John and Paul: A Beatles Love Story in Songs (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event, which took place at London's Kiln Theatre with Ian Leslie.

Ian discussed the themes of his new book, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which details a new history of the world's most influential creative relationship, Lennon and McCartney.

Leslie was joined in conversation by host of the Rest Is History podcast, Tom Holland, to discuss why Lennon and McCartney were a combination of friends, rivals and collaborators. This conversation is coming to you in two parts. If you're an Intelligence Squared member, you can get access to the full conversation ad-free. Head to intelligencesquared.com slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple. Now, here's our host, Tom Holland, with more.

Ian Leslie Mania

very pleased to welcome you to this Intelligence Squared event. My name is Tom Holland. I'm a historian, podcaster, but more germain me for tonight, a lifelong Beatles fan. And that is why I am so excited to be here with Ian Leslie, author of many books that have not been about the Beatles. So Born Liars, Curious, and so on.

But you also do a wonderful kind of sub stack thing called The Ruffian, which I first came across like so many people did when you wrote an article on that called 64 Reasons to Love Paul McCartney. And it kind of went viral, didn't it? Yeah, it was it was one of those lockdown projects.

Yeah, so it was around the end of 2020. I had time on my hands and I thought, well, I'm going to write this piece that I've been thinking about for many years and writing notes towards which nobody else is going to publish apart from me about why Paul McCartney is good at music.

It didn't seem like a sort of viable topic, but I had a lot to say and I needed to get off my chest. So I published it on the sub stack thinking that's right. That's out of the way now. And then it went insanely viral, partly because you and others picked it up on Twitter as it then was.

And yeah, that was it. I remember telling everyone, oh, you've got to read this. It's so brilliant. It just captured not just what was amazing about Paul McCartney, but also kind of what made him someone to laugh. And you then went on to write this extraordinary book, John and Paul, A Love Story in Songs, which you very kindly let me read in proof.

But I'm not going to quote myself very modestly. I'm going to quote luminaries who have been reviewing it over the past week in a range of newspapers. So Dylan Jones, a masterpiece, and then writes in reassurance, this isn't hyperbole. So you must have been relieved about that. Simon Sharma, a man of great passion, revelatory. And Nigella Lawson,

who apparently wasn't a Beatle person, I guess she was a Stones person, I don't know, said that it has made her into a Beatles person. So how do you feel about having made Nigella Lawson into a Beatles cat? Goodie. Yeah, that's what he writes.

And so great love there. And love is very much in the air because the subtitle of your new book, John and Paul, A Love Story in Songs, obviously it's about Lennon and McCartney. You've written about McCartney. Now you're writing about Lennon as well. And when you say it's a love story, could you just have kind of vague sense of what kind of a love story is it?

It is a story of two young men who form an incredibly intense and intimate relationship around music. And I...

And this is really what the book is about. You can't really understand the music and the incredible explosion of creativity that we call the Beatles without understanding or trying to understand that relationship. And you certainly can't understand the music, the relationship without understanding the music.

And I didn't really think that any book or anyone I'd read really had explored just the sheer depth and richness and strangeness of that sort of group within the group. So it's a study of a personal relationship, but it's also a study of how the music works.

emerged yeah and and and and how the emotions of the relationship and the emotions that are in the music are all bound up with each other and and and and when you track the evolution of the Beatles and the evolution of the Beatles music it helps to understand what's going on if you understand the evolution of the relationship yeah okay so and and in your introduction

You also say, we think we know John and Paul. I mean, they are, it's the most famous relationship in popular music, most famous partnership. But you then say, we really don't. So what don't we know about John and Paul? Well, we've inherited these kind of cartoon versions of them.

which partly comes from their own, the group's own kind of brand building in the 1960s, you know, the hard day's night version of them, where John is this kind of like sardonic, witty, verbally clever one. And Paul is this kind of cute, charming, pretty one, which then turns into a bit later this narrative where

Paul is the sentimental balladeer, kind of a soppy guy. And John is this mean-eyed, you know, very, very kind of cynical and also brilliant songwriter. And then it evolves again, this kind of mutates this narrative throughout the 70s and 80s, particularly after John's death. And you end up in this place where

John is the kind of creative genius of the Beatles. And Paul is a square, a straight. A straight, yeah, yeah. A shallow, a very talented melodist, but essentially a kind of shallow sidekick to John's great man, you know. And this is a perspective on McCartney that your book...

brilliantly deconstructs. And, but I mean, to be fair, I don't think it does either of them justice. I mean, they were actually both more interesting. Very modest. I disagree. I think you do them splendid justice because you're fair to both of them.

