John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

“Leslie does a fantastic job here of writing in a compelling way . . .”

Sixty years after the Beatles spun the world around on a new axis, it’s become a cliché to ask the question “Do we need another book on the Beatles?” The truth is, the Beatles are actually underrated so yes, we need all the books about the Beatles we can get, especially if they’re as thoughtful and engaging as this one.

There are naysayers out there who think of the Beatles music as childish or that their music is not rock and roll, but what the lads produced is nothing short of a miracle. The band’s lineup that we know and love was only together eight short years but, wow, you cannot overstate what they established in those years, 1962–1970.

Maybe Timothy Leary was high on acid when he said this, but he seemed to sum up how a lot of music historians think of the Beatles: “The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species.”

All that said, this book, John & Paul is not really a Beatles book. It’s more about the love story between two boys from Liverpool who met and bonded over the untimely deaths of their respective mothers. That bond cemented their friendship and made them much more open with each other than teenage boys are wont to be.

As author Ian Leslie writes: “This is a love story. John and Paul were more than just friends or collaborators in the sense we normally understand those terms. Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender, and tempestuous, full of longing, riven jealousy. This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood.”

If you think about it, there is a lot of female energy wrapped up in singing love songs. “I want to hold your hand,” indeed! But John, the leader of the band at the beginning, had no problem shouting it from the rooftops, and his inspiration, as Ian Leslie points out, were the many African American girl groups popping up in America.

Of course, John and Paul put their own masculine spin on the originals. We all knew what John was singing about in “Please, Please Me” even if it’s a wonder it got past the BBC censors at the time.

As the title of the book promises, the chapters here are broken into Lennon and McCartney’s songs. Not all the songs but Leslie does visit many of the key ones and some they wrote as solo artists, all the way up to “Here Today,” the song Paul wrote after his friend John had been murdered. And, by the way, it’s still sometimes impossible to believe that a musician like John was assassinated! He was not an elected official or a person in power over our lives—he was a singer, damn it. The idea that he’d be shot to death is nearly as incomprehensible now as it was back in 1980.

Leslie does a fantastic job here of writing in a compelling way that keeps the reader glued to his concept—that John and Paul were in a romantic relationship, one that’s almost impossible to define.

As Leslie writes toward the end: “We’re thrown by a relationship that isn’t sexual but is romantic; a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it but doesn’t involve sex.”

These two loved each other but likely never said it out loud. They were Northern men after all from a different era. But Paul lived long enough to realize what they had. One of the saddest things in the book is what Paul said to Hunter Davies, another Beatles biographer, in 1981: “I realize now we never got to the bottom of each other’s souls.”

This book plumbs how deep they did get.