Books
Ian Leslie
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
More than 50 years after The Beatles broke up, their cultural presence just keeps growing. While the music may have come to an end with the release of the AI-enhanced “Now and Then” in 2023 – the white whale for Beatles-heads, the 14-minute psychedelic jam “Carnival of Light”, seems unlikely to ever see the light of day – scarcely a month goes by without the release of a new book or documentary. Given the obsessive level of documentation of their lives, it might seem unlikely there could be anything new to say. But as 2021’s revelatory Get Back made clear, the story of The Beatles still holds surprising discoveries and fresh perspectives.
Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is another major contribution to Beatles literature. Conceived as a study of the personal and creative partnership between Lennon and McCartney that was the engine of the band’s success, it is also a history of the countless ways in which The Beatles transformed our culture. Many of these are obvious: their innovations continue to echo through popular music and the playful, mocking relationship with their own celebrity that they intuitively pioneered is now part of the basic grammar of contemporary media. As Leslie makes clear, they are “crucial to the creation of a post-1960s personality: curious, tolerant, self-ironising, unaffected, both feminine and masculine”.
Leslie’s narrative traces the familiar arc, following Lennon and McCartney from their early days in Liverpool to their stint in the fleshpots of post-war Hamburg to the electrifying explosion of Beatlemania and the still-dizzying series of creative leaps that took the band from Please Please Me to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with almost-incomprehensible rapidity. The band recorded everything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road in less than four years, which must surely qualify as one of the hottest hot streaks in history. To this Leslie appends a briefer and less compelling account of the decade between the final breakdown of the band and the two men’s partnership in 1970 and Lennon’s death in 1980, and a short, if moving, survey of McCartney’s four-and-a-half decades as a solo performer and, increasingly, custodian of the band’s legacy.
Leslie is determined to push back against the perception of Lennon as the “towering genius behind The Beatles” and McCartney as a peddler of schmaltzy sentimentality, a narrative that was actively encouraged by Lennon after the band’s break-up and set in stone by his canonisation after his murder.
Here Leslie is pushing at an open door: recent years have seen a major reappraisal of McCartney’s contribution to the band and stature as an artist. Leslie argues the reasons we get the two men’s partnership wrong has as much to do with our “trouble thinking about intimate male friendships” as Lennon’s distortions. For while “we’re used to the idea of men being good friends, competitors, or sometimes both” and comfortable with the idea of sexual love between men, “we’re thrown by a relationship that may have an erotic or physical component to it but doesn’t involve sex”.
The recasting of Lennon and McCartney’s relationship in these terms allows Leslie to capture them and their work with striking acuity and tenderness. He writes movingly and perceptively about McCartney’s grief at the sudden loss of his mother and Lennon’s turbulent childhood and the deaths of his uncle and his mother, Julia, and how each recognised that shared experience of loss in the other. Similarly he writes beautifully about the complex interplay of collaboration and competition that drove the two to ever greater heights.
At a personal level it is probably Leslie’s portrait of Lennon that is most fascinating, capturing the conflicting currents of neediness, arrogance and woundedness that drove him. While he does not shy away from Lennon’s capacity for cruelty, he writes with sensitivity and sophistication about the complexities of Lennon’s sexuality, especially in relation to McCartney.
The oddly unknowable McCartney remains harder to pin down. Leslie pushes past the almost-impenetrable surface of McCartney’s public persona to explore the contradictions of an individual of almost preternatural emotional intelligence who was nonetheless capable of not telling his bandmates in Wings that his father had died, revealing a man who has always found it difficult to acknowledge difficult feelings. Likewise he exposes the streak of weirdness that expresses itself in creations like the still-uncanny “Eleanor Rigby”.
While Leslie’s approach marginalises the considerable contributions of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, he writes marvellously about the music. Describing the interweaving harmonies of “If I Fell”, a song that blends “the pre-rock and roll songs that Paul loved and John cherished too, albeit covertly”, he invokes Jonathan Gould’s observation that “John and Paul’s vocal lines do not move in parallel, like a couple holding hands, but perform an intricate courtship dance, moving apart and then closer again as the song unfolds”, noting that this “interplay between the two voices … creates the song’s meanings and emotions: John sounds uncertain, hurt and vulnerable; Paul hopeful, yearning, romantic; together, they sound everything at once”.
Leslie occasionally pushes his conceit too far or seeks to over-psychologise. While his sensitive depiction of Lennon’s troubled psyche helps make his cruelty and occasional violence more comprehensible, the book seems unwilling to offer a true accounting of the damage Lennon left in his wake. Nonetheless John & Paul is a deeply intelligent, psychologically acute and powerfully humane portrait of a relationship that transformed not just music but the world.
Faber Non Fiction, 432pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs".
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