‘John & Paul' Review: When Lennon Met McCartney

Wall Street Journal

04-04-2025

John Lennon was a tough Liverpool teenager with a well-earned reputation—a rocker with a volatile streak—when he first encountered Paul McCartney. It was a summer day in 1957. John's skiffle band the Quarrymen were playing a local gig, and Paul was amazed to see John playing the difficult-to-find-in-England R&B hits and inventing lyrics to boot. Wary and slightly shy but profoundly convinced of his own ability, Paul eventually contrived an audience during which an impressed John watched him perform Eddie Cochran's 'Twenty Flight Rock' and fell in love.
As Ian Leslie writes in 'John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs,' once Paul joined the Quarrymen on guitar (he would later switch to bass), he and John became best friends. More significantly, they became writing partners. The Liverpool scene was teeming with rock 'n' roll acts playing Carl Perkins and Little Richard tunes. In their early days, that's what the Quarrymen—later renamed the Beatles and eventually joined by George Harrison and Ringo Starr—would do as well. But in the private teenage terrarium of their flourishing imaginations, John and Paul had already dreamed something bigger. Their inspirations were brilliant songwriting teams: Leiber and Stoller or Gershwin and Gershwin. A shared vision for what was to come led to the fateful decision to be co-credited as Lennon-McCartney.
Describing an early miracle, Mr. Leslie rightfully stipulates that 'the musical genius of 'She Loves You' is as easy to miss because its effect is so immediate.' Paul's sentimental heart and John's exuberant screaming met the charming mayhem of a perfectly-formed foursome. The telepathic rapport of John, Paul, George and Ringo sprung from the bonding that occurs after shared triumph and trauma: long days and nights toiling in obscurity, followed by the hothouse of their early fame. Mr. Leslie has written multiple books about topics in psychology, including 'Curious' (2014) and 'Conflicted' (2021), and here he combines his interest in the workings of the mind with a focus on how emotion fueled his subjects' songs. 'John & Paul' shows us that the band's collective closeness grew out of an earlier intimacy between the Beatles' twinned geniuses. It celebrates the convoluted, beautiful and tragic nature of a songwriting partnership that still reverberates across the universe.
Both young men encountered unusual depths of grief when in their teens. Paul's mother, Mary, was the anchor and major breadwinner for his close-knit family. Her diagnosis with cancer and subsequent death occurred in horribly quick succession. John, meanwhile, was raised by his Aunt Mimi after his slightly wild mother, Julia, was judged unfit for the care of a child. At 17, John was beginning to reconnect with Julia when she was pointlessly struck dead by a car.If the Lennon-McCartney partnership was a force of life, it was stalked by these and other deaths: The former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe died at 21, their beloved manager Brian Epstein at 27. In each instance, the bandmates proceeded with an obsessive work ethic that mirrored the 'keep calm and carry on' mantra of their parents' war-worn generation. One way to read the Beatles' outpouring of songs is as a pent-up, exhilarated, terrified and kaleidoscopic breakthrough of that decadeslong, carefully managed energy.