By: Nick Duerden / The Independent
Translation: Telegrafi.com

On December 9, 1980, Paul McCartney emerged from a London recording studio to a throng of reporters. He had been there all day while the rest of the world was struggling to come to terms with the news that John Lennon, his former Beatles bandmate, had been murdered in New York the night before. Lennon was 40 years old. When McCartney emerged, he was chewing gum. The press immediately surrounded him with extended microphones, eager to know how he was feeling.

"Eh, you understand ... very shocked. It's terrible news," the singer said.

The news media relies on those short statements that make headlines, but McCartney was not cooperating. His answers were short and cold - a series of verbal shrugs. When asked if he would attend the funeral, he replied: “I don’t know yet.” As for whether he would speak to the remaining Beatles, he said: “Maybe, yes.” The crowd pressed on. They wanted to know what he had been doing in the studio. “I was just listening to some stuff,” he replied. He added that he hadn’t stayed home because “I didn’t feel like it.”

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Suffice it to say, everything was going downhill, until McCartney suddenly uttered a sentence that would become immortal: “It’s disappointing, isn’t it?” - added an “OK, have a good time” and slowly walked away. If before the world had been fascinated by the psychodrama between the two most talented composers of their generation, McCartney’s indifferent response meant that no one ever ceased to be intrigued by this duo.

Johnny and Paul: A love story in song [John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs], by Ian Leslie, opens by recounting this scene in detail. The author did this, as he explained to me today, not “to suggest that Paul was a psychopath,” but to put McCartney’s restrained reaction into context. “It was his defense mechanism. He wanted to push this terrible, devastating news aside and sublimate it — pretend it wasn’t happening — and focus on the work,” Leslie says. “That’s what he did. Paul is a very emotional man, which doesn’t always show,”

John and Paul is the latest in a long line of Beatles books, telling the story of how four young men from Liverpool created one of the greatest music groups in history. It's a story we never seem to tire of hearing, and one that stands up to endless retelling.

I meet Leslie at his publisher's offices, early one February afternoon. He brings with him a heavy cold and a quick lunch from Ready, which he eats as we talk, pulling food from a small bag—sandwich, chips, yogurt, apple juice—like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. He is 53 years old and, in his glasses and velvet jacket, has the look of a scholar. Leslie previously worked in advertising before leaving to write books—on, among other things, why people lie and why they disagree. “I write about psychology because it fascinates me, but I am not a psychologist,” he emphasizes.

Why the Beatles then?

"Well, there were some things I wanted to get out of myself," he says. "There have been so many books written about them over the years - hundreds, if not thousands - but for me, a lot of them have been disappointing. I wanted to balance that out by focusing specifically on the relationship between John and Paul, because that has always fascinated me."

There was certainly a wealth of source material, and he relied not only on his own ongoing fascination (“I’ve been a fan since I was seven”) but also on the wealth of accessible information. Peter Jackson’s mammoth eight-hour documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, from 2021, offered a wealth of information and new perspectives, and enabled Leslie to approach the subject with intellectual seriousness. And although he approaches his subject with the critical eye of a scholar, the tone throughout the book is one of marked sympathy—even a constant sense of wonder. He likes them, even though he admits that he doesn’t fully know them.

In his book, Leslie writes: "We think we know them. In fact, we don't. The standard narrative has distorted their true personalities."

Johnny and Paul It recounts the familiar story of the beginning - the Cavern Club in Liverpool, Hamburg and all the screaming; then India, Yoko and the final breakup in 1974 - but all this serves only as a backdrop to examine in detail what really happened between John and Paul.

Early in the book, Leslie broaches the issue of sexuality, citing an interview in which McCartney is said to have stated: “There was a moment in the evening when [my mother] would walk past our bedroom door in her underwear ... and I would feel sexually aroused.” The most controversial part, however, are the suggestions Leslie makes about Lennon’s feelings for his bandmate – that they might have been more than just platonic. “John was always curious, and I’m not the first to make that assumption,” Leslie points out today. Indeed, during the sessions Get Back, which Leslie used extensively for his own research, Lennon half-jokingly tells McCartney: “It’s like we’re in love.”

Lennon's sexuality has long been a subject of curiosity for Beatles fans. After the birth of his first son, Julian, Lennon chose not to spend time with his family, but to go on holiday with the band's manager, Brian Epstein, who was gay. "It's somewhat well-known that Brian and John had some kind of relationship, the extent of which will never be known," says Leslie. "But it happened - maybe. John was a mess in many ways; I think it's underestimated how much of a mess he was. The others in the band were constantly having to manage him to keep him in the band." Leslie also cites an interview Yoko Ono gave to Beatles biographer Philip Norman in which she talks about "John's very passionate feelings for Paul" and specifically about the possibility that "he was gay" - an indication, then, that Yoko had considered this as a possibility.

