The Bards of the Second Reformation

'John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs' by Ian Leslie

Childhood summers in Dublin were my induction into music. Our much older and cooler cousins had all sorts of records from the 1960s and 70s, that period of explosive creative energy in the Anglo-American world, but mostly we listened to the Beatles. Endlessly.

I loved them then and love them now and forever. Though the music was imprinted on me at an early age - the White Album especially still takes me back to the top floor of the family house in Ballsbridge - the work of Lennon and McCartney remains fresh in a way that most of the classics of that era do not. While I admit to being a cultural lightweight and have no confidence in my pronouncements on art of any kind, for me they are the greatest musical composers of all time. They are certainly the most influential of the post-war period, and Britain’s greatest cultural contribution of the era (although, even as a child, I felt that the Irish, often looking to Liverpool as a cultural capital, saw them as their own).

As I get older, I find the Beatles even more interesting as a cultural phenomenon, a central part of the second reformation, the 1960s being the start of a new era as consequential as the 1520s or the Christianisation of Rome.

My father, who was already on his way to becoming a reactionary when, in his early thirties, this strangely androgynous foursome emerged on the scene, remarked with ironic pride in later life that as a Daily Mirror journalist he was one of the first to write that they would never amount to anything. He joked that the jury was still out, but by that stage – the 1990s – the Beatles legend was only growing with the veneration offered by a new generation of musicians. I think it’s reasonable to suggest that they will stand out among their contemporaries in the same way that Shakespeare stood out among his. The Rolling Stones and the Kinks will be treasured, just as with Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser, but there was only one Bard.

That is one argument made in Ian Leslie’s excellent John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, an ode to the most successful songwriting partnership in history. A thoroughly enjoyable read, even for someone who doesn’t normally consume much music criticism, it features a satisfying mix of social history, song analysis and psychology. Holidays are always hugely improved by having a book one looks forward to returning to, and I felt myself repeatedly escaping human company to get back to Lennon and McCartney. I finished it in a day and a morning, dipping into the book’s Spotify playlist after each chapter.

Leslie is a leading substacker whose work normally focuses on human behaviour and psychology, on which he writes deftly and with great perception. An avid fan of the Beatles, during lockdown in 2020 he published a post about Paul McCartney which spread rapidly through the social media population like, I don’t know, some contagious virus.

Leslie’s original post was a reassessment of the conventional Beatles narrative – that Lennon was deep, rebellious and artistically complex, while McCartney was conventional and ‘mainstream’, his songs mere ditties. This false dichotomy had developed, as the book shows at greater length, partly as a result of Lennon’s own telling in various interviews. Lennon’s supporters, desperate to be as edgy and cool as their idol, turned the legend into history.

Leslie writes how: ‘When it came to the Beatles, John contrasted Paul’s predilection for melodies with his passion for authentic rock and roll (“The thing that made the Beatles what they were was the fact that I could do my rock ’n roll, and Paul could do the pretty stuff”). In his telling of the Beatles’ story, he had to fight for his artistic vision in the teeth of opposition from the music industry and Paul McCartney. The rock press was utterly seduced by this talk and turned Lennon and McCartney into identity markers for a culture war. You were either for John or for Paul; for middle ­class straights… or for working-­class rebels… a narrative so compelling that it still shapes the Beatles’ story today.’

Lennon was insecure and unpredictable, which made the dynamic of John and Paul’s relationship all the more fascinating, about as close as two heterosexual males can get, but far more interesting than most because of the creative sparks that resulted. John, especially, emotionally depended on the writing partner he’d found as a teenager during a difficult time, and his jealously and possessiveness fuelled the vindictive narrative just as it fuelled their creative partnership.

Even when writing separately they were inspired by each other, whether competitively or collaboratively, and the extent of each artist’s input in the other’s songs was considerable, although often contested. I had no idea that in 2019, com­puter scientists used a machine ­learning program to determine who had actually written ‘In My Life’, the most ambiguous and contested in its authorship (and as Leslie points out, most people’s memories are unreliable). The computer said Lennon.

