Latest news with #John&Paul:ALoveStoryinSongs
Irish Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Best new music books: The Bangles, tensions and sexism; Sinéad O'Connor as ‘a witch, burned at the stake'
The internal dynamics of successful pop/rock groups are at the front and centre of Eternal Flame: the Authorised Biography of The Bangles , by Jennifer Bickerdike (Hachette, £18.99). Although the 'authorised' tagline indicates mostly approving details about the band – one of the most successful all-female acts of the 1980s – there is an interesting point of view throughout that three of the original members never really dig into: the tensions that emerged from co-founder Susannah Hoffs garnering most of the media attention. In both archival and contemporary interviews (Bickerdike was given full access to the band archives as well as separate time with Hoffs and the other co-founders, sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson), there is a sense that each member doesn't necessarily have the same recollection of the same events. This makes for particularly insightful reading, as does the detailing of the widespread sexism the band dealt with from fellow musicians , media, DJs (who back in the 1980s could make or break an act in the US ) and record label executives. Not every music book, whether a memoir or biography, outlines a musician's fluctuating achievements. Sometimes, books about music are more instructive. In such cases, we suggest that any emerging musician get their hands on Pop Music Management , by Michael Mary Murphy (Routledge, £34.99). In this book, subtitled Lessons from the Managers of Number One Albums, Murphy, who teaches music industry and entrepreneurship at IADT, Dún Laoghaire, outlines the central tenets of music management, how these have evolved since the 1960s (blueprinted and revolutionised by Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles ), and what type of associations managers need to develop with their clients. While the focus is on the management of music acts of number one albums on the (US) Billboard charts, Murphy also astutely highlights another factor concerned with getting the best from people whose careers are sometimes on a knife's edge: namely, forging progressively caring, kind and intuitively positive relationships. Valuable and insightful reading not only for music business students but also for established managers. READ MORE Paul McCartney (left) and John Lennon Speaking of Epstein, there are lessons to be learned from John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (Faber, £25). We think it's a first in by now far-reaching Beatles literature: a new story outline that doesn't focus on one member but two. Intriguingly, the author focuses on the symbiotic relationship (loving, platonic, conflicted) between Lennon and McCartney and their respective and/or mutual songs. There are biographical details we have read about many times before, of course, but Leslie's side-view approach displays insights heretofore unexplored, which alone makes the book essential reading for fans. Leslie argues that the customary narrative (Lennon as the 'creative soul of The Beatles' and McCartney as his 'talented but facile sidekick') has skewed their true personalities. It's a good argument, cogently delved into and illuminated through songs such as Ticket to Ride, Penny Lane, Help!, and Julia (a mere four of the 159 Lennon and McCartney songs of The Beatles' 184 recorded works), where one was the motivator and the other the midwife. What of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, we hear aggrieved Beatles fans ask. They are necessarily in the wings, apologises Leslie, albeit making 'indispensable contributions'. For all that, this is an excellent book about the Tremendous Two and a contender for end-of-year plaudits. Everyone, more or less, is familiar with The Beatles, but what of some American music acts that have steadily maintained success in their homeland but not on this side of the Atlantic? The last time US soft-rock songwriter Boz Scaggs entered the UK Top 20 singles chart was in 1977 (with What Can I Say and, perhaps his best-known song, the hardy perennial Lido Shuffle). Since then, nada. This makes the first biography of the songwriter, Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs , by Jude Warne (Chicago Review Press, $30) all the more intriguing. The author, however, merely skims the surface of the man's life and times, interviewing collaborators and a few friends but not Scaggs himself. There is some compensation in the contributions of colleagues and musicians, but the spine of the book resides in the tried and tested album-by-album analysis, which, while insightful to those who aren't acquainted with the songs, borders on the humdrum. Sinéad O'Connor. Photograph: David Corio/The New York Times There is nothing at all routine about Universal Mother by Adele Bertei (33 1/3 series/Bloomsbury, £8.99). It comes at you instantly with fangs bared. Sinéad O'Connor , writes Bertei, 'was a witch of great magnitude, burned at the stake again and again'. O'Connor's fourth album is put under the microscope here, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Rather than a track-by-track evaluation, the author takes as the basis for her scrutiny the fact that O'Connor was among the first public figures to experience 'the guillotine of cancel culture'. Universal Mother, therefore, was created as a fresh and resolute starting point for a songwriter who took a lead from Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers : 'To escape from horror, bury yourself in it.' The outcome is a righteous, vivid essay (96 pages) that celebrates not only one of Irish music's finest artists but also one of its best albums. Jon King, founding member of Gang of Four 'In 1980, UK households receive a booklet, Protect and Survive ... Are these the end of days? It's the right time to write radical music.' So starts To Hell with Poverty! , by Jon King (Constable, £25), the founding member of Gang of Four, a feverish post-punk/funk band much admired for their search for working-class justice. In keeping with his poverty-stricken London roots ('Woodlice skeeter about beneath floorboards that groan under our feet, the wet-rotted joists moaning with the load'), King tells his life story in a way that disrupts the norm. Christmas time 'annual luxuries' of his father 'puffing on a Hamlet' and his mother sipping an 'advocaat snowball' are soon replaced with meeting future Gang of Four guitarist, Andy Gill, studying fine art at Leeds University, adventures in America and Spain, and then things start to surge. 