All The Behind-The-Scenes Drama Behind The Beatles’ Hit Song "Hey Jude"

Make no mistake about it: "Hey Jude" was a monster when it was released. The band put it out in 1968 — among the first singles to be released from their Apple Records label — and it quickly stormed the charts. It took the top spot in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. In fact, "Hey Jude" remained at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for an impressive nine weeks in 1968. And if anything, it's only gotten more popular over time. But somehow the song still holds some mystery.

For one thing, most people associate "Hey Jude" with the fabled Lennon-McCartney era of The Beatles' output. Yet "Hey Jude" was all Paul. John told David Sheff for his book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “‘Hey Jude’ is a damn good set of lyrics and I made no contribution to that.” But when you find out what the song might actually be about, that is no big surprise.

"Hey Jude" was born right at the time when John was breaking up with his first wife, Cynthia. The Beatle was also beginning a new life with Yoko Ono — and leaving his son Julian behind with Cynthia. This turn of events understandably kicked off the turbulent relationship he would have with Julian for the rest of his life. The drama was so intense that Paul did what he could to help — including writing a song.

And trust us, the situation was not good for anyone involved. “Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son,” Julian told The Daily Telegraph in 1998. In fact, John’s oldest son seemed determined to portray the writer of “Give Peace a Chance” as a very different person behind the scenes.

Julian specifically blasted his dad for cheating on his mom, breaking up his family, and not talking to him for years. He said that if John had been “true and honest” with himself, he would have known that he was a “hypocrite.” His dad’s treatment of him was also totally different from his treatment of his second son, Sean. 

And John even seemed to confess that he publicly favored his second-born son. In September 1980 — just three months before his shocking assassination — the Imagine singer gave a revealing interview to Playboy. The conversation was published after John’s death — but the comments he’d made about Julian and Sean did not cast his relationship with Julian in a good light.

“It’s not the best relationship between father and son,” John admitted to Playboy about Julian. He seemed to partly blame this on Julian’s mom getting custody of Julian. “I’m just sort of a figure in the sky, but he’s obliged to communicate with me, even when he probably doesn’t want to,” the singer said. But then the interviewer pushed John for further detail — and he revealed something hurtful. 

“Ninety percent of the people on this planet, especially in the West, were born out of a bottle of whiskey on a Saturday night,” John said. Then he seemed to really add salt to the wound when he compared the conceptions of his two sons. “Julian is in the majority, along with me and everybody else. Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference,” he said.

“I don’t love Julian any less as a child,” John continued. “He’s still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn’t have pills in those days. He’s here, he belongs to me, and he always will.” As declarations of unconditional love go, this one is far from ideal. And it only added fuel to the Julian-Sean rivalry narrative as well as the rocky relationship between Julian and John. 

True to form, Julian let it be known that he was very unhappy with his father. During the 1998 interview with The Daily Telegraph, he was unmoved by the idea that John didn’t “know how to be a dad” — something Paul McCartney had said of his fellow bandmate. “If you bring a child into this world, whether it’s planned or an accident, you’d better make sure you can care for it,” Julian said.

“You have to be around,” he continued. “You make time. It’s as simple as that.” And when Julian wrote a piece about his father for The Guardian in 2020, he confessed that John had made life difficult for him growing up. It had started long before Sean’s birth, though. For Julian, the bad times began when John seemed to have “disappeared off the face of the planet.”

Part of the problem was that Julian and John did actually bond when Julian was a young boy. “A lot of the happy memories of my father are from the late 1960s,” Julian wrote. So it was doubly painful when John left and seemingly never looked back. “Maybe ten years passed during which my dad and I barely spoke. I was very angry about how he left the family,” he said.

Julian also told The Daily Telegraph that his father’s “house husband” routine with Sean and Yoko Ono was in part inspired by John’s treatment of his first-born son. John felt guilty, Julian said, so “he made sure he spent every moment with [Sean].” But that didn’t mean that Julian had let him off the hook — far from it.

