Sir Paul McCartney envied the Everly Brothers

Sir Paul McCartney envied the Everly Brothers.

The 79-year-old Beatles legend admitted that he and bandmate John Lennon were influenced by brothers Don and Phil Everly, who made hits such as ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’.

He said: “The biggest influence on John and me was The Everly Brothers.

“To this day, I just think they’re the greatest. And they were different. You’d heard barbershop quartets, you’d heard the Beverley Sisters – three girls – you’d all heard that. But just two guys, two good-looking guys? So we idolised them. We wanted to be them.”

Despite this, Paul, John, Sir Ringo Starr and George Harrison all enjoyed unprecedented fame and success as part of the Beatles.

And Paul has used the pages of his new book, ‘The Lyrics’, to explain how he and John would craft their chart-topping hits.

He said: “John and I used to write our songs in pretty much three hours. It wasn’t that we set a strict time limit; it was just that by three hours, we’d had enough, and we learnt by then we could polish it off. That two to three hours is a kind of natural period. It is why most classes or seminars and most recording sessions are two to three hours. After that your brain goes a bit.

“That period carried over into family life. If I knew Linda [his then-wife] was downstairs doing something – a photo session or a cookery programme – then I would abscond and try to write something, with part of the thought being to surprise her, to give her a little gift at the end of those two hours and be able to say ‘guess what I was doing!’”