On 9 December 1980, Paul McCartney emerged from a recording studio in London to an awaiting press scrum. He’d been there all day while the rest of the world was coming to terms with the news that John Lennon, his erstwhile Beatles bandmate, had been murdered in New York the night before. Lennon was 40 years old. When McCartney stepped out, he was chewing gum. The press swarmed, microphones extended, wanting to know how he felt.
“Er, very shocked, you know. It’s terrible news,” the singer offered.
News media relies upon the kind of snappy soundbites that can sustain headlines, but McCartney wasn’t playing ball. His answers were short and truculent, a series of verbal shoulder shrugs. Asked if he was planning to attend the funeral, he replied, “I don’t know yet” – and as to whether he’d be speaking to the remaining Beatles members, he said, “Probably, yeah.” The scrum persisted. They wanted to know what he’d been doing in the studio. “I was just listening to some stuff,” came the response. He explained that he hadn’t stayed home because “I didn’t feel like it.”
Suffice to say, it was going nowhere until McCartney unexpectedly delivered a line that would prove immortal. “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he remarked, adding “OK, cheers,” before ambling off. If the world had previously been fascinated by the psychodrama that existed between the two most dazzlingly talented songwriters of their generation, then McCartney’s nonchalant response ensured that no one, now, would ever get over their fascination with this duo.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie opens by recounting the above scene in painstaking detail. The author has done this, he explains to me today, not “to suggest that Paul was a psychopath” but rather to put McCartney’s subdued reaction into context. “It was his defence mechanism. He was going to push away this terrible, shattering news and sublimate it, pretend it wasn’t happening, and think about work instead,” says Leslie. “That’s what he does. He’s a very intensely emotional person, Paul, which doesn’t always come across.”
John & Paul is the latest in a seemingly endless line of Beatles books to chart how four young men from Liverpool created one of the greatest bodies of music in history. It’s a story about which we never seem to tire of hearing and that seems to withstand endless retelling.
I meet Leslie at his publisher’s office one early February afternoon. He brings with him a heavy cold and a takeaway lunch from Pret, which he works his way through while we speak, removing successive items from the small bag – sandwich, crisps, yoghurt, apple juice – the way a magician would rabbits from a hat. He is 53 years old, and, in his glasses and corduroy jacket, has about him a scholarly air. Leslie used to work in advertising before leaving to write books on, among other things, why people lie, and why they disagree. “I write about psychology because I’m fascinated with it, but I’m not a psychologist myself,” he points out.
So, why the Beatles?
“Well, there were things I wanted to get off my chest,” he says. “There’s been so many books about them over the years, of course – hundreds, if not thousands – but, for me, so many of them have been disappointing. I wanted to redress that by specifically looking at the relationship between John and Paul, because it’s always fascinated me.”
He had plenty of source material, of course, and drew not only on his own abiding fascination (“I’ve been a fan since I was seven years old”), but also the mountain of information accessible to him. Peter Jackson’s mammoth, eight-hour 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back offered a treasure trove of information and fresh insight, and duly allowed Leslie to pore over his subject with intellectual rigour. And while he approaches his subject with the critical eye of a scholar, the tone throughout is one of pronounced fondness – a sustained awe, even. He likes them, while admitting to not knowing them fully.
In his book, Leslie writes: “We think we know them. We really don’t. The standard narrative has distorted their true personalities.”
John & Paul recounts the familiar origin story – the Cavern Club, Hamburg, and all the screaming; then India, Yoko and their ultimate dissolution in 1974 – but all of this is merely scene-setting to fully examine precisely what went on with John and Paul.
John was always inquisitive [about his sexuality], and I’m not the first to make that assumption
Early on in the book, Leslie raises the question of sexuality, citing an interview in which McCartney is quoted as telling an interviewer: “At night there was one moment when [my mother] would pass our bedroom door in underwear ... and I used to get sexually aroused.”
More contentious, however, are the suggestions Leslie makes concerning Lennon’s feelings for his bandmate – that it was more than simply platonic. “John was always inquisitive, and I’m not the first to make that assumption,” Leslie stresses now. Indeed, during the Get Back sessions, which Leslie relied heavily upon for his research, Lennon says to McCartney, seemingly only half-joking: “It’s like you and me are lovers.”
Lennon’s sexuality has long been a subject of fascination for Beatles acolytes. After the birth of his first son, Julian, Lennon opted not to spend time with his new family but rather to go off on holiday with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who was gay. “It’s kind of well-known that Brian and John had some sort of fling, the extent to which we will never know,” Leslie says. “But it happened – probably. John was such a mess in so many ways; I think it’s been underestimated just how much of a mess he was. The others in the band continually had to manage him in order to keep him in the band.”
Leslie also quotes an interview that Yoko Ono once gave to Beatles biographer Philip Norman in which she spoke on John’s “very passionate feelings for Paul” and specifically about “whether he might have been gay” – an indication, then, that Yoko had considered the possibility, too.