“You cannot just discard people because you can’t face up to them,” Julian said. “You cannot say, ‘Here’s my new life. I’m older, I understand more, I’ll make it better now.’ It doesn’t work that way.” That’s probably why — despite the legend telling the opposite — the relationship between Julian and John didn’t get a chance to warm up before the former Beatle’s tragic death.

The popular story is that Julian and John were making amends in the time leading up to John’s death. But Julian set the record straight to The Daily Telegraph. “It was still very distant,” he said of their relationship. “There were cuddles now and then, but there was always an uneasy tension.” And those tensions likely only got worse after John was gone. It was so bad that Paul did try to do his part in the moment.

Paul told The Beatles Anthology, “I thought, as a friend of the family, I would motor out to Weybridge and tell them that everything was all right: to try and cheer them up, basically, and see how they were. I had about an hour’s drive. I would always turn the radio off and try and make up songs, just in case…” And what he came up with this on this road trip was a song for Julian.

“I started singing, ‘Hey Jules — don’t make it bad, take a sad song, and make it better…’” Paul explained. “It was optimistic, a hopeful message for Julian: ‘Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you’re not happy, but you’ll be OK.’” He then said, “I eventually changed ‘Jules’ to ‘Jude.’ One of the characters in Oklahoma! is called Jud, and I like the name.”

But it soon came time to play the track for John. Paul said, “I finished it all up in Cavendish, and I was in the music room upstairs when John and Yoko came to visit, and they were right behind me over my right shoulder, standing up, listening to it as I played it to them, and when I got to the line, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ I looked over my shoulder and I said, ‘I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy. I was just blocking it out,’ and John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’ That’s collaboration.”

“When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in.’” Paul explained. “So, of course, you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever. I love those words now.” It also made an emotional moment for Paul.

“Time lends a little credence to things,” Paul said. “You can’t knock it. It just did so well. But when I’m singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line. It’s an emotional point in the song.” And of course, John knew that Paul had originally created the song for his son.

John explained to told David Sheff, “[Paul] said it was written about Julian, my child. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian. He was driving over to say hi to Julian. He’d been like an uncle to him. You know, Paul was always good with kids. And so he came up with ‘Hey Jude.’” But John didn't agree that the song was actually for Julian.

John said, “I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it… Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying, ‘Hey, Jude — hey, John.’ I know I’m sounding like one of those fans who reads things into it, but you can hear it as a song to me. The words ‘go out and get her’ — subconsciously he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’”

“On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead,” John explained of his theory. “The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.” Paul has never engaged with that side of the story, of course. But Julian has had his say on the matter.

Julian told Mojo in 2002, “He told me that he’d been thinking about my circumstances all those years ago, about what I was going through. Paul and I used to hang out a bit – more than dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and dad.”

Sadly, Julian wasn’t the only one whose relationship with John was, at times, a little fraught. It’s widely known that things got tense between all of the iconic bandmates. And in a 2021 interview, Paul again opened up about his time with John. He seemed to finally clear up what happened when the band fell apart, too.

The story everybody tells is that in 1970 it was Paul who actually broke up The Beatles for good. That year, you see, he released his debut solo record, McCartney, and with it came a press release that shocked everybody. McCartney replied to the question, “Are you planning a new album or single with The Beatles?” by stating: “No.”

Newspapers immediately started reporting that Paul had quit The Beatles, and the rest of the band apparently freaked out. It was said that they then dispatched Ringo to Paul’s house to ask him to push back the release of his solo debut until after the group’s Let It Be dropped. But Paul refused, reacted with anger, and threw Ringo out.

This incident came to light in 1971, when a sworn statement from Ringo was heard in a courtroom as part of the legal proceedings to dissolve The Beatles. He said, “I went to see Paul. To my dismay, he went completely out of control, shouting at me, prodding his fingers towards my face, saying: ‘I’ll finish you now,’ and ‘You’ll pay.’ He told me to put my coat on and get out.”