Leslie is obviously an admirer of both men - you can feel the warm glow from the pages - but even reading this splendid ode to the Lennon-McCartney partnership couldn’t rid me of my impression that John was a deeply unpleasant man. He was an interesting unpleasant man, admittedly, especially as so many of his faults would become characteristic of the age that followed. He was cool, self-obsessed, masked his rudeness and aggression with the virtue of authenticity, and he was cynical towards beliefs and institutions he didn’t like while credulous about ideas that suited him. The faults of our age, an age which the Beatles helped to create in ways we perhaps don’t appreciate.

The Beatles took Britain by storm in 1963 and conquered America the following year; everything about them, and not just their music, was different to what went before. Leslie writes how ‘The critic Harold Bloom argued that we recognise ourselves in Shakespeare not just because he captured something eternal in human nature but because he wrought our very idea of what a person is – an introspective, self­ fashioning individual. Similarly, the Beatles were crucial to the creation of a post­-1960s personality: curious, tolerant, self­-ironising, unaffected, both feminine and masculine… The micro­-culture of the Beatles, which had such a decisive impact on our culture, germinated in the many hours that John and Paul spent in Paul’s front parlour or in John’s bedroom, guitars on laps, making songs, poetry and laughter.’

London at the time was a remarkable place to be alive and to be young. While the two men are often presented as representing the bourgeoisie and the bohemians, John spent much of the 1960s in the Surrey commuter belt with his first wife Cynthia and their son Julian, while Paul lived in the heart of swinging London, moving in with Jane Asher and her educated, bohemian family, and enjoying the city’s nightlife to the full.

It was at the Asher house in Marylebone where, famously, one morning Paul awoke with a tune in his head. ‘He wondered what it was. It didn’t sound like something he would have writ­ten, but like some wistful jazz melody from his childhood, something his father used to play.’ For weeks he played around with this tune, to the point of frustration for those around him.

Richard Lester, director of Help! remembered McCart­ney between shots during the four-week filming: ‘He was playing this “Scrambled Eggs” all the time. It got to the point where I said to him, “If you play that bloody song any longer I’ll have the piano taken off stage. Either finish it or give up!”’ When the shoot ended McCartney flew to Portugal for a holiday, where on a long cab ride Asher fell asleep and ‘McCartney closed his eyes, the problem of the song’s words returned to him.’

‘Yesterday’ has perhaps the most well-known of any song’s origin stories, being so otherworldly, ‘often told as an example of div­ine inspiration, because it came to McCartney in a dream. But it is also an example of what the science writer Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch”: an idea that takes its time to ripen and requires a lot of work to realise. For all that Paul and John liked to knock off hit songs within two or three hours, they sometimes sweated over them.’ Paul’s work ethic, in particular, was intense.

By the time that Rubber Soul came out it - ‘altogether a good album’ according to the NME - McCartney ‘was a man with his mind on fire. He consumed cultural and intellectual stimulation like a jet plane guz­zling fuel. His London circle included the Ashers, the countercultural entrepreneur Barry Miles, the art dealer Robert Fraser, John Dunbar and his wife Marianne Faithfull, and Tara Browne, a twenty­-year-­old aristocrat who threw extravagant parties. In the London Life interview, Paul refers to Dylan and the Who but also to Handel, the painter Francis Bacon, the playwrights John Osborne and Eugene O’Neill, the actors Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney, and the poet Robert Graves. He said he identified with what Graves said about the impera­tive of creativity: “I write poems because I damn well must.”’

The Beatles were about to go through another ‘phase shift’, as Leslie calls it; from being at the forefront of the ‘British invasion’ to something more significant. They stopped touring in 1966, fed up with the noise and the stress, their most famously hostile reaction coming from Christians in the United States upset at what Lennon had said about religion.

