Ian Leslie’s nonfiction book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs reveals the intangible yet powerfully real love the two musicians had for one another, told through the songwriting that began with the legendary Lennon-McCartney partnership that made The Beatles the greatest band of all time and continued past it into their solo careers.
It’s a fantastic book. Like untold numbers of people, I grew up with The Beatles’ music and love it to this day, and know much of their music so well from core memory. And while I’ve read some Beatles books and seen several documentaries about the band, I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere close to being a Beatles expert (textpert).
Which I mention only to say that, while I found Leslie’s thesis and claims of John and Paul’s unspoken and nuanced love driving so much of their music, the band’s acrimonious fallout, and numerous actions in their lives, convincing, I’m not in a position to question it. Is Leslie cherry-picking evidence to support his thesis, as any author would do, or is this interpretation a thoroughly sound one - for example, did hearing Paul’s Coming Up really spur John back into the studio to make Double Fantasy? Maybe (I’m amazed). John and Paul did write and say all of the things in the book and it adds up. So perhaps…? Then again maybe a Beatles scholar will say otherwise.
What’s clear is that John and Paul both showed their true feelings through their music, in a way that they were unable to in real life. Partly that was because of their generation, where boys weren’t allowed to show weakness or feeling (when Paul’s mother Mary died of breast cancer, his response was “What will we do for money now?”). Partly it was the times, when homosexuality was illegal - not that either were homosexual, but that fact, and the stigma attached to queerness, almost certainly contributed to men being more closed off emotionally to other men.
Each chapter is named after a song, though each chapter is not just about that song - Leslie instead tells a truncated story of both John and Paul, referencing that song somewhere in the chapter. I didn’t recognise a lot of the early songs, or the later ones from their solo careers, but I got all of the Beatles chapters (which make up the majority of the book anyway). The early Beatles songs don’t really contribute much to Leslie’s thesis, as some of the songs are covers and, in an effort to become established commercial acts, the early songs fit the template of standard love songs (Love Me Do, She Loves You, et al.).
So, rather than explore his thesis, Leslie instead gives the reader a brief biography of the boys and the early days of the band, when John and Paul meet for the first time in July 1957. The date is one of many astounding things that struck me when reading this. They went from being kids playing covers at a town fete in 1957 to releasing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 - that’s 10 YEARS. It’s absolutely flooring how quantum a leap they made from being obscure nobodies to the biggest band in the world, producing one of the most inspired albums of all time, in a decade. Just imagine what most people do in a decade - particularly that decade, from late teenagehood to late 20s, which is to say, speaking for myself, nothing all that impressive really - and it’s all the more astonishing.
People speak of the Hamburg days - when the Beatles left Liverpool for the German city to play club gigs for a few months at a time - as the proving ground for the group. This was their “10,000 hours” of practice. But what Leslie points out interestingly is that other groups did exactly the same thing but didn’t become The Beatles. There was something special about John, Paul and George that no amount of practice can account for. Rory and the Hurricanes never went on to conquer the world - although their drummer, Ringo Starr, impressed George Harrison enough to warrant an introduction to John and Paul which led to an invitation to join the band and Ringo making the best decision of his life by saying yes to The Beatles and no to The Hurricanes.
Hamburg is also a place the Beatles returned to more than once - I had it in my head that it was a one-time venture but they went back to do more tours of duty, albeit in better clubs each time. I also imagined their Cavern Club gigs in Liverpool to be at night but they were weirdly lunchtime gigs - apparently workers at this time went to see live bands perform while they ate their lunches?! How oddly quaint!
The early chapters in the book are fine but not nearly as compelling as things get further in. Leslie points out that the songwriting partnership is reflected in their performances with Lennon refusing to take centre stage as the leader of the group (a la Cliff Richard and the Shadows) with Paul often singing different parts of the songs alongside him (A Hard Day’s Night, If I Fell) and the group becoming known collectively and individually in a way that had never happened before - something their manager Brian Epstein brilliantly masterminded.
But certain chapters about songs I don’t really care about, like Ticket to Ride, aren’t as interesting to read as there isn’t much going on. I’m also less persuaded by Leslie’s contention that songs like Day Tripper, Norwegian Wood, and And Your Bird Can Sing are John pining for Paul - written at a time when John (and George and Ringo) had moved to the suburbs, while Paul had remained in the city and was living the swinging sixties fantasy. It’s a bit of a reach, and Lennon’s lyrics in his later songs seem much more Paul-centric.
The most striking aspect of the book was in learning about how mentally ill John was. It felt like he was kept mostly in check while in the band and the others could look after him - he seemed completely in his element when he was in the studio making music, as was all of them, and especially Paul - but you see a foreshadowing of the wreck he’ll become later in the ‘70s in 1965, when he’s dropping acid in his big house, alone, brooding.