No, no, sorry. I meant that the stereotypes don't do either of them justice. So I think, yeah, there needs to be some rebalancing of Paul, but also John is a lot more interesting and in some ways more likable than perhaps that kind of saintly figure that he became in public. I mean, it's actually, I mean, we'll come to what happens when the Beatles break up, but it's actually quite a kind of brief moment, isn't it, where he's casting himself as a

a radical and a campaigner for peace. I mean, it doesn't last that long, but I guess it, as you suggested, it gets cemented by the fact that he dies in the way that he does. But we'll come on to that because before we get into the history, the course of this love affair, this relationship,

Could we just begin by looking at the music, which is kind of why we know about them after all? And it seemed to me when I read the book, every chapter has the title of a song. And the song provides a kind of clothes hanger from which you hang all kinds of analysis.

And it seemed to me that at the heart of this book is your analysis of two songs which uniquely appear on the same single. And this is the single that, I mean, you cite Adam Gottmik writing in the New Yorker, a contender for the 20th century's greatest work of art. And it is the double-sided single, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. And I guess you give those two songs the focus that you do

Because in a way, they tell us something very profound about the character of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters. Yes. I mean, they tell us a huge amount about. Yeah. And you could. Well, there are other contenders for this, but it might be the high point of our Beatles career. And certainly they're the most, Strawberry Fields for us, the most sort of Lennonesque.

great Lennon song. And Penny Lane is the most McCartney-esque expression of McCartney's talent. And so the way I think about it is that, you know, if I had to define what makes them special and different, but also the way they kind of fit together, it's that McCartney's, Paul McCartney seems to have this kind of

subterranean connection to the sort of underground river of music. Going back decades and indeed hundreds of years. And he seems to be able to pull, go down to this river and kind of pull these songs fresh up from music. The melodies that he comes up with, you know,

yesterday blackbird they feel like they've been around forever right and and as soon as you hear them you just think well how could this song not have existed it's just come from well you know paul mccartney often thought that himself in fact yeah indeed yesterday he was anxious that perhaps he was plagiarizing something yeah and i think that was the point in which he realized that maybe i'm just really good at this um and um where and and and

And so he's kind of just an intuitive, he never studied music theory, famously, you know, can't read music and so on. But he is this kind of genius of the universe of music as we know it. And then John Lennon is different. What he was able to do, I mean, obviously they overlap on these dimensions a lot, but where they come apart is that what John's

Most amazing songs feel like they've come from outside the universe of music as we know it. They really feel like transmissions from another planet.

And if you think about the opening of, or just I Am The Walrus, right? Think about that song and try to remember. The opening chords are something like... Can't sing it because actually it's the harmonies. But it's so weird. We're used to it now, but no kind of intuitive musician would get there. He's just kind of coming from somewhere else.

And so those two extraordinarily kind of extraordinary talents kind of coming together is what you see on Strawberry Fields. And Strawberry Fields is an incredibly weird song, musically, harmonically and lyrically, of course, you know, incredibly innovative.

Penny Lane just feels instantly visceral and exciting and happy making. And it feels very natural. But then if you break it down and you go and see what's actually happening, it's much more innovative and complex and frankly weird. In fact, the clue, you know, very strange is which comes at the end of every line is a clue to the lyrical and musical complexity of the song. Because it's sunny yet strange. Yeah, sunny would be...

Yeah, McCartney's genius. Well, actually, you sum it up so beautifully, and you're writing about Penny Lane and Strawby Fields. Paul's melodies feel like the purpose of music itself. John strains at the limits of chords and keys, trying to get past music into pure feeling or experience. So there you have that sense which will be articulated by all kinds of critics in the Summer of Love, that the Beatles are somehow superhuman and that Lennon and McCartney perhaps...

particularly. But the thing that, of course, you also draw out is that Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, strange and wonderful expressions of genius as they are, is also drawing on their childhood memories of growing up in Liverpool, because they're both places in Liverpool. And if we now go back to the beginning of the story...

