During the pandemic, Ian Leslie wrote a Substack essay called “64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney,” arguing that despite his accomplishments, the ex-Beatle was underrated. But he didn’t delve much into McCartney’s relationship with John Lennon, writing, “I’m trying to keep this essay-length and that subject, inexhaustibly fascinating, is a book in itself.”
Inspired by this, Leslie went and wrote that book: “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.” Despite a seemingly endless parade of Beatles books, Leslie offers a fresh take, telling the story of the band through the duo’s relationship and the story of their relationship through the songs they were singing.
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In a video interview from London, Leslie said most previous tomes recount the facts of the story without doing the music justice – “which is what this is all about and you can’t understand them without understanding the music” – or failed to explore the pair’s relationship “with depth or emotional intelligence.”
He was initially hesitant to pitch a book, since he wasn’t a music writer. Still, as a journalist, he’d written two books about human behavior that were relevant to understanding the Beatles’ genius: “Curious: the Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It” and “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.”
“The idea of how curiosity leads to creativity and how you can have productive conflict was central to their music,” Leslie says. Even early on in Liverpool, “when they were kind of crap musicians, they already had the personalities” that would create this unparalleled future.
Ian Leslie is the author of “John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs.” (Photo Credit: Chris Floyd / Courtesy of Celadon)After his essay went viral, providing rave responses from musicians and music experts he could use to pitch a book, he realized “even though I didn’t really have music credentials, I’d invented my own credentials.”
The book recounts the Beatles’ history but shifts the emphasis in important ways. First and foremost, this is a book about their friendship and how it shaped the Beatles and, really, the world. He writes of a moment early on when Paul was being pressured by his father to get a real job and John issued an ultimatum to turn up that day to play or be kicked out. “In the end, he chose me,” Leslie quotes Lennon as saying, and then adds his own take: “Paul didn’t choose the Beatles or rock and roll; he chose John. It’s as if Lennon wanted McCartney to come and be an orphan with him.”
Later, Leslie explores Lennon’s LSD and heroin abuse, his laziness and his violent outbursts. Writing that “we’ve underestimated the extent to which Lennon’s mental instability created problems,” he credits McCartney not just for his musical genius but for his ability to handle his best friend and keep the band together.
He says he dug into this idea after hearing Aimee Mann on Diana Erickson’s podcast “One Sweet Dream” discussing the “Get Back” documentary. “She says she felt that no other band would have tolerated John’s issues and behavior and would not have let him stay in the band,” Leslie says.
The book also makes much of how Lennon and McCartney often wrote and sang eyeball to eyeball, “staring into each other’s soul,” as Leslie says during our interview.
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The fact that Lennon and McCartney were so open to the latter’s sounds is relevant he argues because it ties in to how open they were to their more feminine side, arguing that the duo were also curious, vulnerable and tolerant in ways that most young men in or out of rock music were not in the early 1960s. “And that is inextricably linked to the music they created,” he says.
The book examines dozens of songs, both Lennon-McCartney songs and solo numbers in the context of this relationship. Leslie is adept at capturing what’s special about the production and vocals in bringing the songs to life: “Ticket to Ride,” he notes, has “the stuttering hesitant beat becomes a tambourine-fueled canter” while “If I Fell,” he says, features “a lurching chord changes makes us uncertain where we stand within the song’s harmonic world” and its intro “makes us feel Lennon’s uncertainty as well as hear it in his words. Falling in love, it shows us, starts with falling.”
Sometimes Leslie writes about the collaboration and competition, from McCartney bringing in the tape loops that added the most surreal touches to Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” to McCartney remembering decades later Lennon’s compliments for “Here, There and Everywhere,” saying it was one of the few times his partner publicly singing his praises.
But he also explores the songs’ lyrics, noting that Lennon’s solo song “Instant Karma” is an attack on the superstar McCartney (“Who in the hell do you think you are”) while “Jealous Guy” is a humble apology, which is unusual both for rock songs and for Lennon. On the surface, that one sounds like a romantic relationship song, but Leslie writes “the person who was the object of John’s jealousy perhaps more often, and for longer, than any other was Paul McCartney,” before detailing those emotions. Then he notes that the song is one of the only times Lennon whistles on record and quotes an early McCartney interview, when the Beatle said that he and his songwriting partner would whistle ideas at each other: “John will whistle at me and I’ll whistle back at him.”
Even later songs like McCartney’s “Coming Up” (“you want a friend you can rely on, one that will never fade away… You want some peace and understanding… I know that we can get together”) and Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” (with lyrics like “spread our wings,” “my love,” and “another day”) are examined through this prism.
“I knew I wanted to write about ‘Coming Up,’ because that song was a catalyst for John to go back to recording and when I read the lyrics, it sounded like Paul was writing to John,” Leslie says. “I’m not saying the only or the definitive interpretation of each song. It’s not like I was going mad looking for these connections, or maybe I was going a bit mad, but they both said at different times that no song has just one meaning.”
“Paul said only years later that he understood that “Yesterday” was written about his mother and that “Let Me Roll It” was written about John, even though everyone knew about that one at the time,” Leslie adds.
During our conversation, Leslie brings up a quote from the book where McCartney says, “Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people. And it will answer you with things people can’t tell you,” noting that “the last part is important because in it he’s saying he didn’t always understand the meaning of his lyrics until after he wrote it.”
Leslie hopes the book “restores” a full appreciation of McCartney’s musical genius, but wanted to do that “without diminishing John.”
“I made a point of asking musicians I respected what they felt was so special about John’s songs,” he says. “There was this sense that Paul’s songs sound as if they have always existed, his melodies emerging from the flowing river of music over time, but that John’s songs seemingly come from nowhere, as if they’ve arrived here from another planet.”
Ultimately, he says, it was their uncanny ability to meld their personalities that makes the Beatles’ songs still sound fresh today. As he writes, “Music, for John and Paul, was never just about music… for them almost everything was understood through music.”
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