“We think we know John and Paul,” declares the back-cover blurb to Ian Leslie’s fascinating new Beatles book John & Paul, subtitled “A Love Story in Songs”. “We really don’t…”
We don’t? It’s a provocative claim, not least because Leslie is offering a reinterpretation of existing knowledge rather than any revelations. Indeed, his 424 pages contain just one new interview and that’s with Let It Be documentary director Michael Lindsay-Hogg rather than, say, Paul McCartney, whose direct input Leslie disingenuously claims, “would have unbalanced the book”. Instead, he adds, we continue to get this oh-so-familiar partnership oh-so-wrong because “we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships”.
Lennon and McCartney’s relationship was unquestionably intimate, although clearly not sexual. Even so, Leslie has Yoko Ono vaguely hinting otherwise when she tells Beatles biographer Philip Norman: “I knew there was something going on there from John’s point of view, not Paul’s. He was so angry at Paul I couldn’t help wondering what it was really about.” As Lennon said to McCartney during the Get Back documentary, “it’s like you and me are lovers.”
Leslie is the author of books exploring human psychology rather than a music writer, so we’re spared the minutiae of recording sessions, debates as to whether The White Album eclipses Sgt Pepper (it does, by the way) and yet another retelling of Beatles history.
Instead, he chronologically takes 43 songs, from “Come Go with Me”, the 1957 Del-Vikings hit covered by John Lennon’s Quarrymen on the afternoon he met awe-struck McCartney, to “Here Today”, McCartney’s 1982 tribute to Lennon. Leslie deftly weaves each song into the evolving saga of the chief Beatles’ relationship. And, against all odds, for the first time since Craig Brown’s wonderful One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time back in 2020, there is new insight into the 20th century’s greatest musical pairing. The blurb is right: we don’t know them after all.
Leslie’s trick is to reimagine Lennon-McCartney as a marriage that begins nervously, surfs upon the waves of passion, slips into indifference and collapses in inevitable acrimony, before time heals and allows both parties to look back in languor.
Like the best and worst marriages, it was a union of opposites but equals, although the sands of marital power would constantly shift. On that July 1957 afternoon, Lennon was the alpha male, older than McCartney, acid of tongue, “a big figure in the small world of south-east Liverpool teenagers”. In contrast, his suitor was an unknown who plucked up the courage to borrow John’s guitar before shedding any semblance of gauche to belt out a word-perfect “Twenty Flight Rock”.
There was, of course, physical attraction: “He looked like Elvis. I dug him,” admitted Lennon, years later. Soon after that first meeting, he dispatched an emissary to invite McCartney to become a Quarryman. They had a date and they would go on to play hundreds of them.
From there, the couple (as couples do) built their own world. As Leslie has it, “each educated the other” in the art of songwriting, where both wrote the music and the lyrics, which were often about each other. They had big things in common beyond music – each had lost their mother – but while they both brought friends into the inner circle when McCartney recruited George Harrison and Lennon drafted Stuart Sutcliffe (who would invent the word “beatles”, but would tragically die in 1962), they conquered the world under the Beatles’ name.
Little wonder that when their relationship began to collapse. That disintegration was accelerated by Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman, interlopers who penetrated the newly fragile Beatles’ world in a way Lennon’s first wife Cynthia and McCartney’s long-time girlfriend Jane Asher could not. As the empire fell, outsiders entered the room, literally in Yoko’s case when she attended Beatles recording sessions. Yoko was part of Lennon’s world, Linda was part of McCartney’s, but neither were part of John and Paul’s joint world.
The early Beatles days were giddy, whether living in squalor in the storage rooms of a Hamburg cinema or almost breaking up – young couples are always almost breaking up – when McCartney took the equivalent of a lover: a proper job. On the morning of a lunchtime gig, Lennon called McCartney at work: “Either fucking turn up today or you’re not in the band.” McCartney turned up. “In the end,” reflected the almost cuckolded party, “he chose me.”
As the Beatles rose, Lennon and McCartney grew closer still, taking out a joint account and rearing their children (the songs) as a couple when they split songwriting royalties 50/50, irrespective of who originated what. That nobody had previously done what the Beatles were doing bound these pioneers closer still. Until it didn’t.
Leslie pinpoints the moment Lennon realised he needed McCartney more than McCartney needed him, not the obvious plea for help that was “Help!” itself, but “Ticket To Ride”, “about a shift in the balance of power between John and Paul”, written after Lennon moved to Surrey, while McCartney remained in London lodging with the Ashers.
McCartney was always the more emotionally closed off, hence his seemingly glib reactions to the deaths of both Lennon (“it’s a drag”) and his mother Mary (“what are we going to do without her money?”). In contrast, Lennon paraded his pain. So when the well-connected, intellectual Ashers became McCartney’s entrée into London’s cultural elite, Lennon was left behind, twiddling his thumbs like a golf widow.
As the relationship broke down, Lennon and McCartney could only talk to each other through their songs. According to Lesile, where once Lennon wanted to be the most powerful Beatle, he began to seek McCartney’s love and attention. In their most crucial miscommunication, Lennon believed McCartney understood his insecurity vis-à-vis McCartney’s “charisma, way with women and musical abilities”. In truth, McCartney was oblivious, as he was to some of the songs he had co-written being about him, hence “In My Life”, a love song to McCartney confessing “just how much their shared history and shared present meant to him”, but, adds Leslie, “I doubt Paul even noticed”
When the split came, it was emotionally and financially messy. McCartney framed it maritally: “I hate this trial separation. John’s in love with Yoko and no longer in love with the three of us.” Lennon didn’t see it that way at all. After his death the discovery of his 70s journals confirmed he remained a jealous guy, obsessing over McCartney’s relatively superior album sales and wealth. Later, though, he would stumble towards acceptance: “Maybe it was a marriage that had to end.”
Eventually, the bitterness of sniping at each other through interviews and Lennon’s vituperative “How Do You Sleep?” evaporated into something approaching rapprochement, via telephone calls and occasional visits when the McCartneys were in New York. By the 80s, they were even dressing in very similar fashion.
Shortly after Lennon’s murder, McCartney admitted to a sense of unfinished business: “I realise now we never got to the bottom of each other’s souls.” Had Lennon lived rather than becoming, as McCartney bitterly quipped, Martin Luther Lennon, it’s inconceivable the pair would not have reunited the way divorced couples sometimes do, by socially and professionally collaborating without the baggage of Beatles wedlock. After all, as they both innately understood, Lennon and McCartney were better together. We do know them, but we know them a little more now.
‘John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs’ (Faber & Faber, £25) is out now