In his interview with Maureen Cleave, ‘John Lennon had remarked on the de­cline of religion and how the Beatles might be more popular than Jesus now. His tone wasn’t boastful – if anything, it was slightly wistful. In his rather haphazard fashion, Lennon had been reading and thinking about religion a lot. He had the temperament of a believer but not of a conformer, and while he had some affection for the Church he saw it as part of the past. He read a best­seller called The Passover Plot, a kind of non­fiction Dan Brown, which proposed a conspiracy theory about how the apostles had faked the resurrection and distorted the true message of Jesus. “Christianity will go,” he said to Cleave. “It will vanish and shrink . . . We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.”’

This was characteristic of Lennon, who was bright and inquisitive, but prone to swallowing gullible theories produced by the newfound freedoms of the decade. The drugs probably didn’t help.

They had discovered LSD via Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, which found expression in the final track on Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. ‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream,’ Leary wrote, which Lennon borrowed.

I was interested to learn that, as ‘the mu­sicologist and Beatles scholar Walter Everett points out, it turns the rhythm of the line into iambic pentameter, the main metric vehicle of English poetry and drama.’ It was probably the first time it had been used in pop music, and this Lennon would have picked up at school from studying Shakespeare and Milton, and from reading books at the home of Mimi, the straight and suburban aunt who helped raised him: ‘It was part of his verbal muscle memory.’ The phrase ‘ignorance and haste’ was taken from a prov­erb in the King James Bible, and ‘in an interview around this time John said how grateful he was to Aunt Mimi for sending him to Sunday school.’

Lennon was a bridge between two civilisations: a Sunday school boy who formed a band at a church fete, he would come to write the iconic song of the new era, ‘Imagine’, one that pictured a world with no religion and no countries, influencing a worldview that has even been nicknamed ‘Marxism-Lennonism’.

His clearest influence, however, was his writing partner, and John was inspired to write ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ after hearing Paul play ‘Eleanor Rigby’, each genius spurring the other to further heights: ‘Both John and Paul were living up to Arthur Schopenhauer’s definition of genius: unlike talent, which hits a target nobody else can reach, genius hits a target nobody else can see.’

One of my Beatles childhood memories was of the 20^th anniversary of Sgt Pepper, and thinking how distant the band seemed, like from another historical era (the equivalent today would be a group which split in 2008). It was not their best album but perhaps the point at which the Beatles’ artistic significance reached a new level, although their most celebrated songs of the year, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, weren’t on the album but instead appeared as a double-A Side: ‘Radically different, umbilically connected, they form an opus… No song is more McCartneyesque than “Penny Lane”, just as “Strawberry Fields Forever” is indubitably Lennonesque. Paul created songs that felt as if they had always existed; John channelled transmissions from another planet. Paul’s melodies feel like the purpose of music itself; John strains at the limits of chords and keys, trying to get past music into pure feeling or experience.’

It was at the point when the Beatles were birthing a new cultural movement in the Summer of Love that they were at their most nostalgic, evoking Edwardian music halls. It was also the first Beatles album to be made without the prospect of being played live, and so ‘Pepper achieves what the art critic Clement Greenberg termed “medium specificity”. Everything about its packaging and presentation – the cover, the costumes, the gatefold design, the printed lyrics, the cut­out masks – invites listeners to remember that this is a record, and that the record is the work.’ Again, what we now think of as the norm – what we cannot picture otherwise – was trail blazed by the unusually fertile imaginations of the Lennon-McCartney cultural circle.

John was a turbulent man who had a turbulent childhood, although a previous age might have explained his character differently, and now things started to go wrong. The band were caught up with the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga, one of various BS artists Lennon latched onto, and followed him to India. George was into it; Ringo hated the food. Paul couldn’t achieve any ‘huge spiritual lift­off’ because every time it came to meditate he thought ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’ John, increasingly unsettled, used rumours of the Maharishi’s indiscretions with women as an excuse to leave.