Although, Paul is also not that great a character himself. I found myself thinking his extensive promiscuity a bit immature, but then had to remind myself that he was in his mid 20s - and he was a good-looking, world-famous millionaire rock star! But the age is again what’s so surprising. They lived so much, and created so much, in so short a time! And, though John has the (well-earned) reputation for abusing drugs the most out of all of them, Paul was the one blowing his nose off with coke during the making of Sgt Peppers!
Once we’re into the truly great records, beginning with Revolver (although Rubber Soul is magnificent too), starting in the book with Chapter 15: Tomorrow Never Knows, a little over a third of the way in, the book really takes off. The familiar story of drugs, Epstein dying, George feeling diminished, their management contract expiring and the group splitting up into enclaves, and Apple Corps becoming a money pit, remains a fascinating one.
Leslie mentions a new consideration though: John and Paul finding the loves of their lives - Yoko and Linda - and this contributing further to the Beatles’ inevitable downfall. It’s like their competitive songwriting spilled over into other aspects of their lives. Paul wrote Yesterday so John wrote In My Life. Paul wrote Michelle so John wrote Girl. John wrote Strawberry Fields Forever so Paul wrote Penny Lane. Now, Paul went from being serially promiscuous to being devoutly monogamous and, shortly after marrying Linda, John marries Yoko.
Leslie makes a strong case for the dissolution of the band tying into John’s fears of abandonment - feeling it in the way Paul “left” him for Linda, how he continued moving further away from him, and, rather than be the one left behind again (as he was when his father left, when his mother died, when his friend Stuart Sutcliffe died), he decided to be the one who left and did what he could to bring The Beatles - the band he started - to a close.
Like their ages, their productivity - and the high quality that accompanied it - was flooring. Imagine (all the people) having so much material that you could produce an album a year (at least) and still have enough to do something insane like put Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane out as a double-A single rather than on a record?! Although those two did appear on Magical Mystery Tour eventually, still Lady Madonna and Hey Jude (arguably their best song) remained singles only. Just jaw-dropping that they were throwing these gems out at pace.
Even lesser songs like Hey Bulldog were recorded in a mad rush of inspiration - they went in the studio to film a promotional video for Lady Madonna and ended up making Hey Bulldog instead! It’s not among their best but it’s still a damn good song that’s endured - and they just bashed it together!
It’s interesting that Let It Be and All You Need is Love didn’t get their own chapters, although they were mentioned in others. The chapter on Hey Jude though is an exemplary one - a great piece of musical criticism from a writer who isn’t a known music critic. It also shows the warmth of Paul’s character - something that got overlooked for some time - when he goes to visit Cynthia (John’s ex-wife) and 5 year old Julian, John’s first son - to make sure they’re doing ok in the wake of the recent divorce. It was on the drive over that he began to sing a song to try and make it better - hey Jules… And there’s a sweet short chapter on Paul’s beloved sheepdog, Martha, for whom he wrote Martha My Dear (she ended up outliving John by a year).
As I didn’t know much about what either were up to in the 1970s, the chapters following The Beatles’ breakup were fascinating. John and Paul were in more contact than I’d thought, helped in large part to John’s informal separation from Yoko and his new partner, May Pang, who gets a lot of credit for encouraging him to reconnect with Julian and Paul - things Yoko kept him from doing for too many years.
Mostly though, it’s grimly-fascinating to read about what a disaster John was without The Beatles. He had started using heroin towards the end of his time in the band but his drug use and drinking went off the rails afterwards and continued on and off throughout the decade. Sure, he was traumatised from childhood experiences, but his behaviour - and Paul’s - feels like a reaction to an extremely bad break-up, and really enforces Leslie’s thesis of the two sharing a unique bond.
As the author points out, human love is nuanced - there’s familial love, brotherly love, romantic and sexual love; but there are more kinds of love than this. He places John and Paul’s love beyond brotherly (Leslie mentions how he doesn’t have this kind of relationship with his own brother!), and, as far as we know, it never became sexual. But there was romance there and beyond that something deeper, more profound - spiritual-like, perhaps still another kind of love.
And I believe him that John and Paul had that love. It came out in their songs and, when they were separated, it came out still in their music but also in self-destructive actions, as happens when a great love is broken. For that alone, this is a successful book in that it thoroughly delivers on its premise - but it’s also a thoughtful, insightful, and (once we get past the early years) genuinely riveting account of perhaps the most remarkable songwriting partnership there’s ever been.
It definitely helps if you already have an abiding love of The Beatles’ music to enjoy the book more, and perhaps I liked this all the better for not being someone who has read extensively on the subject of the band, but I really dug John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. An outstanding accomplishment from Ian Leslie and a helluva contribution to the literature on this magical (mystery tour) band.
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