"That first McCartney solo record was an eye-opener. I was aware that The Beatles were breaking up and I was aware that McCartney was bringing out a solo record and, song after song it was, you know, decent! The production wasn't like Beatles production, but it was decent enough. The playing wasn't as good as Beatles playing, but it was good enough. Then I found out that he wrote, engineered, produced, played all the background - except Linda would show up here and there - it was a one-man band. I mean everything! Drums, keyboards, everything, then engineered it, then produced it, did it all. Unbelievable! He only had these four machines with these RCA knobs, very primitive equipment. It's a real tour de force. He's not a great guitar player, not a bad guitar player, he plays just good enough to be able to get those parts down. It just comes down to song writing. You've got 'Junk', or ""Maybe I'm amazed by the way you love me all the time"" - that could have been a Beatles song! There's another great story in how he and Lennon would work together and McCartney would bring songs to Lennon and Lennon would pooh-pooh them and one of those songs was a song called 'Woman'. McCartney brought it and Lennon said, 'That's not great'. So then McCartney said: 'Look I'm going to prove it to you, I'll give it to Peter and Gordon and they'll have a number one record.' Lennon purportedly said, 'Yeah, but that's because your name is Paul McCartney.' And McCartney says, 'Okay I'll change the name to Bernard Webb', and, sure enough, he gives it to Peter and Gordon and... number one. He did it again with Badfinger, brought in another song that Lennon purportedly said wasn't good enough, called 'Come And Get It'. I mean, what the fuck is it? Anyway, another number one song."

"like to think of this as Lennon and Elvis, you know what I mean? Lennon wouldn’t have been there without Elvis and I wouldn’t be here without The Stone Roses. Ian Brown as a frontman had the look and he was cool as fuck. He was my Elvis. The first time I saw them, that was it! I thought, “I want that!” I’d heard our kid play ‘Sally Cinnamon’ round the house and I went to see them just before the album came out and it was like, “This is it, man! This is the next fucking step!” It was like growing up a bit and you’re thinking, “This is the band that’s going to guide me to chicks and being a cool young man.” You know what I mean? This was the album that was going to carry me through. They were my guiding star."

"It would have been very disingenuous of me not to acknowledge the enormous impact The Beatles have had on music and pop culture. They were lucky enough to be around at a time when people were pioneering with electric guitars and trying out different things and forming what pop music was. The Beatles were the best at it and the masterpiece is ‘The White Album’ because you get to hear them experimenting and going a little further out into the deeper water. Some of the McCartney songs are great, things like ‘Blackbird’, but the Lennon songs – ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ and ‘I’m So Tired’ – are magnificent. ‘I’m So Tired’ is one of those songs I relate to more than any. Certain songs suit our personalities or our way of being. With ‘I’m So Tired’ I’ve been in that position so many times; sleepless nights from jet-lag or too many things going on in my head. Lennon had this unbelievably effortless ability of capturing things and writing that postcard that would become a song. That album is filled with those gems. Of all the things they did, that album is by far my favourite. It’s the most experimental. It made me think you can do what you like with an album, it’s just an experience. Other people were just writing songs; The Beatles were addressing a much broader perspective."

"Almost everything I have tried to say, Yoko Ono was saying over 30 years ago. For half a century, she has been a prophet in our midst. On WARZONE, producer Thomas Bartlett sets her sage voice amid the barest of arrangements, shining a light once and for all on the essence of Ono’s legacy.A recent Netflix film revealed that Yoko cowrote the words for “Imagine,” one of the songs for which John Lennon was deified. It is pure Yoko that she would sit silently next to John as he sang it, knowing the world would listen to her message if it seemed to be from the perspective of her partner, a white, male English megastar. Yoko Ono has given and given to us. She is one of the most brilliant and generous artists of the 20th century, and the public record now reflects this."

"It's an overlooked record I think. They were in the midst of breaking up. They were writing separately, and here you can really tell the differences between the Lennon–McCartney and George Harrison songs. What I find really interesting about the record is how it's not really polished. 'Glass Onion' is as unique a song as I've ever heard, and with self-reference: 'I told you about Strawberry Fields', 'the walrus was Paul'; I mean all that stuff! It refers to things the fans were talking about. It's a spectacular album. It doesn't connect like Abbey Road or Let It Be anywhere near as fast because the songs are all over the place. In the days when album covers and packaging meant so much, it was just a brave statement to say it doesn't have a title and leave it white. There is no title anywhere on the record, that's fantastic! Just the solo photos of the band inside. It's a strange record."