Paul McCartney Reveal Details About His Diss Track For John Lennon

It Targeted Yoko Ono Too

Paul McCartney appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Inside the Songs, and he talked about one of his songs from his Ram album – “Too Many People”. Macca admitted it was a dig at his former Beatles bandmate John Lennon.

“This song was written a year or so after the Beatles break-up,” McCartney explained. “At the time, John [Lennon] was firing missiles at me with his songs, and one or two of them were quite cruel. I don’t know what he hoped to gain, other than punching me in the face, the whole thing really annoyed me.”

“I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I’m not really that kind of writer, so it was quite veiled,” he continued. “It was the 1970s equivalent of what might today be called a diss track.”

Macca didn’t just reference Lennon but also his wife, Yoko Ono.

“The idea of too many people preaching practices, it was definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do,” McCartney admitted. “I just got fed up being told what to do, so I wrote this song… The first verse and the chorus have pretty much all the anger I could muster, and when I did the vocal on the second line, ‘Too many reaching for a piece of cake,’ I remember singing it as ‘piss off cake,’ which you can hear if you really listen to it.”

McCartney remembered that after The Beatles broke up, “John turned nasty.”

“It’s actually a fairly upbeat song, it doesn’t really sound that vitriolic,” he added. “If you didn’t know the story, I don’t know that you’d be able to guess at the anger behind its writing.”