I can recall with unusual clarity the first time I ever heard The Beatles. It was the second Sunday in January, 1963, and I was 15 and already a committed pop fan. I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car, a white Triumph Vitesse, being driven from Skipton back to boarding school at York. On the car’s back seat was his red Roberts radio, tuned into the BBC Light Programme, its reception enabled by a cable that snaked its way to an aerial clamped outside the rear window. The programme was Pick Of The Pops, hosted by DJ Alan Freeman, freshly appointed to the role, and as we cruised through Harrogate, sometime between 1 and 2pm, he played ‘Please Please Me’, the group’s second single, just released.
Hello, I thought, that sounds different, funny, really good, terrific in fact. Who on earth is it? I strained my ears to listen but it was over too soon. I wanted to hear it again straight away but I couldn’t, of course, and I didn’t catch the name of the act. But the important thing is that I recognised something, the singing, the guitars, the harmonica, the oh yeas, in the two minutes of ‘Please Please Me’ that stood out from all the other records that Freeman played that day, stood out from pretty much anything I’d ever heard before in fact. I was an instant fan of whoever it was and I didn’t even know their name.
Sixty-three years later, it is reassuring to be told yet again that my adolescent ears weren’t deceiving me. “‘Please Please Me’ is impatient, lusty, playful and reproachful,” writes Ian Leslie in this extraordinary book, and later: “[It] is a series of climaxes: the mouth organ’s clarion call; the opening harmony; the call and response; the sweet release of the chorus; the final oh yeahs. It combines Bing Crosby, the Everlys, Little Richard, girl groups and Motown, yet instead of sounding patched together it is utterly itself, unified by force of collective personality.” Quite.
John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs was published late last year to universal acclaim. I was hoping that Santa might drop a copy down our chimney but that didn’t happen so I waited until it was available in paperback, as it was last week. This edition has three pages of laudatory reviews at the front, eight similar snippets on the cover and I’ve been utterly absorbed by it for the last five days.
The reason for all the fuss is that it’s a different sort of Beatles book, not a biography or chronicle or diary, not a memoir by someone who knew or worked for them, not an exposé of disreputable behaviour, not an arty picture book, not a critical study, not even a structural analysis of their music, not really. It’s simply a deep dive into the minds of John and Paul, focusing almost exclusively on their relationship – the Love Story of the subtitle; a beautifully written account of how the two principal Beatles worked together in the studio, where their songs came from and how they wrote and recorded them, how John and Paul in particular bounced ideas off each other and how the ying and yang of their contrasting personalities somehow fused together to create a body of work that to this day remains the shining exemplar of popular music.
“The twentieth century tilted on its axis,” writes Leslie of the day in July 1957 when Paul introduced himself to John, nailing his colours to the mast at the close of Chapter 1. It wasn’t long before they realised that, musically, they could read each other’s minds. To the astonishment of everyone around them, not least producer George Martin, their rivalry drove them to get better and better until it simply exploded into a situation where communication stopped, like the breakdown of a marriage, a tragedy that even now leaves everyone scratching their heads (and authors writing books like this).
Seeking comparisons, many reviewers have likened John & Paul to Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald’s 1994 book, widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of Beatles criticism, but there are important differences: MacDonald is comprehensive, covering every Beatles track, Leslie is selective, choosing songs – 43 in total, not all written by them, a handful written after the split – that support or amplify his themes; MacDonald is disparaging, sometimes brutally, of songs he considers under par, of which there are plenty, Leslie does nothing but shower praise; perhaps most importantly, Leslie’s emphasis on the group’s principal songwriters gives it an entirely different feel to previous books on the group. George and Ringo barely get a look in.
At the heart of John & Paul is the author’s theory that many of their songs are, in fact, coded messages between the two. Building on his knowledge of human behaviour, about which he has written extensively, Leslie interprets songs in ways that no previous Beatles critic has done; they might be songs of encouragement, or convey feelings of jealousy or vulnerability, or love or hurt, or simply friendship. In short, their songs are about, or aimed at, themselves and because of this the Beatles’ music contains hidden emotions that reveal themselves only after time, and this is the reason why, after all these years, it is still universally loved.
This might sound contentious but in many instances Leslie’s interpretations hold water. Try it: do they believe they can work it out; was the relationship getting better during the Pepper sessions; is Paul urging John to go and get Yoko in ‘Hey Jude’: does Paul want John to get back to him; does John plead with Paul not to let me down; is Paul telling John he’ll never do him any harm and can’t make it alone in ‘Oh Darling’; and surely the memories referenced in ‘Two Of Us’ are their own. And when John sings ‘Nobody else can see, just you and me’ in ‘Look At Me’, written in 1968, was he addressing Paul? After the split, of course, these messages became far more transparent: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ from his LP Imagine is John’s scathing, unfounded attack on his former song-writing partner, while ‘Dear Friend’, the poignant closing track on Wildlife, is surely Paul’s conciliatory message to John.
Interwoven between this hypothesising is a concise and accurate resume of the group’s career, drawn – as Leslie freely admits – from existing sources, all credited in his acknowledgments at the close. The roles played by Yoko and Linda are discussed, along with revealing conversations and meetings between the two couples that reinforce the love John and Paul still felt for each other after the group split up. Suggestions throughout that John needed Paul more than the other way around go some way to redressing the balance as regards which senior Beatle was more crucial to the construction of their catalogue of songs. Leslie quotes many instances where John would bring a song to the group and how Paul would transform it, but far fewer cases where the opposite was true. John often arrived at Abbey Road with fragments, Paul with completed songs. In this respect Leslie mistrusts the somewhat inevitable canonisation of John following his murder, attributing much of it to Philip Norman’s revelatory book, Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles, first published in 1981.
Each chapter in John & Paul is titled after a song, a handful of which towards the beginning of the book are covers. Chapter 4, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, intrigued me insofar as there is no recorded evidence of The Beatles performing this much-admired song, only narrative evidence in Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. “If there’s one of these lost cover versions I would love to hear, it’s ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, a Shirelles song Lennon liked to sing at the Cavern,” writes Leslie (and, by the way, so would I). “Lennon understood, in his bones, the emotion that animates ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’: wanting love and not trusting it to stay. What he learned from Smokey [Robinson] and from black teenage girls was how to communicate feeling rather than just feel it.”
At the other end of the book, in a heart-rending closing chapter that considers ‘Here Today’, Paul’s hypothetical conversation with John from his 1982 Tug Of War album, Leslie bows out with the realisation that by sharing the love they had for one another with the world, the music it inspired has made this world “an immeasurably better place”. Who would argue with that?
John & Paul deserves to be read by every Beatle fan. My paperback edition has 433 pages including 24 pages of reference notes (including my own interview with Paul in 1971), a superb index and, as a sort of coda, a Q&A with the author conducted by Kate Mossman. Though well known, the eight pages of mostly b&w pictures are carefully selected to complement the text.