'We're no longer Dr Feelgood impersonators but have … become ourselves with a radical set and a fierce onstage presence …' King continues the band story to the bitter end, with taut, spiky recollections of health issues and corrupt management. Gang of Four's second album title tells it like it is: Solid Gold. Heartbreaker , by Mike Campbell (Little, Brown, £25) is in a similar gilt-edged category. Although Campbell is best known as Tom Petty's guitarist and co-songwriter (from 1976 to Petty's death in 2017), his life story has, perhaps inevitably, been overshadowed by his more famous associations. What a rags-to-riches life Campbell has lived, though, and how humbly he tells it. From a ragged teenage upbringing in Jacksonville, Florida ('where my mom grew up, poor as ragweed and pretty as Ava Gardner'), getting his first guitar ('I stared at it, stunned') and music industry excess ('Slowly, the record fell apart … We were a mess …') to the first quarterly songwriting royalties from his co-write, with Don Henley, of The Boys of Summer ('When I opened the check, I had to sit down'), Heartbreaker is a wise and observant book from a musician who is much more than an accessory to the main act. Other side-of-stage performers, take note.
South China Morning Post
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Beatles book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs covers Lennon and McCartney's relationship
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. Advertisement 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. The cover of Ian Leslie's book. Photo: AP 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. Advertisement 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.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Inside John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership and the song that shifted the 'balance of power'
For the record:12:27 p.m. April 6, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the year Paul McCartney wrote 'Yesterday' and the year Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to appear on 'Saturday Night Live.' It's the greatest story often told. The Beatles are not just the most successful musical act of all time; they are perhaps the most analyzed, deconstructed and dissected entertainers since the dawn of recorded music. We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership. And it's a revelation. Leslie gives a complete portrait of this remarkably fecund and frequently tortured creative partnership, which began in Liverpool in 1957 and ended in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980, with Lennon's murder. The basic facts of their first encounter are well known. They met in the summer of 1957 at a garden party in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where 17-year-old Lennon was performing with his skiffle band the Quarrymen. McCartney was there to scout Lennon, who was already establishing a reputation as a riveting stage performer. McCartney, 15, ginned up the courage to approach Lennon after his set; their bond was forged over a mutual passion for Little Richard and Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel.' They took to songwriting with alacrity, driven by an urge to create their own material at a time when there was no precedent for a band to write its own songs. 'It entailed the two of them educating each other in the art of songwriting and doing so from scratch,' Leslie writes. 'And there was no division of labor.' One of their first joint compositions was 'Love Me Do,' which was written in 1958, four years before the Beatles recorded it. All of their songs, whether fully realized or half-baked, were dutifully logged by McCartney into an exercise book he had swiped from school. The early songs that fans know by rote — 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' among others — came fast, in a mad swirl of ideas tied to a steady work ethic. Lennon and McCartney were so bound together that Leslie writes of a 'double consciousness' whereby the pair alternated vocals on the same song, as in 'A Hard Day's Night,' or twined them together into a first-person confessional like 'If I Fell.' This equipoise held for four very productive years, but there comes a moment in all love stories when one partner gets fidgety and starts to pull away. According to Leslie, that moment came in 1965, when McCartney wrote 'Yesterday' with no input from Lennon. ' 'Yesterday' feels like a shift in the balance of power,' says Leslie. 'From the beginning they were equals, and 'Yesterday' wasn't only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John's insecurities.' Read more: Sony reveals Beatles cast, will release all four films in April 2028 A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city's arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon's use of LSD and McCartney's reluctance to follow suit. 'They weren't living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,' says Leslie. But 'even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.' One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, 'Penny Lane.' Lennon wrote 'Imagine' a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. 'When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, 'Is it better than 'Yesterday?,' ' says Leslie. Yet even as they were rewriting the rules of pop music, the dynamic between the two began to fray, especially after the death of their manager Brian Epstein. When their revenue stream was threatened by Epstein's brother, who wanted to sell 25% of the band's future earnings to a group of merchant bankers, it sparked a multipronged legal battle in which McCartney chose his brother-in-law John L. Eastman to represent him in court proceedings, while the other three cast their lot with the brash Allen Klein. It was the beginning of the end, as has been well documented. But it wasn't quite over. According to Leslie, there were numerous social occasions when Lennon and McCartney enjoyed each other's company after the Beatles broke up. Leslie writes that it was McCartney who helped broker a rapprochement between Lennon and his estranged wife, Yoko Ono, in 1974 during Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' period in Los Angeles, visiting Lennon at his Santa Monica beach house to deliver the news that Ono wanted to get back together. There was also a strange moment in 1976, when Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on 'Saturday Night Live.' McCartney happened to be visiting Lennon in New York at the time and they briefly considered shocking the world by hightailing it down to Rockefeller Center, but the idea was abandoned. 