In 2020, in the enforced stillness of a pandemic lockdown, Ian Leslie sat down to write a long, impassioned defence of Paul McCartney. The resulting 10,000-word essay, published on his Substack, the Ruffian, contended that McCartney is an underrated musical and cultural force.
Leslie did not expect much reaction “for a piece arguing that Paul McCartney was good at music”, but it went viral, drawing praise from Beatles scholars and fans around the world. For Leslie, a self-described Gen X Beatles fan who fell in love with the band through his parents’ LPs, that essay was the beginning of something much bigger.
“Because the piece was praised by people who knew a lot about The Beatles, I thought, maybe I’ve effectively just given myself licence to write about them … but I didn’t think it was an option, because I didn’t have that background and, obviously, there are a lot of books about The Beatles, as I am constantly being reminded,” he says. Encouraged by the positive response to his essay, he began to think, “Wow, maybe I could do that.”
Leslie’s viral essay led to John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a brilliant book exploring the creative partnership at the heart of The Beatles. Their bandmates, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, feature too, of course, but what differentiates John & Paul from all those other Beatles books is Leslie’s focus on the intense, often volatile and ultimately transformative relationship between Lennon and McCartney.
At the heart of the book is the idea that these two musical geniuses didn’t just write songs together but also communicated through them. “They discovered, as teenagers, that the song could be a vessel for everything they couldn’t say out loud,” Leslie says from his home in England. “It was a kind of emotional panic room.”
They were two boys from Liverpool who had both lost their mothers young, a bond that created a private gravitational pull between them. “You’ve got these two emotionally intense teenagers, at the most intense stage of a young man’s life, and they find this magical outlet, this way to connect, not just with the world but with each other.”
It’s this emotional dynamic that Leslie believes is often flattened in typical Beatles biographies; he has read most, if not all, of them. “The music was their language,” Leslie says. “It’s how they argued, supported each other, competed and connected. Even after the band split they were still talking to each other, just through songs written apart.”
Leslie was about seven years old when he discovered The Beatles. He was rifling through his parents’ record collection when he found Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a compilation album that featured a photograph of the band taking part in a Japanese tea ceremony. “They just seemed very mysterious and glamorous to me – they have done ever since – and that was the beginning of it.”
[ Seeing but not quite hearing The Beatles in Hammersmith, 1964Opens in new window ]
Leslie’s background is in advertising, but his previous books, Born Liars, Curious and How to Disagree, are about human behaviour and psychology. He is known for taking a familiar aspect of human nature and uncovering fresh angles. No surprise, then, that he wanted to take a well-trodden story such as that of Lennon and McCartney and reappraise it. “That central relationship in the group is the thing that absolutely is like the molten core of The Beatles, and the thing that really fascinated me,” he says.
As a writer on psychology Leslie brings a fresh perspective to the friendship. “There is more than one reason that we get Lennon and McCartney so wrong, but one is that we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships,” he writes. “We’re used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We’re thrown by a relationship that isn’t sexual but is romantic, a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn’t involve sex.”
In each chapter Leslie takes a deep dive into a song to more fully understand the Lennon-McCartney bond. Each of the 23 songs in the book, from Come Go with Me, the song Lennon sang at their fateful 1957 church-fete meeting in Woolton village, to Here Today, the song McCartney wrote after Lennon was murdered, in 1980, become emotional landmarks. When Leslie writes about a work as ubiquitous as She Loves You, he somehow manages to restore the shock of how new it once sounded.
Reading the book, you find yourself stopping to listen to each song – and, with Leslie’s insights, hearing them in a different way.
“I knew pretty much from the beginning that’s what I wanted to do,” he says. “I don’t think you can separate the music from the relationship, and these were guys who lived and thought and felt and communicated through songs. They learned to do that as teenagers in each other’s bedrooms and front parlours, and that becomes their primary channel of communication about the things they care about most.”
Although Leslie’s book veers away from indulging the polarising narrative around the two friends, he admits that he has always been “a Paul person”. “He was the one who fascinated me. I felt he’d been treated unfairly in terms of his reputation,” Leslie says.
For me, as a fellow Paul person, one of the successes of the book is that it draws me more towards Lennon. Leslie is pleased about this. “I wanted to be careful that I wasn’t biased. I’m glad that it kind of sent you to John. I mean, partly, that’s what happened to me as well, because I set out with that kind of approach, to say, ‘Look, these two guys basically created each other.’
“It’s ridiculous to talk about John versus Paul, right? You couldn’t have one without the other musically, creatively speaking, and even in terms of personality. So as I was researching and writing the book I was sort of opening my own mind to how extraordinary John was.”
John & Paul, Leslie explains, was a balancing act. It needed to be accessible to people who didn’t know much about their back story, “which is a lot of people, especially young people”. At the same time, “the material had to feel fresh even if you know all about The Beatles”.
