Paul McCartney: "I wrote it with John in the front parlor of my house in 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton. We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars and a little bit on the piano that I had there. I remember I had the lyrics "just 17, never been a beauty queen" which John - it was one of the first times he ever went, "What? Must change that..." and it became "you know what I mean". That's really the major recollection. To us it was just an opening line that, but...at the time we were 18, 19 whatever, so you're talking to all the girls who are 17. We were quite conscious of that. We wrote for our market."
Paul McCartney: "There always was a count-in on the front of the songs but I think that one was particularly spirited so we thought "We'll keep that one, sounds good."
John Lennon (in 1980) - "That's Paul doing his usual job of producing what George Martin used to call a 'potboiler.' I helped with a couple of the lyrics."
Paul McCartney (in 1994) - "Sometimes we would just start a song from scratch, but one of us would nearly always have a germ of an idea, a title, or a rough little thing they were thinking about and we'd do it. 'I Saw Her Standing There' was my original. I'd started it and I had the first verse, which therefore gave me the tune, the tempo, and the key. It gave you the subject matter, a lot of information, and then you had to fill in. So it was co-written... and we finished it that day."