He went into a depression, and George recalled that ‘John was in a rage be­cause God had forsaken him (although it was nothing to do with God, really).’ John felt a sense of humiliation and was taking LSD and other drugs, and his friend Pete Shotton would ‘find him in torrents of tears, other times laughing maniacally. He was also drinking heavily, for the first time in years.’ Lennon was not a good drunk, and would make scenes at parties, while ‘the drug ­taking was making him delusional: at one point during this period he convened an emergency meeting of the Beatles in the Apple boardroom to declare that he was Jesus Christ. The other Beatles lis­tened, then proposed lunch.’

The instability was caused, ‘in John’s mind at least, by Paul’s growing independ­ence. In more ways than one, then, Yoko was a replacement for Paul. Ono told [biographer] Philip Norman that John said to her, “Do you know why I like you? It’s because you look like a bloke in drag. You’re like a mate.”’ She must have been charmed.

It is established Beatles lore that Yoko Ono, Lennon’s second wife, was responsible for the band’s break-up; in both the Let It Be and Get Back films she’s seen permanently hanging around, just there. Yet Paul’s new relationship with talented photographer Linda Eastman was playing on John’s jealousy, aggravated by McCartney’s desire to have the Eastman family represent the band’s interests in the increasingly complex legal wrangle over music rights. This was a clash of class and cultures, and ‘for her part, Yoko saw in the Eastmans exactly the kind of establish­ment figures that she and other avant garde artists in New York hated: the kind who hung Matisses and Picassos in their homes but blanched at truly subversive art.’

John, moving onto heroin, got into weirder and weirder beliefs, very much a Chestertonian exemplar of the former Christian who embraces every idea. He became a follower of psychotherapist Arthur Janov, who encouraged patients to talk about childhood trauma and scream when they felt upset. He would have several sessions a week and, remarkably, this didn’t make him feel better; Janov explained that his now non-functional patient had not found contentment by dredging up his unhappiest memories and screaming only because he hadn’t finished the course.

Things weren’t helped by the return of John’s wayward father Freddie who at, 57, had just become a parent again. John, ‘pale, haggard and distracted’, threatened to have him ‘done in’, a line delivered with ‘malignant glee’. They never spoke afterwards.

The band’s split was acrimonious, both sides now lawyered up, with Paul aided by the establishment-coded Eastmans and John by Allen Klein, an aggressive and shady attorney who later went to jail. John’s public pronouncements were increasingly hostile, but also remarkably successful at shaping the narrative.

‘John’s label for Paul, a “good PR man”, stuck, even though, as the Beatles historiographer Erin Torkelson Weber notes, “the title right­ fully belonged to Lennon”. From 1969 until the end of 1971, John and Yoko gave more than a dozen major interviews and over fifty­-five radio interviews, and appeared on Dick Cavett’s TV show multiple times. They gave countless smaller interviews too, sometimes as many as ten a day. Allen Klein also put their case to the media. Meanwhile, McCartney retreated to Scotland or worked in the recording studio, and refused most interview requests. Rather than attempt a counter­ narrative, he offered only silence punctuated by legal statements and brief self-­justifications.’

On 8 December 1970, before the release of the Plastic Ono Band album, John and Yoko sat for a Rolling Stone interview with journalist Jann Wenner, where he let rip, calling life as a Beatle ‘awful… a fucking humiliation’ and portraying himself as a tortured artist. He managed to insult George Martin, George Harrison and various friends of the band, and of Paul, he ‘portrayed him as superficial, glib and PR­ focused, a commercially­ minded foil to his own unruly artistic genius. He consistently downplayed the importance of their collaboration. He ignored McCartney’s contributions to his songs, and overplayed his own contributions to Paul’s.’ He also dismissed what he called the ‘Paul and Linda’ album, McCartney, as ‘rubbish’.

He later apologised, saying he was ‘stoned out of my fucking mind’ on heroin, and it appears more vicious in print than on tape, where Leslie writes that he just sounds like someone suffering from depression.

