Twenty-five years later, Paul remembers John

Two young men, sitting side by side in a small Liverpool bedroom, bent over a notebook. One strums a guitar, the other jots down lyrics. Barely out of their teens, they’re writing songs that will soon travel the world with The Beatles. It’s this image - Paul and John, shoulder to shoulder, creating together - that Paul McCartney evokes in this beautiful letter. Written around 2005 on his personal letterhead, it begins not with fame, but with friendship:

He was my friend from our teenage years in Liverpool, the guy I sat across from as we worked out how to write songs…

This single-page letter, addressed to the editorial team at Q Magazine for an article that was never published, had been forgotten in their archives until it was accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

This letter is much more than a memory. It is an attempt to express what John Lennon meant to Paul, after years of collaboration, rivalry, silence, and unspoken affection. McCartney writes:

It’s impossible to sum up in a short letter how and why I love John, but here are a few thoughts

What follows is a touching reflection from Paul and a vivid portrait of Lennon:

I love him because... he was a mate through our teenage years in Liverpool, he was the guy I sat across from as we worked out how to write songs, he was the man I admired as we evolved through the madness of fame, fortune, and “fabulousness”, and he was, and still is, the heroic figure whose wit and wisdom, with a little help from his friends, shaped the thoughts and lives of millions of people. AND SO MUCH MORE.

You can almost picture Paul writing this letter, sitting at a desk, remembering his friend twenty-five years after John’s assassination in 1980. Today, it stands as one of the most moving tributes to a friendship that changed the history of music.