The Beatles were John Lennon’s band.  He initially let others play with him and his mate Stu.  There is no question that there would have been no Beatles without John, nor that he was the creative driving force in the band’s early years.  But by 1966 McCartney had overtaken Lennon as the band’s creative force.  John Lennon added very little of note to The Beatles after 1967, not least because he was – from that point – off his tits on smack.

There are, I respectfully contend, 43 indispensable Beatles tracks (and another 40 almost as good).

Of the 43 one (Twist And Shout) is a cover version; two were written by George Harrison (Here Comes The Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps); and seven were either agreed to be joint compositions (Two Of Us, A Day In The Life, Flying, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Eight Days A Week and Wait) or have their composition disputed (In My Life).

Lennon wrote 13 (You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Don’t Let Me Down, Across The Universe, Help!, Strawberry Fields Forever, Rain, Norwegian Wood, All You Need Is Love, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Girl, Dear Prudence, I’ll Be Back and Nowhere Man).  They are all stunning.  But just three – Don’t Let Me Down, Across The Universe and Dear Prudence - were composed after 1967.

That leaves McCartney responsible for 20 of what I consider the very best of The Beatles’ output – Blackbird, And I Love Her, Yesterday, Get Back, The Long And Winding Road, Let It Be, Hey Jude, Magical Mystery Tour, The Fool On The Hill, Here, There And Everywhere, For No One, Got To Get You Into My Life, She’s Leaving Home, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Hello, Goodbye, Lady Madonna and Golden Slumbers-Carry That Weight-The End.

So if we simply weigh it on the scales according to the Minister’s iPod playlists, McCartney wins.

Far more importantly, however, McCartney singlehandedly turned the double bass/bass guitar from being little more than a rhythm keeper in three-chord rock and pop records into a melodic instrument in its own right (eg Come Together).  He wrote music that will survive as long as anything produced by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.  My genuinely held belief is that, once Lennon and McCartney effectively stopped writing songs “eyeball to eyeball”, as Lennon once put it, McCartney’s Beatles output is superior.

Furthermore, while McCartney’s solo MOR tendencies have sometimes bordered on being crimes against humanity (eg Mull Of Kintyre, Ebony And Ivory and We All Fucking Stand Together), it is my genuinely held belief that McCartney’s solo output (whether as Wings or himself) rips the piss out of Lennon’s.

Band On The Run is a genuinely great album (even if Michael Parkinson does appear on its sleeve); Live And Let Die is the second best Bond theme ever (after Nobody Does It Better, of course); Jet, Another Day, Silly Love Songs, Every Night and My Brave Face are all fantastic singles; while Maybe I’m Amazed is fucking magnificent.

Oh, and Solo Paul is still shit hot live, whereas Solo John shunned live performance like, well, like he shunned his eldest son.

Meanwhile, Imagine‘s enduring popularity remains an inexplicable enigma (as well as being the most hypocritical creed ever published by someone who was not a full-time politician: it’s easy as piss to talk about having no possessions when a chauffeur ferries you around in a white Roller, you own half-a-dozen homes and you buy floor-length fur coats to keep the missus warm).  Double Fantasy was being deservedly ridiculed until Mark Chapman’s intervention and would otherwise have remained a joke to this day, containing as it does a succession of over-produced MOR drivel more saccharine than anything McCartney ever committed to tape.

Essentially, John Lennon Solo was a series of pub-standard cover versions, songs he couldn’t finish without someone to kick his backside, and the odd primal scream.  Love, Jealous Guy and Watching The Wheels represent three-quarters of Lennon’s entire listenable solo output: the final part of the quartet, Instant Karma!, however, is a SMIP from start to finish and will be lauded as such in due course.  (I’d find Phil Spector not guilty just for producing that, Be My Baby, River Deep, Mountain High and You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’: we all make the odd mistake, after all…)

The basis of Lennon’s appeal is the opposite of the Stones’.  Lennon is canonized because he – entirely pointlessly – died young and those left behind have cultivated his ridiculous Working Class Hero legacy.  The Stones get the treatment for precisely the opposite reason, despite the fact that their useful creative life ended at about the same time Lennon’s went down the hreoin swanee and they are now nothing more than a performing freak show for Baby Boomers who are desperate to remember the days before they became senior partners in accountancy and law firms.

McCartney gets the critical bum’s rush for simply growing old and because his creative fire no longer burns quite as bright or hot as it once did.  Mind you, his current album contains some of the best writing of his career.

I’ll back two dozen of Lennon’s compositions to the hilt as representing some of the unsurpassable cream of pop music – but don’t ever again seek to claim I favour him over McCartney, Mr. Baby.  Or I’ll have you.