As for whether anything ever happened between the two, Leslie doesn't believe it did. “[McCartney] denied [the rumors],” he says. “It didn't. They never had a sexual relationship ... well, who knows? But I don't think so. I would be surprised. Paul is consistently heterosexual, and John has been mostly heterosexual.”

However, Leslie adds: "I think there was probably an erotic component to their relationship, and they were somewhat fascinated by each other, but I don't think they slept together. John, perhaps, at some point had questions in his mind about whether they should do it, but ...", Leslie laughs, "he hit a wall of Paul's heterosexuality. That's my guess."

As his previous books attest (Born Liars, 2011, and How to Disagree, 2022), Leslie is fascinated by the psychology of human interactions - how we connect, how we break up - as well as our instincts for hypocrisy and competition. As such, John and Paul were ideal subjects for him. He would have struggled to write a similar book about, say, Liam and Noel Gallagher, but the Beatles duo elevated their personal feud to the level of art. They deserve every bit of in-depth analysis.

Leslie says that the duo were always in a mutual encouragement throughout their time in the band - supportive but also fiercely competitive. In 1965, when Paul talked about why John's name came first in their songwriting partnership - "Lennon and McCartney" instead of "McCartney and Lennon" - he suggested that, after the success of the song Yesterday, which he wrote alone, his rise in status “made John feel uncomfortable. I climbed to his level. We became equals. It made him insecure. He’s always been like that.”

In the 70s, McCartney proved to be more than Lennon's equal, achieving global success with his new band, Wings, while Lennon, at least initially, struggled. In 1971, Lennon wrote the song How Do You Sleep?, in response to McCartney taking the Beatles to court to legally dissolve the partnership. Nearly a decade later, Lennon was still analyzing the lyrics of Yesterday, perhaps Paul's high point, complaining about her narrative: "It doesn't really get resolved."

There were occasional temporary improvements in their relationship, often at the urging of their much more reasonable wives, but as he clearly describes Johnny and Paul, the relationship remained complicated. “It was very difficult for both of them. No one had ever been a former member of such a big band before. Their whole identity was tied up in being a Beatle - and how do you deal with the fact that you're not one anymore? How do you rebuild yourself as something else?” says Leslie.

It was Lennon who suffered the most. “His sense of himself as a genius was extremely important to him, but he wasn’t sure he felt that way when Paul wasn’t around. Being with Paul reinforced his sense of himself. And when Paul wasn’t around, he was afraid he wasn’t [the genius]. Throughout the 1970s he lost his rhythm.”

If they always remained within each other's orbit, it was, Leslie suggests, "because when you love someone so deeply, you always hope to get through the hard parts to rediscover the sweetness. Their relationship was always alive. It never completely died out."

Time and distance, as always, proved to be the greatest healers, and by the end of the decade there were signs that they might be able to fully reconnect their friendship—at least platonically. They were speaking regularly again and occasionally meeting for dinner. But the events outside the Dakota Building on December 8, 1980, definitively ended that possibility.

“Suddenly,” says Leslie, “John was killed, he was made into a martyr and very quickly he was seen as the great genius of the Beatles – as a symbol of peace, an almost sacred figure.” And McCartney? “Paul kind of lost his way in the 1980s. I don’t think he really emerged from John’s shadow until the mid-1990s, with the advent of Britpop. It was that movement that accepted him as an inspiration – so it took a while for the world to realise that Paul was a genius too.”

In all this history, of course, the other two members of the band - George Harrison and Ringo Starr - are often overlooked. If Lennon and McCartney were competitors, weren't the guitarist and drummer perhaps as well? Leslie admits that yes, that's possible, but adds that that's a topic for another book - not his own.

"Do I feel sorry for them?" he asks, of Harrison and Starr's relatively smaller roles.

“No. They were lucky. Their game was elevated to a whole new level just because they were around John and Paul.” Pushing aside the remains of his lunch, Leslie leans forward, increasingly drawn in by the subject. “It’s interesting that George would then do the song Here Comes the Sun and Something", which are two of the best songs the Beatles ever did. I don't think he would have written anything like that if he hadn't been with John and Paul, within that magical narrow radius that they created together."

Is this perhaps the perfect example that shows that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?

Leslie nods. “Yes. And, ultimately, I think the tensions and conflicts – especially between John and Paul – were essential to the music they made. Even in the most difficult moments of their relationship, they continued to collaborate, they were still each other’s first listeners. All that tension, all that clashing and uncertainty – fed the music and made it better. A lot of their shared genius comes from the fact that they were like an unstable molecule. If they had been more normal, calmer and simpler,” he thinks, “we probably wouldn’t have had the Beatles as we know them. They probably never would have made that extraordinary music. That’s why I think it’s such a beautiful story – ultimately, a love story.” /Telegraph/

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