John + Paul, the new book on the formation of the Beatles

The mystique surrounding The Beatles continues to explore the mysterious mechanisms that gave rise to the unrivalled perfection of a band of teenagers capable of changing the world. A new instalment adds further details to the reconstruction of this masterpiece, with an investigation as daring as attempting to map Michelangelo’s mind as he envisioned the Sistine Chapel. In 1957, in a parish hall in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, a 16-year-old with the face of a hooligan sang skiffle music to an audience that had happened to gather beneath that small stage. It was John Lennon; his band was called The Quarrymen, named after the school attended by its members. In the audience is a young lad, Paul McCartney, who approaches him after the gig, shows him how to tune a guitar properly, and then plays Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ without missing a single chord. It was the defining moment of a 20th-century cultural legend: the essayist and psychologist Ian Leslie, in "John + Paul: A Love Story in Music" (2024, now available in Italy published by Utet), describes it as the genesis of that unique two-headed entity which, for thirteen years, would think, write and play as a single being. Leslie’s book arrives at a time when Beatlemania seemed to have run its course, following Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now and, above all, following Peter Jackson’s ultra-documentary Get Back, which in 2021 offered an unvarnished glimpse into what life was like for the Beatles and how their songs came to be. Leslie focuses not on the band, nor on the era, but on the relationship — more intense than a friendship — between two young men who had lost their mothers and who forged that surrogate family built on emotions and songs, shared equally. Her argument stems from the fact that Lennon and McCartney wrote ‘eyeball to eyeball’, looking each other in the eye, as John said in his 1980 Playboy interview, shortly before his death: sitting opposite each other, guitar against guitar, they crafted music whilst gazing into each other’s faces, creating something neither of them could have produced alone. It is an image so intimate as to be almost embarrassing, and Leslie describes it for what it was: a love story – not a sexual one, but certainly an erotic one – made up of courtship, betrayals and reconciliations.

A creative fusion of bodies and minds against the historical backdrop of the dawn of pop music: before the Beatles, songs were factory-produced — the Brill Building in New York, with rooms full of songwriters churning out hits on commission, or the orchestral crooning of Tin Pan Alley. The idea that a group of lads could write their own material, signing it with a shared credit — ‘Lennon-McCartney’, modelled on Rodgers and Hammerstein but in the style of working-class heroes — was heretical. The Beatles made it the norm. Leslie captures how this shared authorship was a cultural revolution, even before it was a musical one, overturning the nineteenth-century romantic myth of the solitary genius and replacing it with a dialogical, Socratic model, in which the power of the song emerges from the interplay of two sensibilities. Lennon and McCartney were two vastly different, yet equally self-centred personalities. Lennon needed to be the perpetual centre of attention and the eternal rebel; McCartney possessed tireless ambition, a tyrannical perfectionism (vividly illustrated in Get Back) and a vanity that persists right through to his present-day concerts. Yet Leslie dismantles the binary stereotype that the public has inherited from decades of storytelling – on the one hand, Lennon the radical, sarcastic rocker; on the other, McCartney the saccharine, conciliatory melodist – given that, for a decade, those two imposing egos silenced one another in the act of composition. Their rivalry never ceased, and Leslie argues that competition was the fuel for their creative fusion: every song one brought to the table was implicitly a challenge to the other, a ‘do better than this’. When McCartney wrote ‘Penny Lane’, Lennon responded with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’; when one jotted down a weak verse, the other rewrote it without mercy. This is the book’s paradox: their ability to temporarily dissolve their individual egos in the creative act, whilst remaining two clinical narcissists, and giving rise to the most fertile compositional period in the history of pop music. It is the moment when youth music ceases to be mere entertainment and becomes the dominant language of Western culture. Some critics argue that Leslie romanticizes that bond, reducing the complexity of the Beatles to a therapeutic interpretation of the pair, at the expense of Harrison and Starr. Nevertheless, he decodes a dynamic—as empirical as it is magical—of two personalities who, together, looking at one another, create something infinitely more evocative. It is the defeat of loneliness, and it is a fascinating story to read even through this delicate lens.