John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

Ian Leslie

2025 

A very 2020s take on a 1950s relationship

There are one or two books about The Beatles already^{[citation needed]} so it would take a novel approach to make this much-analysed subject fresh. Thankfully, that's what Ian Leslie has achieved, using 43 songs as jumping off points for an in-depth look at the central relationship in the band, that between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It makes for an interesting, engrossing read, one I enjoyed very much.

But - you knew there was a "but" coming, surely - entertaining as it is, I can't take it too seriously. If you leave out the (very) well-known facts and biographical elements, what's left is basically just reams of speculation. Leslie - a psychologist, to judge by his previous books - has taken snippets of old interviews and pieces of lyrics that Lennon and McCartney both acknowledged were often just included because they fitted the music, and built upon them a castle of sand.

Leslie even points this out himself: in the chapter about "I Am The Walrus", he mentions how John Lennon:

"rails at 'experts textperts' - those who confidently offered interpretations of Beatles lyrics"

while literally doing the same thing himself in the same paragraph (and the rest of the book), apparently unaware of the irony. 

Overall, although it's an interesting approach, I'm not sure the conclusions are warranted based on the slender evidence. Lennon and McCartney met in the late 50s and barely more than twenty years later one of them was dead. What they went through together, no-one else will understand, but casting it in the light of a 21st century bromance is almost certainly not how they thought of it themselves. At least, that's my opinion. But what do I know, since I'm not them, and neither is Ian Leslie.