Ian Leslie opens his account of the relationship between Lennon and McCartney with a telling prologue. It is the 9th of December 1980 in London, and thousands of miles away John Lennon has been shot dead outside his home in New York. As Paul McCartney emerges from a recording studio, reporters thrust microphones at him and ask him various knee-jerk questions: how did you find out, who told you, are you going to the funeral, etc. McCartney visibly closes down amidst the barrage and becomes increasingly reluctant to provide any details. Then, when one reporter asks why he chose to go to the studio as usual, McCartney’s hackles rise as he answers that he “didn’t feel like” sitting at home. His infamous comment “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” terminates the interview on his terms.
This vignette says a lot about the invisible force-field that The Beatles created around themselves against intrusions from outside, with the group’s two accepted leaders, Lennon and McCartney, at the heart of that space. The protective shield was probably necessary for them to survive their extraordinary level of fame, as evoked by McCartney’s photography exhibition and book from 2023, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. It provides a unique first-hand account of The Beatles’ first trip to the USA, capturing the cultural importance —and sheer madness— of these four individuals’ experiences once they landed at New York’s JFK Airport on the 7th of February 1964. Unprecedented hysteria ensued, culminating in the group’s performance to around 70 million Americans on the Ed Sullivan Show. (Quite a contrast to their 1961 Aldershot performance, when they played to eighteen people.)
So how did all this kick off? Various accounts suggest that it didn’t start with the legendary meeting at the Woolton Village Fete on the 6th of July 1957, when Ivan Vaughan introduced Paul to John, the leader of the Quarrymen, who were performing that day. They had crossed paths before, although McCartney had been somewhat intimidated by Lennon’s “fairground hero’s personality.” The thing that got Lennon interested in McCartney was his superb musicianship. This unique meeting of talents would change a whole generation.
For anyone with more than a passing preoccupation with The Beatles there is always the worry of Mark Lewisohn, still the ultimate Beatles authority, hovering to pounce on the slightest inaccuracy, but Leslie largely avoids mistakes (and, in any case, as time goes on, there will always be misremembered memories). Thematically, he brings the love affair between Lennon and McCartney to the fore by charting their songwriting progress, starting out at McCartney’s house in Forthlin Road, Liverpool where both would “sag off” from school and play guitars facing each other until they came up with some good tunes. The early deaths of both their mothers further cemented the bond between them, as did a shared passion for Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and other early rock-and-rollers. Apart from establishing the Liverpool and Hamburg backgrounds of this much-documented relationship, Leslie identifies certain songs which shed light on how both became exceptional songwriters. While 1962’s Love Me Do peaked at Number 17 in the UK charts, The Beatles’ first Number 1 was Please Please Me, a Lennon composition which showcased his songwriting dominance in the early part of the group’s career. Not long after came a frenetic round of songwriting between the two in hotel rooms and tour coaches, resulting in such classics as She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand. Leslie shows how locked into each other John and Paul were throughout this period, in order to keep their relationship endlessly productive.
With the appearance of their first film A Hard Day’s Night, the demand for a large output of high-quality material to deadline reached new heights. However, even though an agreement had been reached early on that all their songs would be credited to Lennon-McCartney, the days of them truly collaborating were fast disappearing, as each individually mined his own exceptional songwriting talent. Leslie is particularly good on how the musical and vocal arrangements of their compositions were instinctively complementary, so that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts —and when they collaborated on song texts, this added a fascinating tension, such as on We Can Work It Out, in which McCartney’s conciliatory lyrics are greatly enhanced by Lennon’s bracing, pull-yourself-together contribution.
Perhaps inevitably, once the group disbanded in 1970 the two main songwriters disputed who wrote what, as well as the contributions that they had made to each other’s songs. Although, famously, McCartney woke up one morning in 1965 with the complete melody of Yesterday already in his head, Lennon’s In My Life from this period has been the subject of some dispute. Did McCartney help out with it, or was it completely Lennon’s own work? Similarly contradictory recollections swirl around Eleanor Rigby. Perhaps anyone who isn’t totally immersed in The Beatles couldn’t care less: the end product is all that matters. Still, it is interesting to see how time and later animosity reshaped their memories.
By the mid-sixties McCartney was living the life of a successful and wealthy bachelor in London, increasingly involved in the capital’s contemporary avant-garde scene. Lennon, meanwhile, grew ever more envious of this man-about-Town existence, having moved his wife Cynthia and son Julian into a Surrey mansion in 1964. Drugs had been a part of The Beatles’ story from their Hamburg days, when they took amphetamines just to stay awake during their marathon stints on stage, and Lennon had by now moved on to cannabis and LSD. By his own admission naturally lazy, and feeling isolated from the London sixties scene, he seems to have spent a good deal of time tripping on his sofa. Even so, based on these experiences and his interest in such countercultural figures as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Lennon would write some of his best songs. It was the latter’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead which largely informed the lyrics to Tomorrow Never Knows, an experimental tour-de-force which appeared on the group’s 1966 album Revolver and demonstrated how far they had come in terms of musical development in just four years. Not to be outdone, McCartney’s contributions to the album such as the sublime Here, There and Everywhere demonstrate the inspired competitiveness that raised them far above their contemporaries.
All of this pointed the way to what would be seen at the time as Lennon and McCartney’s crowning achievement, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – even if, in hindsight, opinions differ on whether it was their best record. Leslie explores the two songs that were meant for this album but appeared prior to its release, due to EMI’s determination to keep The Beatles’ extraordinary chart success going. Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane have often been acclaimed as the greatest double-A side ever produced, highlighting the two friends’ recollections of their childhoods in and around Liverpool. Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields whilst making his only solo appearance in a film – How I Won the War (1967) – on location in Spain. The evolution of the song and its recording through various studio sessions provides a study in time signatures and tape speeds. McCartney’s riposte in the form of Penny Lane, which initially appears to be a much more straightforward piece of childhood nostalgia, is in several ways a stranger song lyrically than it appears on first hearing.
It's tempting to continue with this trawl through The Beatles’ canon, but Leslie’s main subject is of course the relationship between these two friends, which seems to have come unstuck due to something that happened when the group went to India to explore the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Whatever it was, it meant that Lennon and McCartney would never be as close again. On top of this, the death of their manager Brian Epstein in 1967 meant that McCartney more or less took charge of the group. A few more fantastic albums followed, but by 1970 it was all over and their friendship descended into acrimony —especially from Lennon– via the press. McCartney made some obscure little digs in his music about his former mate (Too Many People), and Lennon retaliated with How Do You Sleep, a particularly nasty and vituperative song which Ringo Starr, who sat in on the session, told him to tone down.
Both continued to thrash out their differences through songs or in the press throughout the early 1970s, until a truce was agreed around about 1975. There’s even an amusing story about McCartney visiting Lennon in 1976, when they nearly took up an offer from Lorne Michaels, producer of the US TV show Saturday Night Live, to come down to the studio and perform together “for a certified check for $3,000.” In a sense it’s good that they never did get back together, since their legacy remains pristine. It would, however, have been very nice to see and hear Lennon reminisce about his past in his old age, but that wasn’t to be. Luckily the two were back on good terms before the end: McCartney remembers one of their last phone calls, in which Lennon said “think about me from time to time, my old friend.”--Mark Jones
