How close were John Lennon and Paul McCartney to writing music together again after The Beatles split up, but before Lennon's untimely death in 1980?

Fans of The Beatles can only wonder.

But consider this — what if Lennon had guest starred on McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings' 1975 album Venus and Mars? Or at least helped out in its songwriting?

Can you imagine?

While that clearly didn't happen, and the two lads from Liverpool never wrote together again after The Beatles' 1970 breakup, it's a prospect we can now better imagine thanks to new info from May Pang, Lennon's former lover who accompanied the late musician during his infamous "Lost Weekend" period of the '70s, while estranged from Yoko Ono.

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As diehard Beatles fans know, Lennon and McCartney did mend fences and play music together at least once in 1974 — see the infamous bootleg A Toot and a Snore in '74. But could the two have actually composed new songs together in the classic Lennon/McCartney sense? It's something that came very close to happening, per Pang.

She tells her story of her relationship with John Lennon in the 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. And in a new interview accompanying its Oct. 13 release on demand and Blu-ray, Pang — she first worked for Lennon as a personal assistant — was asked about the documentary's revelation that Lennon briefly considered going to New Orleans to work on music with McCartney in 1975.

All You Need Is Love
The Beatles (BIPS / Getty Images)
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"The pressure was off," Pang recalls of Lennon's "Lost Weekend" era to USA Today. "All of them [in The Beatles] were now free to do whatever they wanted to do."

She explains, "So in January 1975, Paul and Linda [McCartney] were saying, 'We're going to go down to New Orleans and do a new album [Venus and Mars].' So John says, 'Oh, great, New Orleans, always loved it.'"

Pang continues, "A couple of days later, he's tinkling on the guitar, and he goes, 'What do you think if I wrote with Paul again?' You talk about shock — the reference is like The Exorcist, the head flips back. And I said, 'I think it would be great.'"

The Lost Weekend: A Love Story Trailer

Of course, this never came to fruition. But according to Pang, it was a real possibility. And it seems she wishes she had tried harder for it to happen.

"Then he goes, 'Maybe we should go down," Pang adds. "He really wanted to do that. I knew if I'd gotten him down to New Orleans, it would have happened."

What do you think a post-Beatles Lennon/McCartney song would sound like? We still can only wonder.

Wings, "Listen to What the Man Said" (Venus and Mars)

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