10 BEATLES SONGS THAT JOHN LENNON HATED

John Lennon, alongside his Beatles bandmates, released 13 studio albums worldwide between 1962 and 1970 and established a musical legacy like no other.
From Please Please Me right up until Abbey Road, the band recorded in excess of 300 songs.
 In the years after the Beatles split, John Lennon was often drawn into a conversation about self-reflection and, across those meetings, he named a number of tracks that he was less fond of.

Primarily “It was inspired from—this is a very vague connection—from Baby Let’s Play House. There was a line on it, I used to like specific lines from songs, ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’—so I wrote it around that but I didn’t think it was that important.”

Recorded on a four-track, ‘Lovely Rita’ was written and sang by Paul McCartney and details the narrator’s affection for a traffic warden—something John wasn’t particularly keen on. “I’m not interested in writing about people like that,” John once said of the song. “I like to write about me, because I know me.”

Next up was another Pepper number, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. This iconic track, one of the first songs Paul wrote when he was just 16, tells the tale of a young man planning to grow old with his lover. Given the slightly more traditional themes in the track, John once aimed a subtle dig at his bandmate by describing his writing as “granny music” and, when asked who wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, he replied: “Paul’s, completely. I would never dream of writing a song like that.”

It wasn’t only Paul’s work John wasn’t happy with on the record though, written by John, ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ was inspired with a mixture of television commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes breakfast cereal and 1960s sitcom Meet the Wife. “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought,” John once said. “I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over, and then I wrote the song.”

Another inclusion from Pepper may surprise you, however. A somewhat surprise addition to this list, ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’  written by John. Despite the supposed sentimental value, John didn’t remember the track fondly when he reminisced on his past material: “I heard ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ last night. It’s abysmal, you know?” John said in 1980. “The track is just terrible. I mean, it is a great track, a great song, but it isn’t a great track because it wasn’t made right. You know what I mean?”

Perhaps one of the most beloved songs on Lennon’s most hated list is ‘Hello, Goodbye’. Written by Paul, John was said to have been particularly unhappy when it was decided that ‘Hello, Goodbye’ was chosen to be the A-side to the Beatles’ experimental song ‘I Am the Walrus‘. “It wasn’t a great piece,” John said in a 1980 interview with Playboy, adding that it was: “Three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions. The best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano.”

Featuring on the band’s final full-length studio record Abbey Road, ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ was also in Lennon’s crosshairs. Written during his time in India, Lennon once said that the track was inspired by a newspaper story about a miser who relentlessly tried to hide his money hide to stop people trying to make him spend it.

Not happy with the end result, John told David Sheff in his 1980 interview for Playboy that the track was “a bit of crap that I wrote in India” and described it as a “piece of garbage.” “I’d read somewhere in the newspaper about this mean guy who hid five-pound notes, not up his nose but somewhere else.

written by John, ‘Run for Your Life’ has been described as his least favourite Beatles track and has always garnered mixed reviews from critics due to the nature of the lyrics. “‘Run for Your Life’, I always hated, you know,” Lennon told Rolling Stone back in 1970. “I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’, because it was a song I just knocked off.


Although John would regard the record as Beatles best album, The White Album doesn’t escape his wrath without at least one song being picked as his least favourite. ‘Birthday’ is the unlucky effort. Chosen as the opening track on the third side of The Beatles’ now-iconic album The White Album, ‘Birthday‘ was an impromptu creation: “We thought, ‘Why not make something up?’ So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff,” Paul once said. “So that is 50–50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all in the same evening.”

For John though, the feeling wasn’t so mutual: “I think Paul wanted a song like ‘Happy Birthday Baby,’ the old ’50s hit,” he once said. “It was a piece of garbage.”

John is again not afraid to poke holes in his own work as he picks the only track from The Beatles fifth album Help! as his own, ‘It’s Only Love’. “That’s the one song I really hate of mine. Terrible lyric,” he once said in an interview with Hit Parader Magazine. Lennon was heavily critical of the track whenever it came up in conversation and, when speaking to Sheff, he said: “I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics were abysmal. I always hated that song.”

What is perhaps John’s most hated song? Well, as you might expect it’s Paul McCartney’s song. But what you might not expect is that it’s quite possibly one of the band’s most famous songs of all time. In what was The Beatles final single before Paul McCartney announced his departure from the band, ‘Let It Be’ is arguably one of the band’s most famous songs.

While fans often speculated that the song was built around the tense relationships in the band, John disputed it emphatically: “It has nothing to do with The Beatles,” he said in 1980. “It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what [Paul was] thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be.'”