John & Paul: A Love Story in Song, Ian Leslie, Faber & Faber £25
Bella Caledonia, 4 April 2025
Gerry Hassan
The Beatles story is one of the most enduring, beguiling and seemingly never-ending of our modern age. What else is there to be said? Ian Leslie thinks he has an answer in exploring the relationship, inner workings and chemistry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney – the central axis of the phenomenon that was the Beatles.
This is a riveting, well-written account throwing new light on old stones – the band, John and Paul, songwriting and creativity, and the craft of some of their most critically acclaimed songs (and some lesser-known gems) – all told within a poignant narrative about male friendship, musical alchemy and loss.
There is a welcome revisionism in John & Paul. Leslie throws out the well-worn concept of completely distinct John and Paul songs – one of the central strands of numerous Beatleology studies. Instead, he sees John and Paul as creations of each other, demolishing the simplistic dichotomy of John the rocker and Paul the sentimental balladeer, John the visionary and Paul the champion of ‘granny music’. ‘There was no John without Paul, and vice-versa’ writes Leslie observing of who wrote what: ‘They were so far inside of each other’s musical minds that it does not matter.’
There are numerous powerful passages and insights into the inner working of John and Paul’s music creation. This includes how they wrote songs individually and together, assisted each other and worked in part competition, and the evolving art in the 1960s of music as a set of colours and soundscape in which the Beatles were revolutionary pioneers – and which only Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was in any way in the same league at the time.
Leslie’s approach is to chart the arc of John and Paul’s relationship through 43 songs from ‘Come Go With Me’ by the Del-Vikings, a doo-wop song Lennon played at the summer fete at Woolton when the pair first met in July 1957, to the post-Lennon assassination ‘Here Today’ by McCartney. In each he contextualises the specific song referencing the period and other songs recorded at the same time by the band or John or Paul post-Beatles.
There are wonderful insights into the duality of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ and the genius of ‘A Day in the Life’. Leslie portrays 1967 and Sgt. Pepper as ‘the year when John and Paul were most in sync’ – with the first two songs drawing deeply from a child’s perspective of a lost world. In this they were aided by the studio and musical wizardry of George Martin who empowered and realised their kaleidoscopic vision taking it into uncharted waters.
There are many well-chosen observations about John and Paul’s often wordless communication, how they held each other’s eyes looking at each other, and their mutual humour and wit. Leslie notes: ‘In music they could say what they felt without having to say it’ and Paul reflected on their bond in 1964: ‘The way we work, it’s like, we just whistle. John will whistle at me and I’ll whistle back at him.’
The ‘Two of Us’ from Let It Be has long been a track that many of us have thought as much about John and Paul as about the then new relationship of Paul and Linda with its evoking of ‘you and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead’: a view confirmed by the recent Get Back film and by Leslie in this book.
In such a densely populated forest as that of Beatle books there will always be judgements by an author with which the reader disagrees. Leslie considers for example that a critical watershed in the John-Paul partnership was the Beatles’1968 trip to study with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India, with John feeling betrayed by Paul’s early departure for home.
It is of course difficult to know if John really felt this. Did he really as Leslie ruminates fall off the cliff post-India and never quite see Paul in the same light again? Or were other forces entering the frame then – such as Yoko in John’s life and Linda in Paul’s? Add to that the constant vulnerabilities beneath John’s bluff and sometimes abrasive demeanour, and a heady cocktail was brewing.
Leslie poses that John and Paul were ‘a duet not a duel’: positioning these as opposites when they can be complementary. The duet nature of their creative relationship cannot be understated but neither can its duel-like aspects; both were ultra-competitive with the achievements of each spurring the other on to new highs. The absence of such a helpful rivalry was one factor in the decline in quality of the post-Beatle work of both. Not only did they not have the creative spark of each other, but didn’t have the need to prove themselves to someone their equal.
Leslie’s account has warmth and nuance and gets as far as is possible decades later into understanding and explaining the intricate nature of the Lennon-McCartney musical partnership. Brian Eno’s notion of scenius sprang to mind where he challenged the conventional wisdom of individual genius. Instead, Eno asserted: ‘Let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work’, concluding: ‘So I came up with this word “scenius” – the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture.’