How do you see the upbringing that these two boys had before they got to meet each other kind of affecting the people that they will be and the relationship that they will have? Because there are similarities, but there are also quite striking differences in how they grow up. Yes. So they, well, if you know a little bit about them, you'll know that

Paul McCartney came from a much more stable family background. We'll get on to where it became unstable in a minute, but generally speaking, much more stable family background than John. John's childhood was incredibly unsettled and very complicated and emotionally incredibly complicated and very upsetting for a lot of the things that happened to him as a young boy. So just going back to what we've been saying about the music scene,

it kind of makes sense that John would see the world and think about the world through this really weird, strange lens because his childhood was so fantastically weird and different.

And that Paul would really kind of celebrate the beauty of the world as we know it and as it is. But the thing that they do share, I'm sure most of you know this, is that their mother's dying. When they met, Paul's mum had been dead. She died from cancer quite quickly. And to him as a young boy, quite mysteriously, about eight months before he meets John.

And John's mother, who was kind of in and out of his life, but whom he was he absolutely adored, was killed the year after they meet and in a car crash or by a drunk driver.

And what does this do for them? You know, I think it does that that event cements their bond. So Paul's talked about that a little bit and says, you know, we didn't talk about it much, but it certainly was. We knew that we had this thing in common and that brought us even closer together. I think it also made them feel it reinforced their sense of difference and apartness.

I think it's often people who have this kind of bereavement early on will say it makes you feel different from the other kids, right? You know that you're not quite like them. And it also gave them this strong sense of the contingency of reality, as you know it, right? You walk through the world taking it for granted, right?

But actually, anyone who's had this kind of traumatic, shocking event knows that it can change like that. And actually, what you see is not the real world. And when you think about these kind of huge consciousness shifting moves that they make later in their career with the music that they're making, you're right up to things like A Day in the Life. I think that kind of stems partly from that experience of childhood kind of dislocation. But they're always drawing on...

those memories and they obviously process it in different ways so in a sense the pretty nurse selling poppies from the tray in penny lane is maybe a reference to paul's mother who was a midwife and and john of course writing about julia and then even more in in mother and yeah songs on you know it's much more intense but both of them are are clearly drawing on buried traumas

Yeah, and when you think about the strain of childhood memories just runs throughout the Beatles' music, right? And they do several amazing kids' songs. Obviously, The Yellow Submarine, my favourite is Octopus's Garden. Childhood is very important to John and Paul and to the whole group. But what makes their childhood, their treatment of childhood so interesting is that there's almost always a kind of shadow falling across it.

So there's darkness always mixed up with the joy and the play. And that makes it much more interesting. Because kind of playing with childhood in the 60s, during the psychedelic era in particular, was a bit of a thing. Like other groups did kind of kid songs that are much less enduring and much less interesting because they're just kind of twee. And the Beatles added some sort of grit. Well, you say grit. I mean, one of the maybe the consequences of this is also their attitude towards authority. Yeah.

And with John, it's famously combative. I mean, he is very keen to strike a pose as a rebel. You have a brilliant description of McCartney's approach to authority. You say, Paul didn't hate authority so much as refuse it. He didn't dress outrageously or insult his teachers. He would listen to them and smile and do the opposite of what they said.

And that includes his father, of course. And that sense, I guess, after they've met, you know, at the church faith where they meet, and then they go on to form their band. That sense that by doing that, in a way, they are taking a transgressive step. I mean, their approach to that is different, but it's important, isn't it, to the sense they have of themselves, the journey that they're taking.

Yeah, but I mean, they pretty soon commit themselves to this career of being rock and roll stars, which is sort of a crazy thing to do. You know, it's even more so than it would be now. It's more than unorthodox. It's completely crazy. And it's not like they had a safety net.

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Because they're both very clever, so they could have had the traditional grammar school career and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They could have gone to university or some sort of higher education. Paul was lined up to be a good teacher and have a nice, comfortable middle class life. And he pretty soon after meeting John...

I don't know if he already decided on it, but it becomes clear after meeting John that this is not what he's going to do. And it's even more striking because, you know, after his mother dies, the family is not in a good way financially, as he kind of famously points out when he finds out the news of his mother dies. His first comment is, how are we going to make money now? How are we going to live?

His dad is not great with money. You know, he's actually got a gambling, bit of a gambling. When they become stuck getting money, the first thing he does is buy him a racehorse, isn't it? Yeah, it's a slightly passive-aggressive move, I think. Yeah, very cool thing to do, actually.

