WE THOUGHT OF OURSELVES AS LENNON AND McCARTNEY from very early on. It was because we’d heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lennon and McCartney? That’s good. There are two of us, and we can fall into that pattern. We put our names next to each other in our school exercise books. ‘Love Me Do’ came from around that period, as did ‘One After 909’. That might have been as far back as 1957. About ten or fifteen years ago, I found that school exercise book. I put it in my bookcase. I’ve since lost it. I don’t know where it is. I think it might show up somewhere. It’s the first Lennon and McCartney manuscript.

In any case, one thing we always did with the records we bought, aside from checking out the title, was to check out the names in brackets underneath. Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King. These were magic names to us – all of these, particularly these American ones – though not so much Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had been a little earlier. This was our time, and these were the writers of our time. When we moved to London, John and I started meeting professional songwriters – people like Mitch Murray and Peter Callander. They worked out of our publisher’s office, and they just made hits – kind of churned them out. Mitch wrote songs like ‘How Do You Do It?’, which George Martin had us record, and it nearly became The Beatles’ debut single. So, John and I looked at people like them and said, ‘Right, we could do that. And if we get hits, we’ll get money. It may not buy us love, but it’ll buy us a car.’

It wasn’t just the money. It was the joy of pulling a song out of a hat and then being able to play it with our band, which needed songs. So we were sort of feeding the machine. We would ask our record company, ‘How many do you want, guv?’ The people from Capitol Records came over, Voyle Gilmore and Alan Livingston. They were two very California gentlemen in suits, and they said, ‘Well, we would like four singles and an album per year.’ We thought that was very doable.

So, Brian Epstein, our soft-spoken but debonair manager, would ring us and say in his quiet but perfect upper-class accent that bore no trace of his Liverpool upbringing, ‘You’ve got next week off, and you’re to write the next album,’ and we went, ‘Great, okay.’ We wrote a song a day. We would just meet at my house or John’s. The usual two guitars, two pads, two pencils. A lot of the other stuff had been written on the road – here, there and everywhere – but to do an album you would actually allocate a week or so and just manage it.

It was always a good idea to be mid-process because it made us think, ‘What if we wrote one that sounded like that?’ or ‘We should write one that sounds like this.’ We recognised a gap that needed filling, and that was as much a part of what inspired us as anything else. And the fact that we were making records and they were successful was very helpful. It was as if you were an athlete. You were winning races, so you could sort of say, ‘Oh yeah, I think I’ll go in for that one as well.’

John Lennon. Paris, 1961

This song was written on a piano in the George V Hotel in Paris. Only a few years earlier, John and I had hitchhiked to Paris and hung around the cafés. This was a very different visit. The hotel was near the Champs-Elysées, and we had suites big enough to have a piano brought up. We were in town to play something like three weeks’ worth of concerts at the Olympia Theatre. Back then, concerts were pretty short, but we’d be doing two sets every day. When I do shows now, we play about forty songs in three hours. In those days it was probably fewer than ten, so around half an hour, once you added a bit of chit-chat with the audience. We would have songs like ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘This Boy’, and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in the set. The others would be covers like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ‘Twist and Shout’, finishing off with ‘Long Tall Sally’. Our days in Hamburg, where we used to play all night every night, had been great training for long residencies like this.

So, as if forty-odd shows weren’t enough, Brian would also arrange all these other duties, like writing and recording sessions. While we were in Paris, we ended up re-recording ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’ in German: ‘Komm, gib mir deine Hand’ and ‘Sie liebt dich’ by Die Beatles. Our producer, George Martin, came over for the recording at the Pathé Marconi studio, and at the same time we put down the basic tracks for ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.

It’s twelve-bar blues, with a Beatles twist on the chorus, where we bring in a couple of minor chords. Usually, minor chords are used in the verse of a song, and major chords bring a lift and lighten the mood in the chorus. We did it the other way round here. The idea is that all these material possessions are well and good, but money can’t buy you what you really need. The irony here is that just after Paris, we went to Florida where, if not love, money certainly could buy you a lot of what you wanted. But the premise stands, I think. Money can’t buy you a happy family or friends you can trust. Ella Fitzgerald recorded the song later that year too, which was a real honour.

The single did really well for us, getting to number one in the UK and US at the same time. And then, funnily enough, it was knocked off the number one spot in the UK by ‘A World Without Love’, a song I wrote for Jane Asher’s brother Peter. He had been signed to EMI with his friend, and they put that song out as their debut under the name Peter and Gordon. I’m pretty sure it made number one in the US too. That was a song I’d written when I was sixteen at home in Liverpool. I didn’t think it was strong enough for The Beatles, but it did pretty well for Peter and Gordon’s career. The song starts off with the line ‘Please lock me away’, and when I would play it, John would respond, ‘Yes, okay,’ and we’d joke that that was the end of the song.

Probably quite a few people out there associate ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ with the film A Hard Day’s Night. It plays in a scene where we finally manage to break out of the studio and get to have some fun, and it is sort of a proto–music video. The song was actually written especially for the soundtrack and the film, although pretty heavily scripted by Alun Owen – written in sort of short sound bites, so we wouldn’t have to learn long lines – and it’s sort of responsible for giving each of us public personas: John was the smart, acerbic one; George was the quiet one; Ringo was the funny one. I was typecast as the cute one. It was strange being reduced to a couple of shorthand characteristics in the eyes of the world, and I think many people to this day still think of us in terms of how our dialogue was written in that film. That viewpoint can be pretty restrictive, but we learnt to ignore it.

One important thing hasn’t changed though: my suit jacket size. I wore a velvet-trimmed tuxedo jacket to the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night in London in 1964. In 2016, when The Beatles tour film Eight Days a Week premiered, again in London – and perhaps thanks to having been a vegetarian for about forty years at this point – I wore the same jacket.