Paul later expressed regret about his actions towards Ringo that day. “It hadn’t actually come to blows, but it was near enough,” he said in 2000’s Beatles Anthology. “Unfortunately it was Ringo. I mean, he was probably the least to blame of any of them.” But it was true that the tensions in the band had reached a breaking point.

John had even been quietly angling to leave the band for a while. In fact, some might say that he’d already embarked on his solo career before Paul had made his announcement. He’d performed solo tracks accompanied by his girlfriend, Yoko Ono, after all — and her part in the band’s split would of course be analyzed for decades.

John was upset that Paul had tried to release a solo album first, perhaps in part because he wanted to be the one to do that. He told Rolling Stone in 1971, “We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us that was what he was going to do.” Though Lennon claimed he was never angry about it.

But who was it who really put the final nail in the coffin for The Beatles? Well, different people have said different things. In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article titled “Why The Beatles Broke Up” that attempted to get to the bottom of what happened. By 1969, the magazine claimed, Paul was the only Beatle “who had any sense of urgency” about the band.

The death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967 had cast a dark shadow over things, it seemed. Numerous observers believed that he’d been fundamental to the band’s stability, and without him The Beatles were cut adrift. John thought Epstein’s passing marked the end for the band, but Paul had other ideas. In fact, he had his eyes on the silver screen.

Within a week of Epstein’s passing, Paul had talked the other Beatles into making a new movie to be aired on the BBC. This was Magical Mystery Tour, and it didn’t go well. When it aired in the UK over the Christmas holidays, the media absolutely roasted it. Since Paul had been the driving force behind the project, this did little to help his standing within the band.

And then there was Yoko Ono. She had a bad time of it as Lennon’s girlfriend in a time when sexism and racism were rife. Many fans of the band hated her, and the other Beatles apparently didn’t like her much, either. John usually flew off the handle whenever anyone offered him advice during recording sessions, but he let Yoko do it, and the band resented that.

And it’s generally considered that egos were getting way out of control during the final days of The Beatles. The 2009 Rolling Stone article notes, “Each of the Beatles treated the others as his supporting musicians — which made for some spectacular performances and some explosive studio moments.” Ringo left the band for a fortnight, and then George seemingly quit for good.

George walked out during a recording session, after having had a fight with John that reportedly saw them trade punches. John seemingly wasn’t all that bothered and got Yoko to do George’s parts instead. The other two Beatles had no idea what to do, believing that if they got involved John might also leave. It was, to put it mildly, a mess.

John floated the idea of the band bringing Eric Clapton in as a permanent replacement for George, but thankfully it didn’t come to that. The band was able to make up shortly afterward, though tensions remained. The other members of the band still seemingly deeply resented Yoko’s status as the “fifth Beatle.” But John appeared to prefer her company to that of his old bandmates.

According to Rolling Stone, shortly afterward John dropped an absolute bombshell. When Paul said in a meeting that The Beatles should go back on the road, John reportedly replied, “I think you’re daft. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I’m breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce.” In 2020, though, Paul gave an in-depth interview to GQ and spoke candidly about his old bandmates.

Paul told the magazine he dreamed of the good days with the band. He said, “The thing is, if you’re a performer, or me as a performer, I find that dreams are often related to a gig or getting ready for a gig or being in a recording studio and I think a lot of performers are like that. So, often, John or George will be in there.”

Paul continued, “And the good thing is you don’t really think anything of it, it’s just normal, like, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And you’re just chatting away, talking about what we’re going to do, as in making a record or something. So he’s often there, I’m glad to say... And it’s normally very pleasant, you know? I love those boys.”

