The obsessives tally 18 Beatles songs mentioning “sun” or “sunshine”. That fits with their luminous place in the national story: a burst of colour and sound that presaged the passing of postwar hardships. The 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony featured a dayglo parade of Sgt Pepper soldiers pursued by a giant gramophone horn.
The truth, however, is that it was darkness as much as light that bound the heart of the band together. Only eight months before Paul McCartney met John Lennon in 1957, he’d lost his mother at 14; 12 months after they met, Lennon endured the same loss.
When he eventually turned to primal scream therapy and post-Beatles offerings such as “Mother” and “Crippled Inside”, Lennon would tell the world his bewildering backstory: an infancy tossed between a feckless father, a sparkling but unreliable mother and an overbearing aunt, before an adolescence shaken by the sudden death of, first, his uncle-cum-stepdad and then his mother.
By contrast, McCartney’s perpetually cheery, best-foot-forward presentation ensured that the scars of his own grief commanded less attention. Roy Plomley’s single-sentence dismissal of the singer’s teenage “misfortune” during a 1982 appearance on Desert Island Discs was typical.
While he nowadays concedes he “never got over” his early loss, he still tends to deflect from his own vulnerability by highlighting somebody else’s: the father whom he could hear sobbing through the wall; or the additional dislocations of John’s “broken” home, compared to the “loving” warmth of his own.
Paul has now been the surviving half of the Lennon-McCartney partnership for longer than John was alive, so perhaps it’s inevitable that his sense of himself as the light (“it’s getting better”) to Lennon’s shade (“can’t get no worse”) has become entrenched. But as someone who lost a parent at 16 myself, I’ve long suspected that this shared rupture in adolescent life might help explain why the songs of this particular pair of young men would conquer the world like none before—and linger on like none since. Just occasionally, McCartney has let something slip that hints at the fundamental nature of the grief bond, as when he told his friend Barry Miles: “Once or twice when someone said, ‘Is your mother gonna come?’, we’d say, in a sad voice, ‘She died.’ We actually used to put people through that. We could look at each other and know.”
Ian Leslie’s marvellous new rendering of the well-told story of how two young Liverpudlians united, created and eventually broke apart doesn’t pretend to offer new facts. Yet it brims with insights, chiselling away at the “shells and barriers” that each man put up from early ages, and giving the same attention to the submerged miseries of this pair of “walking wounded” as to the more familiar joys.
Leslie’s book brims with insights, chiselling away at the ‘shells and barriers’ that each man put up from early ages
Don’t get me wrong: those joys are very much here too. Laughter was one of the weapons by which two teenagers from a declining provincial city could pull off their unlikely global “heist”. Their 1950s giggling fits continued through the 1960s: you can hear them “overflowing” on a published outtake of “And Your Bird Can Sing”. The easy exuberance of numbers such as “She Loves You” and “I Feel Fine” flows from many shared listening delights, most obviously Elvis, Buddy Holly and Little Richard. John and Paul were also shaped by the banjo-strumming American folk that John’s mum loved, as well as the music-hall songs Paul’s dad would play, without which we’d never have got “When I’m Sixty-Four”.
Leslie places a particular and persuasive stress on the “suave harmonies of doo-wop”, the American genre that provided such 1950s hits as “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, which he defines as the “sound of longing”, against the raw “desire” of rock ’n’ roll. Leslie hears doo-wop in those lovely, three-part harmonies that the young Lennon and McCartney would rope George Harrison in for (think “This Boy”), as well as in the word-free mantras of later songs (the “shoo-bee-doo-wop” in “Revolution”). Doo-wop songs were “heat-seeking missiles aimed at the hearts of America’s fastest-growing record-buying audience: teenage girls”. And doo-wop singers, at least those that reached British ears, were often young women too.
The first two Beatles albums cover several girl-group tracks, such as the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You” and the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr Postman”. Boys in matching suits doo-wopping about “hurt and high drama” worked commercial magic. But it was also creatively significant, especially—Leslie notes drily—for the Beatles’ self-styled macho rocker: “Girl groups liberated Lennon to open up his throat and bare his soul.” And yet the compulsion to reveal oneself was also a McCartney trait, in his case complicated by profound inhibitions and by uncertainties about what there was to reveal: “he harboured doubts about the person he was at heart, and sometimes questioned whether he had a heart at all”.
Two “deeply emotional men who had the fabric of their world ruptured at a young age”, they needed a release valve, and, happily for the world, they found one: “When they couldn’t speak what they felt, they sang it.” Here we arrive at the motor that drove those 159 (out of 184) Beatles recordings that John and Paul wrote themselves: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must consign to song.
Only through the singing can we understand the writing. Just as it may be said of Chopin or Liszt that they were pianists before they were composers, so it should be understood of McCartney and especially Lennon that they were songwriters because they were singers. There are virtually no Beatles instrumentals, nor anything like Eric Clapton’s “Layla”, where the singing is an incidental overlay to the guitar. McCartney eventually proved a superb instrumentalist, but his path there started in John’s tiny porch, working out harmonies inches apart: “one boy stood with his back to the outside, the other with his back to the house,” above a tiled floor that made for a thrillingly reverberant acoustic (which the National Trust nowadays lets visitors try out).
Being singers first and foremost meant that for Lennon and McCartney there was no sharp line between melody and lyrics: “Music created meaning, words made rhythms and sounds.” It followed that—unlike other writing pairs, including Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin and Gershwin or, later, Elton John and Bernie Taupin—both partners had to supply both elements of the “compound”.
Each chapter of Leslie’s psychodrama is framed around a song, on the basis that “The songs they wrote and sang together were not ‘about’ their feelings—they were their feelings.” Time and again, loss is central among those feelings, although it’s often given a redemptive twist.
