John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the lipstick camp. But if Ziggy was from Mars (magical realism with a dash of science fiction) and the Beatles were from Liverpool (trippy social realism) then of the Fab Four, my heart-throb was Ringo. Screeeeam! His wit, deadpan expression and how unbothered he always seemed at the height of the Beatles’ fame made him all the more alluring. When I discovered he joined the band after a summer job drumming at Butlin’s, I loved him even more.
As it happens, George Harrison might be my favourite songwriter out of these four blazing talents – “Something” is a truly uncanny love song. It’s hard to convey a mood that is onside with ambivalence and certainty at the same time. And when I cook spaghetti to “My Sweet Lord”, I appreciate its yearning to see and know something unknowable. Harrison was a Hare Krishna devotee. An older friend once told me that in the Sixties, after chowing down lots of psychedelic drugs, there was a split between those who delivered themselves to spirituality and those who dragged themselves to psychoanalysis.
But Ringo and George are not the subjects of Ian Leslie’s empathetic and enjoyable literary equivalent of a biopic, or perhaps psycho-pic, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Leslie has devoted his considerable writing talent to focus on Lennon and McCartney. As the blurb tells us in somewhat overfamiliar language: “This is the story of how two young men merged their souls and multiplied their talents to produce one of the greatest bodies of music in history. It is also a love story, full of longing, laughter, pain and joy.”
And it is a great story, particularly about boys and men, class, post-Second World War Britain, fame, friendship and jealousy, structured around the songs Paul and John wrote separately and together. When I first glimpsed the index, with chapters titled, “Please Please Me”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Eleanor Rigby”, etc, I thought this was going to be too schematic and reductive, but Leslie knows that all the telling is in the songs. It also works well to navigate the ways in which John and Paul’s personal and professional relationship changes over time.
Leslie is a British writer and journalist with an interest in psychology, the author of books such as Born Liars, Curious and How to Disagree. A Beatles fan from the age of seven, he is astute on male friendship. “There is more than one reason that we get Lennon and McCartney so wrong, but one is that we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships,” he writes. “We’re used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. 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.”
So true, but do I believe we can really “know” John and Paul? Fans will always create and recreate their heroes, make them into something that is right for them. There is no way to bash our unconscious into the “right” shape. As far as I’m concerned, Ziggy Stardust is alive and well and has never left the building, though Bowie retired the alien with lashings of mascara so many decades ago.
For a moment I thought Leslie was going to give the boys an Elena Ferrante-ish airing in the style of My Brilliant Friend, her novel about a lifelong, tempestuous friendship on the tough streets of 1950s Naples. In the Ferrante scheme of things, Paul would probably be the more sensible Elena and John the wilder Lila – but maybe that’s all wrong too. As Leslie points out: “John versus Paul is still the polarising shorthand by which fans and writers discuss the Beatles. But as the protagonists themselves always acknowledged, there was no ‘John’ without ‘Paul’, and vice versa. Their collaboration, even at its most competitive, was a duet, not a duel.”
All the same, Leslie does nod to the epic stretch of the Ferrante narrative, except we are in suburban Liverpool in 1957, in the chip shop and on the bus and in the clubs. I couldn’t get enough of Leslie’s critique of the grim national mood that would soon explode when the Beatles first kicked in: “Britain seemed stuck in some long-gone era of top hats and dirty chimneys, all vitality spent. But from its damp soil sprouted a life force so vigorous that it jump-started a new epoch. It didn’t come from the country’s capital, either, but from the suburbs of a provincial city in industrial decline, streets forlorn with war damage.”
The life force Leslie mostly refers to is located in his two genius subjects, Lennon and McCartney. The first chapter, titled “Come Go with Me”, starts with Paul, then a 15-year-0ld fan of Elvis and Little Richard, making his way to a summer fete in Woolton to see a skiffle band called the Quarrymen, fronted by a charismatic teenager called John Lennon. This moment has all the more pathos because Paul’s mother has recently died. The boys meet at the fete, which really does turn out to be fate: later they play for each other and show off what they can do. “Lennon was struck by how well this lad could play and by how handsome he was. (‘He looked like Elvis. I dug him.’)” Lennon invites McCartney to join the Quarrymen.
As their friendship develops, they bunk off school, meet up on Hope Street, smoke upstairs on the bus (those were the days) and make their way to Paul’s house, where they play guitar and start to write songs together. It’s very moving, and in a sense, it’s a story told in reverse; while we read about their beginnings in the present tense, we already know they will become global stars, we already know about John’s tragic death, and we can already sing many of their future songs off by heart. Leslie is attentive to the ways the boys mucked about with each other, but also how serious they were.
“Paul appropriated an exercise book from school in order to record and catalogue their songs. Each song was given its own page. There was no musical notation, since neither could read music: just lyrics and chord names and occasional vocal instructions (‘Ooh ah, angel voices’).”
I loved reading about the vocal instructions. The mystery of songwriting is in how all of life is inflected in the “ooh ah”s and “angel voices” and in the case of “Hey Jude”, in the “Na na na nananana, nananana”s – a song that Leslie tells us Lennon described as “one of Paul’s masterpieces”.
By the time we get to the chapter titled “Penny Lane”, a lot has happened: fame; the alchemy of all the players in the band. I have respect for the ways in which Paul keeps the band on track, for his capacious musical talent, his dedication and his graft. Apparently, John and Paul, way back in 1958, had been interested in writing a musical about “Jesus coming back to Earth as the inhabitant of a Liverpool slum”. Alas that didn’t happen, but when they finished “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the band “began work on Paul’s song about growing up in Liverpool”. The royal mile to the unconscious was Penny Lane, and Leslie deep dives into this song.
“Penny Lane hints at and subverts England’s deep cultural memory, imaginary or otherwise, of an orderly, serene Edwardian world, before war and decline despoiled it… Penny Lane is real and unreal. It’s a fiction and we can visit any time.”
For this reason, Penny Lane turns up in my novel The Man Who Saw Everything, in which a young nurse living in the GDR, a Beatles fanatic, longs to jump over the Wall and travel to Liverpool to see Penny Lane for herself. Is it real, just like in the song? Does she make it? In one way or another, she does turn up at the famous zebra crossing on Abbey Road, which is where the novel starts. I sat for many hours on the low wall by EMI studios watching tourists walk this crossing in the manner of their favourite Beatle, as depicted on the Abbey Road album cover. I would have appreciated Leslie’s biography when I was researching this novel. What this nurse (a reference to the nurse selling memorial poppies in Penny Lane) really wants to do, is to scream hysterically in a safe place – like the girls in the audience watching the Beatles perform live at the Washington Coliseum in 1964. After all, there was so much (societally) for girls to scream about. You can watch this concert on YouTube and marvel at the way Ringo navigates the wobbly structure that has been built to hold his drums.
The lucky strike of Leslie’s biography, given it is told in songs, is that you can read the chapter titled “She Loves You”, for example, and then listen to that very song again, now imbued with information that might make you “really know” John and Paul, or not really at all. As it happens, I like to study the different phases of their haircuts and beards alongside their songs. I’m not sure if this makes me the right or wrong sort of reader, but whatever: John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is a triumph.
Deborah Levy’s collection of writing “The Position of Spoons” is published by Hamish Hamilton. “The Man Who Saw Everything” is published by Penguin
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Ian Leslie
Faber & Faber, 432pp, £25
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
Content from our partners