But despite that touching statement, Paul also has memories of the less pleasant times — and he’s spoken about them as well. He went into detail about the infamous Beatles breakup during a 2021 chat with journalist John Wilson. This was broadcast during the BBC Radio 4 series This Cultural Life — and it led to many fascinating insights.

Paul remembered that the breakup of The Beatles was the “most difficult period” of his entire life. His desire had been for the band to carry on, especially since they were continuing to make “pretty good stuff” at that point. “This was my band, this was my job, this was my life, so I wanted it to continue,” Paul declared.

Instead, Paul claimed, the blame lay at Lennon’s feet. He said, “The point of it really was that John was making a new life with Yoko. John had always wanted to sort of break loose from society because, you know, he was brought up by his Aunt Mimi, who was quite repressive, so he was always looking to break loose.”

And Paul also discussed the fact that he was often the one blamed for the split. He said, “I had to live with that because that was what people saw. All I could do is say, no… I am not the person who instigated the split. Oh no, no, no. John walked into a room one day and said I am leaving The Beatles. Is that instigating the split, or not?”

Paul told Wilson that after this, the band was left confused as to where exactly they all stood. Was it a break-up or not? Their manager, Allen Klein, made them keep everything away from the press. And according to Paul, “It was weird, because we all knew it was the end of The Beatles but we couldn’t just walk away.”

In the interview, Paul remembered Klein as “dodgy” and added, “Around about that time we were having little meetings, and it was horrible. It was the opposite of what we were.” Paul said that he then got “fed up of hiding it” and so “let the cat out of the bag.” But that didn't exactly turn out well, either, did it?

As for the court case, Paul recalled, “I had to fight, and the only way I could fight was in suing the other Beatles, because they were going with Klein. And they thanked me for it years later. But I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny coming in one day and saying ‘I’m leaving the group’.”

But Paul indicated in the interview that he wasn’t trying to re-ignite the old feud between him and John. He added that John had “wanted to go in a bag and lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. And you couldn’t argue with that.” And Paul didn’t blame Yoko either, saying, “They were a great couple. There was huge strength there.”

As for John’s side of the Beatles breakup story, obviously he can’t speak for himself anymore, but he went into it with Rolling Stone in 1971. He was asked by the reporter: “Always the Beatles were talked about — and the Beatles talked about themselves — as being four parts of the same person. What’s happened to those four parts?”

John said in response, “They remembered that they were four individuals. You see, we believed the Beatles myth, too. I don’t know whether the others still believe it. We were four guys…” And then John added, “You know, Brian [Epstein] put us in suits and all that, and we made it very, very big. But we sold out, you know. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain… That’s why we never improved as musicians; we killed ourselves then to make it.”

“The Beatles broke up after Brian died,” John continued. “We made the double album, the set. It’s like if you took each track off it and made it all mine and all George’s. It’s like I told you many times, it was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group, and I enjoyed it. We broke up then.”

But John also believed that Paul had tried to “take over” the band after Epstein’s death. “I don’t know how much of this I want to put out,” he told Rolling Stone. “Paul had an impression, he has it now like a parent, that we should be thankful for what he did for keeping The Beatles going. But when you look back upon it objectively, he kept it going for his own sake.”

And now, Paul definitely seems to be the front-man of the Beatles’ legacy. In the 2021 BBC interview, he mentioned that he’d recently found an unrecorded song by himself and John titled “Tell Me Who He Is.” Perhaps it was one of those “best works” that John had spoken about. But Paul found a way to let the world experience them.

In November 2021 Paul released a book called The Lyrics, an autobiographical work that included a lot of previously unpublished photos and letters. He said in a press release that he hoped the volume would “show people something about [his] songs and [his] life which they haven’t seen before.” And there is still time for him to reveal more about The Beatles.

One of the most touching revelations regarding Lennon and the band breakup actually came out in the GQ interview. Paul said that eventually, before John died, “We settled our family squabble and I was able to see him and to speak to him on a number of occasions, so we were friends till the end.”