Paul wrote his first guitar song “I Lost My Little Girl” immediately after cancer stole his mother. Three of the five most-covered Beatles songs bear the marks of his early grief. At No 5 is “Let It Be”, whose comfort-bestowing apparition, “Mother Mary”, is barely disguised (McCartney’s mum was called Mary). At No 3 is “Eleanor Rigby”, of which Leslie writes: “From the moment he found its first five syllabic notes, the song seems to have found its themes: loneliness, futility, the end of life. McCartney was twenty-three.” The most covered of all is “Yesterday”, whose haunted melody arrived complete in a dream. McCartney mulled the lyrics for a long while, before arranging them around the bewildering question of “why she had to go”. Today, he concedes it must really be about his mother, not the girlfriend in flight he’d vaguely presumed he was crooning about in his youth.
As for Lennon, even before his autobiographical turn, his “lyrics were drawn from” the anguished “well of his unconscious”. However jaunty its tune, the title of “Help!” speaks for itself. Or consider “I Am the Walrus”. The language-breaking mayhem (“goo-goo ga joob”) is used, Leslie insists, to “create the space for a plain and direct statement of pain: I’m crying.”
If grief was the first creative spark for both John and Paul, their second was each other. Leslie’s obsession is, as his subtitle puts it, the “love story” between them. Its plot thickened a year into their friendship, when John’s mother was run over: they barely discussed it, yet “John knew that Paul understood something of what he was going through”. And that was enough. So inseparable did they become that when John came into a bit of cash, he didn’t take the girlfriend who’d become his first wife on holiday to Paris, but Paul instead. Each jealously guarded their friendship with the other, sometimes to a deranged extent. The reputedly cool-headed McCartney would sneer and snipe at his one-time fellow-Beatle and—for young Paul, aggravatingly close—friend of Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe. McCartney and Sutcliffe ended up fighting on stage in Hamburg.
Leslie’s line-by-line decoding of supposed signals each man was sending the other through their lyrics can teeter into fan fiction. (When solo John sang “I Know (I Know)” in 1973, can we really assume he was referring back several years to an LSD trip where he’d voiced something resembling that unremarkable title to Paul?) But the book’s more serious purpose is to understand the relationship in order to understand the creation. “Shared trauma… blasted open an underground tunnel through which they were able to communicate in secret from the rest of the world, and even from themselves.”
They developed an unusually close understanding, whereby each could find the perfect bridge or chorus to complement any scrap of a verse that their friend had dreamed up. There are a host of tracks where one sings one song, then the other what sounds like another, before it somehow becomes integral to the first: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “We Can Work It Out”, “I’ve Got a Feeling”, not to mention “A Day in the Life”, which pushes this unlikely welding to the point of a party trick. In “Come Together”, Paul crafted just the bassline needed to frame John’s previously shapeless art. John likewise gave Paul’s songs what he called the “gimmicks” that completed them: the harmonica on “Love Me Do”, the jangling guitar triplets on “All My Loving”.
Sometimes, especially later, the role of the partner was merely to bless and encourage
Occasionally—the loss-tinged “In My Life” being a case in point—the pair would retrospectively contest exactly who’d come up with what, but as Leslie writes: “In a sense they were so far inside each other’s musical minds that it doesn’t matter.” Sometimes, as with “From Me To You”, it was full-on “eyeball-to-eyeball” co-writing. Sometimes, especially later, the role of the partner was merely to bless and encourage. Other than his lovely harmonies, Lennon’s only contribution to “Hey Jude” was to persuade Paul it was already perfect. Paul sat in on John’s one entirely solo “Beatles” recording, “Julia”, his first public lament for his mother. There are outtakes where you can hear John tell Paul that it’s a difficult song to do, and Paul tell his friend he’s doing well. They’re ostensibly discussing finger-picking, but they both know they’re not.
Along with love, there was also rivalry—and, in the early 1970s, public fighting. The two talents remained, but there was an artistic price to pay for the severed alliance, with no one to arrest Lennon’s descent into solipsism, or to stop McCartney’s baroque pastiches from getting out of hand. The enmity etched into solo lyrics only confirmed that neither was really “over” the other.
In his political writing, Leslie is the kind of “centrist” who seems to swing many more punches towards the left than the right. And with the Beatles, he’s previously admitted to venerating “Paul in particular”, so I was on the lookout for bias. But, in the end, he is pretty judicious, showing awareness of how both men could be infuriating. Yes, Lennon’s capricious rages are documented, but so too are McCartney’s infuriating “self-justifications”. We read how Paul abandoned one (part-time) girlfriend with the words, “Don’t cry. I’m a cunt.”
This is a tragedy as well as a love story, because the wounds of the breakup never did entirely heal. The ballad of John and Paul in the 1970s is a frustrating catalogue of phone calls and rare meetings that sometimes achieved a brief reconnection, but never a settled rapprochement. One issue was that John & Paul was incompatible with John & Yoko: Lennon’s wife scuppered one rendezvous and sometimes refused to put McCartney’s calls through.
And then, very suddenly, it was too late. After Lennon’s murder, it once again fell to McCartney to sing what he couldn’t say. “Here Today” delicately dispatches the ludicrous posthumous reimaging of his tricky old friend as Martin Luther Lennon. Instead, he recalls “how it was before”, when the lads first met and “didn’t understand a thing, but we could always sing”. It’s not genius he mourns, just company: “you were always there with a smile”. Company that didn’t so much exist in a place as it did in a form: the beautiful closing line is, simply, “you were in my song”. Paul was still writing for and with his internalised John. Once more, he did what they’d so often done together: take a sad song and make it better.