So I mean, I guess that the place where they then refine this sense of rebellion is Hamburg, where they go with Paul's school friend, George Harrison. Yeah. Not yet Ringo. He hasn't yet joined the band and they go to Hamburg. And a further element in what makes the Beatles the Beatles, you fixed on actually...

Not so much in John and Paul, but in a recent post that you did in The Ruffian, where you said you're talking about the night the Beatles really became the Beatles was the night that they began to max show. Do you want to just tease out what you mean by that? Yes. So when they say yes, so they're in Hamburg. I think it's incredibly exciting for them because actually now for the first time they are starting to make a career as rock and roll stars. Right.

You know, they're not getting paid much money by pop star standards. And it's a really grimy, gritty, dirty, squalid kind of way to live. But they're being paid to play rock and roll every night, which is incredibly exciting. However, they don't immediately become very brilliant kind of performers. They're pretty intent on being cool. They think they're kind of cool beatniks.

And, and particularly, you know, Stuart Sutcliffe still in the band. He was a very kind of like a cool sort of shades wearing artsy kind of a guy. John wanted to be like Stuart in that, in that sense, but they're all a bit like that. And so they were just kind of standing on the stage, you're playing his songs. I'm sure they were playing them reasonably well, although they weren't kind of great musicians at this stage necessarily, but there was no kind of dynamism. They were not moving around the station or doing anything. Now the other acts played,

The other British acts that had come over had these kind of really carefully worked out dance routines and they were wearing kind of like pink lame suits and so on. And they're all trying to be like Cliff in the Shadows. And they because hilariously hated Cliff. Yeah. And they hated Cliff and they hated that whole kind of genre. They hated all these other groups. They thought all the other groups were shit, basically. And they thought they were all kind of fake people.

And they were like, no, we're not like that. We're like, we're cool. I mean, they didn't speak like that. It's kind of the attitude was like, we're too cool for that. But it meant they were actually quite really boring. And the manager of this little club was like,

you've got to make show, make show. And his broken English and his assistant's broken English. He's going, make show, make show. And they had complained to the Beatles at the time manager, Anna Williams, back in Liverpool. Williams had come over and has written them a very stern letter saying, come on, you guys, you've got to sort it out. They completely ignored him, both of them. Because the other thing about them, they're already very arrogant. Um,

But finally, because this guy's shouting at them, and they think it's really quite funny and weird, John Lennon starts to just jump around the stage, do stupid duck walks, do a kind of parody of rock and roll stagecraft.

And the others kind of join in and they all start just goofing around like idiots as they're playing songs. Because the shared humour is a crucial part of the realistic as well. Yes. And it ignites that humour. It basically ignites their onstage personality, their collective personality, which they already had offstage. You know, they were funny guys. But suddenly now onstage, their real personalities are coming through, which is like, this is a laugh. This is brilliant. This is fun. Rather than we're cool. Yeah.

the Beals were not cool, right? And if you think about their career, they were very cool. They weren't really cool in that sense. They were not reserved, kind of withdrawn. They were like, let's go for it. But their characters become part of the package of what, you know, they go back to Liverpool, they form the cavern, they get picked up by Brian Epstein, as it were. The humour becomes part of what is being sold as well as the genius, right?

And just before we come on to Beatlemania, just to ask, the final combination, Pete Best gets sacked, goes off to become a hairdresser, Ringo joins. What is it like, do you think, for George and Ringo to be in a band with two such very, very self-confident geniuses? I think it's...

It's a tribute to George's inner strength of character and stoicism that he manages to handle it, for the most part, quite well. I think he found it quite difficult... From quite early on, there's a comment...

where he's talking about the early 60s, but after John and Paul, it's become clear that they are the songwriters as well as the, you know, kind of key performers, where he's like, you know, those two guys thought they were the big, I can't remember what the phrase he uses, but, you know, they thought they were better than us. And then obviously we know towards the end of the career that

that becomes a real problem and he wants to go so i but but for the most part george is so kind of confident in himself that he doesn't get intimidated by them he's just like i'm going to be me they're going to be them that's just what john and paul are like and that's okay i don't have to be super close to either and i don't have to compete i'm just going to be me and in fact he's incredibly creative about it because then he carves out his space as this kind of you know purveyor of different sounds and different cultures yeah and i guess the um the the

maybe the particular tension is with Paul because Paul's kind of like the older brother, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And Paul treats him like a younger brother and that becomes increasingly annoying. With Ringo, I think it's slightly underestimated how much, how difficult it was for Ringo. You know, so the other three had been together all the way through since George joined in whatever it was, 1958. You know, Paul and George had been at school together

other members of the Quarrymen and the Beatles had come and gone. These three had remained together. And then John and Paul, even within those three, are just this ridiculously kind of close pair. And then Ringo has to come in. Now, it's actually incredible that he was able to come in and sort of fit. But I think he was always a little bit insecure and sort of felt like he was having to earn his place there all the time. It must have been terrifying because they all had their in-jokes and their language and