This fragile mood was illustrated by one song in particular, ‘God’, where Lennon goes through ‘a long litany of ideas and idols’ in which he no longer believes, including magic, the Bible, Jesus and Kennedy, ‘before singing.. in a voice that sounds ancient, I don’t believe in Beatles – at which point the music stops… After a short pause, Lennon re­enters, unaccompanied, sud­denly vulnerable, to sing “I just believe in” – the band returns – “me”.’ The Sixties, everyone.

Soon after, at a court hearing to conclude the band’s business, Lennon’s statement was read out which, as Leslie writes, ‘included some outrageous narrative­ shaping’. Lennon claimed that ‘From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred “pop type” music and we preferred what is now called “underground”.’

He found full expression in his bitterness about Paul in one song, ‘How Do You Sleep?’, and ‘even though reviewers found “How Do You Sleep?” shocking, they made sense of it through Lennon’s narrative. Rolling Stone argued that its vituperation embodied “the traditional bohemian contempt for the bourgeoisie”. It was taken as indisputable evidence that John despised Paul.’ Yet he was also possessive of him; broken hearted at his loss.

John continued to become more wayward in his thirties as McCartney settled down in rural Scotland and became the quintessential family man. Lennon binged drink, engaged in affairs and one-night stands, and his career began to dip, while McCartney enjoyed a second bite at the cherry, the Wings selling out larger stadium than the Beatles ever managed. It’s amusing to read that McCartney was now considered an ageing rock star and was asked if he was ‘past it’, which he rather conceded. He was thirty­-three.

By 1972 a glasnost of sort had set in, although a proposed meeting of the Fab Four to finalise the legal wrangling was aborted because Yoko’s astrologer said it wasn’t the right day. A promoter offered them $50 million for a one­-off gig but it was never going to happen, although John and Paul still spoke occasionally. Then, of course, any hope of a reunion ended in December 1980 with Lennon’s death, further sanctifying his memory.

‘John Lennon’s murder elicited an outpouring of public grief. Vigils were held in multiple countries. Beatles music and Lennon solo albums were played non­stop on the radio. Double Fantasy, which had sold creditably before his death, went to number one. Jann Wenner published a special edition of Rolling Stone devoted to Lennon. On its cover he used a photograph taken by Annie Leibovitz on the day of the murder, showing Lennon, naked, curled up like a baby next to a fully clothed Yoko. The image was used across the world. People mourned Lennon partly because he represented the optimism and liberation of the 1960s.

‘His peace campaigns and political activism (in reality pursued for only a brief period of his life) fused with the love people felt for his music, and the pain they felt at his passing, to create a mythical figure. As the journalist Ray Connolly – who knew and liked John – put it, “You could already smell the dubious whiff of incense at the public canonization of a newly martyred saint.” Lennon became revered as the towering genius behind the Beatles, the vision­ary who imagined a better world, the gentle proselytiser for peace and loving partner of Yoko Ono. His flaws, frailties and contradictions were erased or smoothed away. And for Lennon to be raised in status, McCartney had to be lowered. Robert Christgau, then America’s most influential rock critic, sympathetically quoted his own wife: “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”’ Grotesque, and unfair, but it took many decades for this narrative to shift, and Ian Leslie’s highly-readable biography will no doubt help to rebalance the story further.

McCartney has now outlived his band mate and best friend by almost half a century, still going strong in the age of AI and social media, becoming one of those unusual figures who crosses eras. More than an icon, he is one of the great historical figures of our age, and I mournfully wonder how we will feel when the time comes for him to rejoin his great friend and partner.

We live in a different civilisation to the world in which two school boys met up at St Peter’s Church in Woolton, Liverpool, on that fateful Saturday, July 6,1957, and it is a civilisation which these twin bards of the Second Reformation helped to create. I think my dad might have been wrong about this one – the Beatles are going to make it.