Book Review - John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
Cultural and other reflections
To write a book about The Beatles these days must be something of a challenge. What’s left to say? Who are you saying it to? How can you make it original?
With John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs Ian Leslie has pulled it off with considerable aplomb. Looking at the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, The Beatles’ prolific and exceptional songwriters, and telling it through 43 songs (mostly Beatles but some solo songs too) he has produced a stand-out book that is both erudite and engaging.
There is no question that Leslie is a Beatles fan (he wrote the excellent 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney in 2020) and this explains the warmth and affection that comes through. But this is no hagiography.
Leslie challenges the enduring perception of Lennon as the radical rock’n’roller activist wit and McCartney as the cute, charming balladeer and, whilst acknowledging that there is some truth in these personas, “you only have to change the angle of view by an inch or so to see them very differently”.
The main focus is the unique relationship between Lennon and McCartney and its twists and turns. This includes the almost telepathic connection as well as the junctures. There is also the quite literal physical closeness that existed between them at times and its importance in their creative process – I lost count of the number of times the phrase “eyeball to eyeball” appears.
The book charts the story of The Beatles from Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting as teenagers in July 1957, through the graft of the Hamburg residencies and The Cavern in Liverpool, to the stratospheric levels of popularity in the 1960s, the acrimonious split in the 1970s (this had its own ebbs and flows) and the pursuit of solo paths. Leslie is particularly insightful on The Beatles’ visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India in February 1968, not just in terms of what happened during the visit itself but also in respect of its subsequent repercussions.
But this is not only a great book about The Beatles and the group’s two key protagonists, it’s a great book about modern music and its development. For example, in the chapter on We Can Work It Out Leslie signals how the famous Abbey Road recording studios, like all the major recording studios at the time, “had been run like a factory, the aim being to maximise output, with producers, engineers and arrangers trained to work at speed. Studio time was booked in blocks of three hours, deemed enough time to record a single and its B-side. These strictures were now relaxed for the Beatles, who were allowed to use the studio as an R&D department rather than just a manufacturing facility”.
The 43 song chapters mean that the book is in easily digestible chunks but the chronology means that they flow smoothly and coherently. Some of the chapters go into the specific song in some detail including its construction, whilst in other chapters the song itself only gets a couple of paragraphs but provides a hook to give context to the developing story.
Leslie has a wonderful way with words. Take these descriptions of McCartney’s singing, be it with lyrics – “he rolls around in word-sounds like a cat in a pool of sunshine” or without – “[Paul] floats on a wordless falsetto, hovering like a thing with feathers”. His writing about particular songs can also be perceptive and moving. Two paragraphs on Hey Jude are a case in point. I won’t reproduce them here but you will find them on page 253.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs will inevitably send readers back to the music (all 43 songs are available on an excellent Spotify playlist here). This will entail not just going back to old favourites but also trips of rediscovery (almost literally in my case of Revolver’s psychedelic Tomorrow Never Knows).
This is a story about one of the most remarkable bands in modern music and the extraordinary, yet in other ways quite ordinary, people at its centre. And it is indeed also a story of love.
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs
by Ian Leslie
Faber & Faber 2025 (hardback 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0571376117)
For more information on the book and to explore purchase options, visit the Faber website.
This review was first published on the arcana website on 5 May 2025.