I mean, when Beatlemania breaks, the Beatles are sold as a package. They are all equal. They all appear on the covers. You know, they all get equal airtime in the interviews and things like that. People have their favorite Beatles. That's kind of part of the marketing strategy. And there's a sense, isn't there, in which the distinctiveness of Lennon and McCartney as characters,

these incredible composers is slightly buried beneath the kind of... the sense that this is a band. Yes. And that was their choice, you know, to... One of the kind of... The things that...

going back to the beginning of the Beatles, the choice that they made, or rather the choice they didn't make, was not to have Johnny and the Beatles or Johnny or Paul and whatever it was, right? And they were constantly being asked or pushed in that direction by promoters or record label people because that was the model. If you were going to be in a group and there weren't that many groups around you, it's mostly solo acts, then it ought to be, you know, X and the Ys. And they always refused it, you know. They wanted to be...

Because to begin with, they're also doing quite a lot of covers on their albums and it takes time for them, for all the songs on their albums to be Landon McCartney or occasionally Harrison compositions. How long does it take for, I guess, but not just fans, but also promoters and maybe music critics even to...

to realize that with Lennon and McCartney specifically, something really amazing is happening, that they really are astonishing songwriters. How long does that process take, do you think? I think the world starts to get that around the mid-60s. In 1965, there was a TV special about the music of Lennon and McCartney.

So they are recognised as a songwriting partnership there. And there are people doing covers of their songs who perform on the show. I think it takes a while for a music writing kind of critical establishment to really catch on on what's going on. That happens maybe towards the end of the decade. So they're always out ahead of perception. It takes the rest of the world. There's always kind of a couple of steps behind in terms of what they're actually doing.

And so during the early years of Beatlemania...

What is the process by which this love affair that you're talking about between John and Paul is expressing itself? Through the music? Through anything more than the music? Well, through the music, through songwriting, they're spending a lot of time together, just physically in proximity. Hotel rooms and so on. Hotel rooms, on tour, on the bus. And because they are the songwriting partnership...

And they had made that decision really just before they become famous, that it is just the two of them. And George is not going to be part of that. And that the two of them are going to share everything that they do. It's all going to be Lennon and McCartney, financially, legally, and, you know, in holy matrimony. And so they're spending a lot of time together. And they're also kind of increasingly, it's true of all four of them, but especially these two, they're kind of increasingly just reliant on each other. Because they're the only people who know what it's like to be a Beatle. And they're being kind of...

Nobody's been this at the center of this maelstrom or very few, you know. And that's the other thing, isn't it? That everybody who follows them and let's let's remain focused on Lennon and McCartney rather than Beatles as a whole. Yeah. Has their example before them. But in a sense, Lennon and McCartney are, you know, they're they're blazing a path. No one has done exactly what they're doing.

No, and that was true right from early on. And somehow intuitively, they just kind of, they come up with a new, it's a new model of songwriting, really. When they were first writing songs, and all the way through in the early, late 50s and early 60s, they were thinking, insofar as there were songwriting partnerships, in their heads, it was people like Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, maybe Lieber and Stoller, who wrote some of those rock and roll songs, and then a bit later, Gothen and King.

But in all of those cases, it was very different. Number one, you know, nobody wanted to see Rogers and Hart up on stage performing their own songs or nobody could write. That was not something that songwriters did. You didn't play, write and then perform. Or, yeah, some did. Obviously, there are examples, you know, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly. But it was not a kind of classic songwriting partnership thing to do. And then the other thing is that there was no division of labor between them.

In all those cases, and since the Beatles still, you know, most songwriting partnerships, you have a words guy and a music guy, right? And they might overlap a little bit. And there was no such division. They both did words and they both did music. And that was constantly confusing to people and had to be explained a lot. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, and edited by Mark Roberts.