As to whether anything actually transpired between the two, Leslie doesn’t believe so. “[McCartney] pretty much dismissed [the rumours],” he says. “It never happened. They never had a sexual… well, who knows? But I don’t think so. I’d be surprised. Paul is pretty much immovably heterosexual, and John was predominantly heterosexual.”
That said, Leslie adds, “I do think maybe there was an erotic component to their relationship, and they were kind of fascinated by each other, but I don’t think they were sleeping together. John, maybe, at one stage had questions in his mind whether they should, but…” Leslie laughs. “He came up against the wall of Paul’s heterosexuality. That’s my guess.”
As his previous books attest (Born Liars in 2011, How to Disagree in 2022), Leslie is fascinated by the psychology of human interaction – how we connect, how we fall apart – alongside our instinct for duplicity and competitiveness. John and Paul, then, were ideal subjects for him. He’d have struggled to write a comparable book about, say, Liam and Noel Gallagher, but the two Beatles elevated their own particular schisms to the level of art. They more than repay the forensic examination.
Leslie tells us that the duo spent their time in the Beatles forever sparking off one another, always supportive if unfailingly competitive. In 1965, when speaking about why it was that John got top billing in their songwriting partnership instead of him – ie “Lennon and McCartney” rather than “McCartney and Lennon” – Paul suggested that after he wrote “Yesterday” alone, his rise in status “made John uncomfortable. I got up to his level. We grew to be equals. It made him insecure. He always was, really.”
John’s sense of himself as a genius was incredibly important to him, but he wasn’t sure he felt like a genius when Paul wasn’t there
In the 1970s, McCartney proved more than Lennon’s equal, finding global success with his next band Wings, while Lennon, at least initially, struggled. In 1971, he wrote the song “How Do You Sleep?” in the aftermath of McCartney having taken the Beatles to court to legally dissolve their partnership. Almost a decade later, Lennon was still picking over the lyrics of “Yesterday”, arguably McCartney’s high point, complaining of the narrative that “it doesn’t really resolve”.
There were occasional detentes, often at the encouragement of their far more sensible spouses, but as John & Paul so clearly paints, it remained complicated. “But then it was incredibly difficult for them both. Nobody had ever really been an ex-member of a group as big as theirs before,” says Leslie. “Their whole identity was wrapped up in being a Beatle, and so how do you handle no longer being one? How do you establish yourself as something else?”
It was Lennon who suffered the most. “John’s sense of himself as a genius was incredibly important to him, but he wasn’t sure he felt like a genius when Paul wasn’t there. Being with Paul confirmed his sense of self as he wished to be. And when Paul was not there, he became terrified that he wasn’t, and throughout the Seventies he rather lost his momentum.”
If they ultimately always remained within one another’s orbit, then they did so, Leslie suggests, “because if you do love someone that deeply, then you keep hoping to get over the difficult bits in order to find the sweetness again. Their relationship was always alive. It was never fully exhausted.”
Time and distance, as ever, proved the great healer, and towards the end of the decade there were intimations that they might even rekindle their friendship fully – in the platonic sense, at least. They were speaking regularly again and would occasionally meet for dinner. But the events outside the Dakota Building on 8 December 1980 put paid to that.
“Suddenly,” Leslie says, “John was dead, a martyr, and quickly became seen as the great genius of the Beatles, this avatar for peace, a saintly figure.” And McCartney? “Paul slightly loses his way in the Eighties. I don’t think he fully got out of John’s shadow until the mid-1990s, with Britpop. It was the Britpop crowd who recognised him as an inspiration, so it took a while to realise that Paul was a genius, too.”
All that tension, all the conflict and the insecurities – it fed into the music and made it better
Amid all of this, of course, the band’s two other members – George Harrison and Ringo Starr – rather get overlooked. If Lennon and McCartney were competitive, then surely the guitarist and drummer were, too? Leslie concedes that, yes, this is likely the case, but argues that that’s a subject for another book, not his.
“Do I feel sorry for them?” he wonders on Harrison and Starr’s relative relegation to minor-league status. “No. They were very lucky. They had their game raised enormously just by being around John and Paul.” Pushing the remains of his lunch aside, Leslie leans forward, warming to his theme. “It’s interesting that George would go on to write ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Something’, those being two of the best songs the Beatles ever did. I don’t think he’d ever have written anything like that if he hadn’t been with John and Paul, and within the tiny circle of magic they created.”
The perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, perhaps?
Leslie nods. “Yes. And ultimately, I think, the tensions and conflicts between John and Paul in particular were central to the music they produced. Even at the worst points of their relationship, they were still collaborating, still each other’s first audience. All that tension, all the conflict and the insecurities – it fed into the music and made it better. So much of their collective genius stems from the fact that they were this unstable molecule. If they’d been more normal, more relaxed, and uncomplicated,” he muses, “we might never have had the Beatles as they were; they might never have made such great music. Which is why I think it’s such a beautiful story – a love story, ultimately.”
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is published by Faber & Faber
