Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
My impression is that Paul McCartney, who has been very much in the public eye of late, is getting something of a bad deal with the mostly negative reaction to his crusade to flip-flop Lennon/McCartney to McCartney/Lennon on the songs he primarily or exclusively wrote while he and John were the most famous songwriting duo on earth. He isn’t trying to change the business side of it, he isn’t excising John from the credits, just reversing the order FOR THE SONGS HE WROTE.
- McCartney, in a lengthy statement released on Wednesday, rejected suggestions that the widow of his late partner John Lennon might have a court case because he reversed the credits on Beatles songs on his latest album from the traditional “Lennon-McCartney” to “by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.”
McCartney’s new album “Back In The U.S. Live 2002,” lists 19 classic Beatles songs that way and McCartney said, “The truth is that this is much ado about nothing and there is no need for anybody to get their knickers in a twist.”
….McCartney said Lennon accurately divided credit for each of their songs in a Playboy magazine article and that he and Lennon were in complete agreement as to who had done what. McCartney himself spelled out the exact writing credits for Barry Miles’s book “Many Years From Now.”
McCartney said Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Lennon independently decided in Epstein’s London office that the billing would be “songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney”
“I said ‘What about McCartney/Lennon?’ They said ‘We’ll do this for now and we can change it around to be fair at any point in the future,”‘ McCartney said. [Reuters]
I guess the time is now.
The Beatles’ first two LPs and their first few singles, which were released in the UK before the USA all show the song writing credits as McCartney-Lennon. Why did they change the order?