In 1995, Jann Wenner sat down with Mick Jagger for a retrospective conversation about his career. (Faroutmagazine)
During the interview, Jagger described his partnership with Keith as being “essential” if occasionally limiting. “You don’t have to have a partner for everything you do,” he said.
“But having partners sometimes helps you and sometimes hinders you. You have good times and bad times with them. It’s just the nature of it. People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in a partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it’s self-sustaining”.
When asked why the Lennon-McCartney partnership didn’t survive, Jagger struggled to give an answer. “That’s hard to make even a stab at, because I don’t know John and Paul well enough,” he confessed. “I know them slightly, same as you, probably, and maybe you knew John better at the end. I can hazard a guess that they were both rather strong personalities, and both felt they were totally independent. They seemed to be very competitive over leadership of the band.”
Jagger continued: “The thing in leadership is, you can have times when one person is more at the centre than the other, but there can’t be too much arguing about it all the time. Because if you’re always at loggerheads, you just have to go, ‘Ok, if I can’t have a say in this and this, then fuck it. What am I doing here?’ So you sort of agree what your roles are. Whereas John and Paul felt they were too strong, and they wanted to be in charge. If there are 10 things, they both wanted to be in charge of nine of them. You’re not gonna make a relationship like that work, are you?”
The divisions between John and Paul were, in many ways, inevitable. In their early days, The Beatles had been cast as a homogenous creative blob. While this certainly aided the group’s success, it also led to a great deal of resentment. As Harrison later noted, it wasn’t all that fun being “fab”. Keen to establish a firm sense of identity distinct from The Fab Four, Lennon and McCartney became increasingly averse to the idea of co-writing -individualising their songcraft in a quiet act of resistance. It was the beginning of the end.