'Despite their differences, there was always this feeling with John that perhaps one day they might get together again,' says Leslie. 'John had the greatest admiration for Paul's musicianship and songwriting, and there was always this mutual respect, even when they were fighting in court. There was this unspoken dialogue between them, long after they stopped writing together.' Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Inside John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership and the song that shifted the ‘balance of power'
It's the greatest story often told. The Beatles are not just the most successful musical act of all time; they are perhaps the most analyzed, deconstructed and dissected entertainers since the dawn of recorded music. We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership. And it's a revelation. Leslie gives a complete portrait of this remarkably fecund and frequently tortured creative partnership, which began in Liverpool in 1957 and ended in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980, with Lennon's murder. The basic facts of their first encounter are well known. They met in the summer of 1957 at a garden party in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where 17-year-old Lennon was performing with his skiffle band the Quarrymen. McCartney was there to scout Lennon, who was already establishing a reputation as a riveting stage performer. McCartney, 15, ginned up the courage to approach Lennon after his set; their bond was forged over a mutual passion for Little Richard and Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel.' They took to songwriting with alacrity, driven by an urge to create their own material at a time when there was no precedent for a band to write its own songs. 'It entailed the two of them educating each other in the art of songwriting and doing so from scratch,' Leslie writes. 'And there was no division of labor.' One of their first joint compositions was 'Love Me Do,' which was written in 1958, four years before the Beatles recorded it. All of their songs, whether fully realized or half-baked, were dutifully logged by McCartney into an exercise book he had swiped from school. The early songs that fans know by rote — 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' among others — came fast, in a mad swirl of ideas tied to a steady work ethic. Lennon and McCartney were so bound together that Leslie writes of a 'double consciousness' whereby the pair alternated vocals on the same song, as in 'A Hard Day's Night,' or twined them together into a first-person confessional like 'If I Fell.' This equipoise held for four very productive years, but there comes a moment in all love stories when one partner gets fidgety and starts to pull away. According to Leslie, that moment came in 1966, when McCartney wrote 'Yesterday' with no input from Lennon. ' 'Yesterday' feels like a shift in the balance of power,' says Leslie. 'From the beginning they were equals, and 'Yesterday' wasn't only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John's insecurities.' A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city's arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon's use of LSD and McCartney's reluctance to follow suit. 'They weren't living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,' says Leslie. But 'even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.' One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, 'Penny Lane.' Lennon wrote 'Imagine' a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. 'When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, 'Is it better than 'Yesterday?,' ' says Leslie. Yet even as they were rewriting the rules of pop music, the dynamic between the two began to fray, especially after the death of their manager Brian Epstein. When their revenue stream was threatened by Epstein's brother, who wanted to sell 25% of the band's future earnings to a group of merchant bankers, it sparked a multipronged legal battle in which McCartney chose his brother-in-law John L. Eastman to represent him in court proceedings, while the other three cast their lot with the brash Allen Klein. It was the beginning of the end, as has been well documented. But it wasn't quite over. According to Leslie, there were numerous social occasions when Lennon and McCartney enjoyed each other's company after the Beatles broke up. Leslie writes that it was McCartney who helped broker a rapprochement between Lennon and his estranged wife, Yoko Ono, in 1974 during Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' period in Los Angeles, visiting Lennon at his Santa Monica beach house to deliver the news that Ono wanted to get back together. There was also a strange moment in 1975, when Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on 'Saturday Night Live.' McCartney happened to be visiting Lennon in New York at the time and they briefly considered shocking the world by hightailing it down to Rockefeller Center, but the idea was abandoned. 'Despite their differences, there was always this feeling with John that perhaps one day they might get together again,' says Leslie. 'John had the greatest admiration for Paul's musicianship and songwriting, and there was always this mutual respect, even when they were fighting in court. There was this unspoken dialogue between them, long after they stopped writing together.'
The Independent
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Beatles biographer Ian Leslie on John Lennon and Paul McCartney's ‘erotic' bromance
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. 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.'
