Book review: ‘One of the best — and sweetest — books of the year’

John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s knotty relationship has long occupied writers, fans and critics and, nearly 70 years since the pair first met at a church fete in a Liverpool suburb, that fascination shows no signs of abating. 

With the possible exception of Bob Dylan, no other songwriters have been subjected to such prolonged, forensic examination.

So, the challenge for Ian Leslie — whose previous work has been in the fields of psychology and human behaviour — is a familiar one: how does one find fresh meat on a bone that has been so picked at?

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs begins at the end. On December 9, 1980, McCartney took a call from his manager telling him that Lennon had been shot dead in New York City. 

He spent the following day working with the producer George Martin at Air Studios in London city centre, after which he stepped out to address a pack of waiting journalists. “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he told them.

Throughout their 23-year relationship, Lennon and McCartney would often finish or complement one another’s thoughts and sentences. 

In studio, they’d frequently finish one another’s songs. So how did we end up here? With Paul, chewing gum, marking the death of his collaborator with a glib one-liner?

Co-conspirators in a unique love story

To help make sense of what has long been contested territory, Leslie casts Lennon and McCartney as co-conspirators in a unique love story. 

Through music, they found a way, he claims, to bring that love — their love — to the world and, by doing so made that world a better and more interesting place.

He supports what is a brilliantly worked thesis by unpicking the many contemporaneous love notes John and Paul left behind them: their songs.

Forty-three of those songs are de-constructed and parsed here in a psychoanalytical unfurling of the story of John and Paul’s relationship. 

The book begins with a breezy take on 'Come Go with Me', an early cover first performed by John and that later featured in the Beatles’ earliest sets. It concludes with a touching appraisal of 'Here Today', a McCartney number from his 1982 solo LP, Tug of War.

The last 50 years has taught us that there is no one story of the Beatles: the group’s short history is far too complex and their output too layered for any conventional telling. 

But it’s no harm reminding ourselves — as Leslie does excellently — of how exceptional the gut of that story is. 

The group was together for just over a decade, during which it output prodigiously and released a dozen studio albums, among them some of the most influential ever made. 

Neither Lennon nor McCartney, who wrote the bulk of the band’s material, had reached the age of 30 by the time the band fell apart in 1970.

But the Beatles was also a group within a group: the first contract they signed with a manager, Brian Epstein, determined that.

In agreeing that all songs by either John or Paul — irrespective of who contributed what — would be credited as co-writes, Lennon and McCartney were pitching themselves in the likeness of top-tier partnerships like Gershwin and Gershwin, Leiber and Stoller, and Pomus and Shuman.

But they were making a public declaration too. In an interview with Playboy magazine conducted shortly before he died, Lennon referred to his relationship with Paul as a marriage and, in one key respect it was. 

By sharing the writing credits — and the royalties that derived from their work — they were “bound together in the eyes of the law”. 

The deeper that personal relationship became, the more the creative partnership evolved and the more difficult it became to sustain.

John and Paul wrote regularly with one another, about one another, for one another, and to one another, the songs often used as what Leslie describes as “emotional shorthand”. 

But although the Beatles always had plenty to say to their public, the group’s history — particularly in the years after the death of Epstein in 1967 — is pock-marked by an inability to communicate clearly with one another.

“When they couldn’t speak”, the author writes, “they sang it”. Working together in studio on 'Two of Us', a McCartney cut most likely about John and among the Beatles’ final songs, Lennon tells Paul: “it’s like you and me are lovers”. 

The author suggests that this line wasn’t as throwaway as one might think: it was in and through the music, he claims, that “John and Paul could let each other in”.

The music enabled this to manifest itself physically, too. Because the Beatles didn’t have an obvious frontman, and because John and Paul routinely harmonised their vocals, the archives are awash with footage of the pair making eyes at each other and sharing microphones.

In framing Lennon’s insecurity, the author suggests that “when John wasn’t being looked at by Paul, he didn’t know who he was supposed to be”.

Lennon infatuated with McCartney

Lennon’s pursuit of happiness, inside and outside of the group, has forever been the subject of conjecture and hearsay: an old trope, recycled here, speculatively suggests that John, “the intellectual Beatle”, was infatuated with Paul, “the pretty one”. 

What we do know is that he never really knew his father, his mother died prematurely, and the spectre of death punctuated his life regularly thereafter.

Leslie credibly suggests that it was fractured domestic relationships that led John and Paul into each other’s arms and that the pair’s self-confidence was “the arrogance of the damaged”. 

Lennon and McCartney’s union was an often fractious one, under-scored betimes by jealousy, anxiety, financial concerns, insecurity, and infidelity. 

John assembled the Beatles to help him shake the world but, by 1968, McCartney — the key recruit who became his writing equal — was “effectively the Beatles’ chief creative officer”. 

By which point, Lennon was “almost helplessly dependent on the others”.

During a long interview with the Beatles’ biographer, Hunter Davies, and possibly in the throes of a drug-induced psychosis, he claimed that the only people with whom he felt truly comfortable were the other members of the band.

“They seem to need you less than you need them,” Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia — who was with him throughout the exchange — told Davies.

And yet creatively, the Beatles continued to thrive: one can legitimately argue that the band got better the longer it endured and the more personal turbulence it encountered.

Lennon, in particular, seemed to come alive in the swell of chaos that engulfed him during the band’s later years. 

With Paul at his elbow — “the biggest constant of his life” — he used his many anxieties to create possibly his best work.

A Love Story in Songs is a real achievement. Superbly written, the author keenly respects the line between theorist and therapist, fan and journalist, and avoids any needless blurring. 

In what can also be read as a book about the vagaries of male friendship, he convincingly gets to the real heart of the matter. 

Ian Leslie has not only delivered one of the best — and sweetest — books of the year, he’s also delivered one of the finest studies of Lennon, McCartney, and their magnificent body of work, in decades.