Lennon and McCartney after the Beatles
The Beatles story is one seemingly without end. The group formally broke up in 1970 55 years ago while John Lennon was assassinated in 1980 which you would think would draw a veil over the endless questions in 1970 to the four ex-Beatles about whether they would ever reform. But even the death of Lennon and subsequently of George Harrison has not completely called time on the fantasy of the ‘Fab Four’ being reunited, with the Frankenstein creations of ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ while George was still alive, and ‘Now and Then’ when only Paul and Ringo are still with us.
Leslie covers the key years of the band from Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting in 1957 to the 1970 break-up and beyond, examining the turbulence of the early 1970s and then reproachment before Lennon’s death. Post-1970, Lennon felt that he and Yoko were slighted by McCartney songs on Ram such as ‘Too Many People’, responding with the scorn and bile of ‘How Do You Sleep?’
Lennon also felt annoyed at McCartney for being the one who publicly announced he was leaving the band in April 1970 after Lennon had left in September 1969 and agreed to not go public. Leslie is good on the wounds and scars Lennon carried throughout his entire adult life in and after the Beatles, some of which he expressed in his resentment and insecurities towards McCartney.
It is worth noting that the Lennon-McCartney period of public acrimony, much discussed and with a long bitter hangover in how both are seen, is relatively short – from April 1970 to the end of 1971. This is not a never-ending feud like that of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour which has gone on for four decades.
Instead, McCartney sent out an olive branch in December 1971 with the track ‘Dear Friend’ and the two agreed a truce which led over the decade to their relationship and friendship warming. A significant moment was their mutual sympathy for Irish republicanism, both penning songs opposing the British presence in Northern Ireland: ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ (Paul) and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (John).
John and Paul by the mid-1970s occasionally hung out together in the States, remembered the good old days of Hamburg, and talked of recording together. The latter never happened apart from an impromptu drug-imbued studio session in 1974. The dynamics of their duel while weakened never fully went away and McCartney’s jaunty ‘Coming Up’ single in 1980 galvanised Lennon to get back into the studio and record what was to be his last album Double Fantasy with Yoko.
This is a golden era of Beatle books and all things related to the band and its members. It is worth considering why this is so. There is the undoubted brilliance of their music and the impact it had. There is the conceit of the baby boomer generation who have endlessly relived the idealism of the 1960s and their youth, but are slowly passing out of the picture. There is the absence of musical pioneers in the present in the way there was in the 1960s and 1970s with the likes of Dylan, the Stones and Bowie, as well as the Beatles. That missing ingredient of the music of the future has fuelled the fires of cultural nostalgia which are all around us.
There is a retreat of idealism and cultural innovation across much of the West, a retrenchment of reactionary views and a wider pessimism about the future. The allure of the Beatles and the sixties is filled with nostalgia, but is also shaped by a lost idealism and frustration that today’s problematic status quo is not being shaken in the way it was in that decade.
I finished Leslie’s book feeling even more a sense of awe at the work rate and pushing against musical and cultural boundaries that was the Beatles at their best – John, Paul, George and Ringo as individuals coming together to make more than the sum of their whole. While the latter two, and even George Martin, are relegated to bystanders in this account that is overall a price worth paying for a detailed examination of the central dynamic of the band and what contributed most to their greatness.
Such an account raises big questions about the nature of creativity, talent and human imagination, and the revolutionary impact of four young men from humble upbringings in Liverpool who remade music forever and more. Would such people of talent coming from similar backgrounds be able to breakthrough in music or another creative field in the UK today?
When we consider not just the degree of inequality and insecurity in British society but the toffification of large acres of public life and the arts and culture the answer is unlikely to be a positive one. Rather it points to the degree of social and cultural closure since the 1960s and 1970s and the open flaunting of privilege and advantage that has now become the norm.
There are ultimately so many reasons why this story endures and continues to hold the attention of so many. It reminds us of the wonder and joy of human imagination and creativity, what music can do which refuses to play by the rules, and the appeal of difference and uniqueness in a sea of conformity (like in the early 1960s and in a very different way the present).
The story of the Beatles is uplifting and liberating, showing how people can break with orthodoxy and make the world more hopeful. They do not deserve to be canonised, but rather seen as catalysts in articulating the view that we can do more than just accept the conventions of the establishment and of those who think they know best, and do something different.
Leslie’s book is a timely reminder of a time when it seemed possible to think of changing society, culture and the future, and of overthrowing the old ways. Such a mindset is more than needed in today’s Britain and world but surely if it were possible in the 1960s and other times it is possible to at least begin to imagine this today?