He was working on three levels. “One is what happened. It’s important to me that we tell the story of The Beatles and not just assume people know it,” Leslie says. “The second level is the John-and-Paul relationship. And the third thing is the music, and how does the music change and develop? They all have to be interwoven, so you can see how they’re all playing off against each other. That was basically the challenge of writing it.”
What the book powerfully communicates is the sheer unlikeliness of what Lennon and McCartney created. Leslie returns often to the mystery of their personal and musical partnership. How did two working-class young men, in a postwar industrial city, end up making the greatest popular music of the 20th century? How did both of them turn out to be world-class songwriters and singers?
“It’s almost a kind of magical meeting, the two of them coming together at that time,” Leslie says. “Sometimes you worry that if you’re enchanted by something the magic will go, because it’ll just become a series of facts and information. And actually, in this case, it’s kind of the opposite. I think, in terms of The Beatles and John and Paul’s relationship, the more you learn about it, the more detail you accumulate, the more mysterious and enchanting it gets. And I wanted to convey a little bit about that in the book.”
When you’re writing a story that’s so familiar to so many, “it can feel like the author knows exactly how and why all of this happened … so now and again I sort of step outside the frame and go, ‘I don’t know how this happened’,” Leslie says.
This incredibly vitriolic song is not the kind of song you write about somebody that you’re exhausted by, or that you’re bored by, that you just can’t be bothered with
It’s why John & Paul begins with Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting, on a hot summer’s day, 12 years after the end of the second World War and a decade before Sgt Pepper. “I wanted to capture that. John’s there at the fete, playing bad skiffle, when he first meets Paul, and 10 years later they’re making a psychedelic masterpiece that revolutionises music. It’s hard to believe ... I still don’t understand it,” Leslie says.
He suspects some kind of “hidden hand” in this. He mentions Rick Rubin’s well-ventilated theory that The Beatles were the best proof available of the existence of God. “The more you look into the story of The Beatles, that’s how I feel about it. I can’t explain this.”
The book is particularly revealing about the acrimony that developed between the two friends in later years, and how their relationship ebbed and flowed after The Beatles split, when Lennon was with Yoko Ono in the United States and McCartney had settled into family life with his wife Linda.
“Most relationships or marriages end because the partners essentially get bored or exhausted by each other. The fire goes out altogether. That’s why a lot of long-running groups split up eventually,” Leslie says. That didn’t happen with The Beatles “because they essentially split up prematurely, when they were making the best music of their career. This never happens”.
“You split up because you’re not very good or you’re making mediocre music, the spark is gone and you’re a bit bored and so on. They never did that. They split up and they have this terrible argument when they’re still doing incredible stuff.”
Lennon’s song How Do You Sleep?, which is full of cruel digs at McCartney, features in the book for good reason. “This incredibly vitriolic song is not the kind of song you write about somebody that you’re exhausted by, or that you’re bored by, that you just can’t be bothered with. It’s a song you write when you really want somebody’s attention, because you have very, very strong feelings about them,” Leslie says.
Arguably, they were still being inspired by each other when Lennon was fatally shot outside the Dakota, his apartment building in New York, and Leslie is insightful about the emotional fallout for McCartney of his best friend’s death. In the book he describes McCartney’s appearance on Desert Island Discs years later, visibly struggling not to cry as one of his chosen songs, Lennon’s Beautiful Boy, is played.
What does Leslie think Lennon would be up to now, had he lived? “The thing about John Lennon is that he’s never really what you want him to be, which is why he’s so cool and fascinating and interesting. I don’t think he’d ever settle into your nice, sweet grandad mode. I think he would have been on Twitter, you know, saying the most terrible things.”
Did he have revelations about McCartney and Lennon as a fan himself while writing the book? “Absolutely. It’s such complex music, even when it sounds very simple, that you can always go back to it and hear different things. And, yes, that happened to me, but it was also the mission of the book to take something very familiar that we take for granted and ask people to think about it again,” Leslie says.
“We think we know The Beatles. We think we know John and Paul. I wanted to reastonish people with what they did and who they were. And, of course, the music is absolutely essential to that. I want people to hear I Want to Hold Your Hand and go, ‘Oh my God,’ or She Loves You and go, ‘This is actually incredible. It’s not just this song, it’s a masterpiece,’ you know.”
Not even Lennon and McCartney, the mercurial protagonists themselves, could decode the full mystery of their bond. In one of the final quotes in the book, from 1981, McCartney remarks that they “never got to the bottom of each other’s souls”.
[ ‘A festering wound’: The true story of the Beatles break-upOpens in new window ]
As Leslie puts it, “What we can say for sure is that they loved each other and that through music they found a way to share this love with the world – and in doing so they made the world an immeasurably better place.”
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is published by Faber & Faber. Ian Leslie is in conversation with Tom Dunne and Paul Howard at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on Wednesday, July 9th
