s no time, for fussing and fighting my friend.” Not ‘my love’, or ‘my dear’, but ‘my friend’.

Then on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ from Revolver in 1966, John spoke directly to his song writing partner about his uninvited early morning work calls. McCartney was prone to turn up at Lennon’s house in Weybridge, to find his partner still in bed. “When I wake up early in the morning, I lift my head, I’m still snoring.” Buggar off, Paul.

Neither did this backwards and forwards through song cease once the Beatles had finally gone their separate ways. It began almost straight away, with Lennon’s revenge attack ‘How Do you Sleep?’ from 1971’s Imagine album an unashamed slight aimed squarely at McCartney’s door, and consisting of such lines as “The only thing you done was yesterday”, a reference not only to Paul’s most famous composition, but also to his best musical years already being behind him. Ouch!

In the mid-seventies the pair remained in contact by publishing open letters to one another via the pages of the music press, continuing their sparring in the only real way they knew how: in full view of the audience that they had grown up with and who had been a staple part of their lives since they were in their early twenties. Was McCartney’s later response to Lennon’s view of his “muzzak” to pen ‘Silly Love Songs’ in 1976, a single that awarded McCartney his fifth post-Beatles number one single in the USA (to Lennon’s one, although Macca had released three times as many singles by this point)? “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, And what's wrong with that?” The single’s mere existence typified McCartney’s tendency toward the fluffy at the same time he was experiencing familial bliss as he trundled through his thirties, his beloved wife Linda playing keyboards in his band Wings (apparently they spent just one night apart in the entire time they were together, and that was when Linda was in hospital giving birth to their son James), whilst popping out three children between 1969 and 1977. Compare this to Lennon’s output from the off with the Plastic Ono Band: ‘Give Peace a Chance’, ‘Instant Karma’ and ‘Working Class Hero’, and later typified by their confronting 1972 single ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’. Although McCartney did offer his own slightly watered down attempt at controversy when he released ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ that same year, perhaps, once again drawing influence from his former bandmate’s example.

Volume-wise, the pair’s post-Beatles output remained fairly consistently matched, with Paul releasing ten albums by the time Lennon died in December 1980, to John’s seven (although Lennon released three experimental solo albums before the Beatles split in 1970, and released nothing between 1975 and 1980), but where Lennon’s most famous composition is probably the preternatural idealism of ‘Imagine’, which was released with a short amount of distance from the Beatles’ output in 1971, with no foil to play against, McCartney’s solo work (including Wings) was subject-wise rather tepid in comparison. Both lyrically and musically, safe. And this was the guy who invented thrash metal and inspired Charles Manson’s mass-murder streak when he wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ in 1968. ‘Imagine’ is probably the strongest Lennon composition, its anti-religion/ imperialism/ nationalism message sugar-coated by its dreamy delivery. Commercially, it was the biggest release of Lennon’s career and subsequently gave its name to Ron Howard’s film production company, as well as finding its way in poster form onto the bedroom walls of many post-angst youngsters. Do McCartney’s most famous solo outings ‘Band on the Run’, ‘Live and Let Die’ or ‘Mull of Kintyre’ stand up against ‘Imagine’? Unlikely. As Lennon had noted back in 1971, was McCartney’s most famous composition one from his time in the Beatles? Was all he had actually done ‘Yesterday’?

Interestingly the competitiveness continued, whether known to McCartney or not, long after Lennon was dead. Paul reconvened the remaining Beatles to re-record versions of existing Lennon compositions in 1995, ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, approved by Yoko, but unasked of the man himself and unapproved before release. Two years later he released the album Flamin Pie, his most successful for quite some years, which took its title from Lennon’s story of naming their band: “I saw a man on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are the Beatles with an A.’ And so we are.” With the juggernaut that was the Beatles Anthology series in full flow by this time, McCartney’s world would yet again be filled with stories of the past, and he would undoubtedly be reliving the years gone by, remembering a time when he and John used to compose together. But Lennon had no say on how ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ sounded, hardly fair.

Perhaps the finest example of the pair’s individual song writing competing and yet also complimenting is the Sgt. Peppar opus ‘A Day in the Life’. Lennon’s composition gave the song its name and made up the majority of its run time, but he had no mid-section. Paul had a mid-section, but no song to fit around it. George Martin put the two together and linked the whole thing up with a cacophony of strings and brass, constructing a kind of forced symbiosis. The song has proved a lasting fan favourite and still sounds epic 50 years later, but its mere existence perhaps owes more to Martin’s production skills than it does to the two individual songwriters. Despite the two differing sections seeming to have little or nothing to do with one another, there is still a link. Lennon’s ethereal verses take on the imagined aspects of a dream where stories symbolise deeper metaphorical meanings. Why was it the crowd turned away from the road accident victim, but he just had to look? And then there’s the crescendo of music and suddenly the dream is over and he’s awake, “woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”. McCartney’s brief aside takes on a social-realist narrative as the character in the song stumbled from his house, and found his way to work where he went upstairs and “had a smoke,” and then he is back in the dream again, and the song concludes with the playful surrealism familiar from ‘I am the Walrus’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ with the idea of counting how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

By this point in their career, and with the two of them thinking that they were pulling in different directions (and with a little help from their friends!), together they somehow still seemed to produce something that transcends both their individual talents and create something altogether so much better. And it is in this that we see what it was that the young leader John Lennon sensed in his future band mate Paul McCartney, and why the band were never even nearly Long John and the Silver Beatles, and were just: the Beatles.

So in conclusion, who was the better songwriter? Neither of them. Both of them. They could not have existed without the other one, or rather, they both could have formed other bands without a complementary song writing partner, and had very successful careers (just as they did as solo artists), but there never could have existed the same kind of magic that was there with the Beatles. An easy thing to say with hindsight, but as Ringo might say: tomorrow never knows.