Review | Beatles book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs covers Lennon and McCartney’s relationship
Ian Leslie relies on other Beatles books, gossip and interpreting lyrics to try to define the relationship between band’s writing partners
Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, takes a long look – 426 pages – at how John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked together from their meeting as teenagers until John’s death.
Had McCartney not decided at age 15 to go to hear Lennon’s band playing in a Liverpool suburb, the world may have been denied the multitude of Beatle songs that brightened a generation and brought escalating musical innovation to rock music.
As Leslie affirms in the book, Lennon and McCartney early on developed a personal and creative chemistry that allowed them to elevate each other’s work to the timeless classics still heard around the world.
And into that relationship dives Leslie, analysing the mountain of articles and books written about the Beatles and interpreting messages the two men were sending to each other in their solo songs, particularly after the band’s break-up when both were writing and performing as solo acts.
Leslie focuses on exploring the often tortured relationship between the introverted, sometimes jealous and frequently depressed Lennon and the more outgoing, driven and businesslike McCartney.
Leslie’s comprehensive assembly of lyrics, memos and actions of the two men strays into gossip sometimes in his effort to define their relationship. The book labours to find where the Lennon-McCartney relationship fell in the spectrum of best buds to bromance.