Get the latest gossip

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie review – a Beatles bromance


An intelligent, diligently researched look at the intense bond between Lennon and McCartney

To Beatles aficionados, the cast and chronology will be familiar: the Quarrymen, Hamburg, the Cavern, Beatlemania, Abbey Road, the Apple rooftop concert; Brian Epstein, George Martin; Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jane Asher, Linda Eastman. He follows them from the teen years when they bunked off classes to strum at each other’s houses (“Paul’s reversed guitar meant that the two of them could act as mirrors for each other”) through jamming sessions in hotel rooms to late-night studio recordings. But the emphasis here is on Lennon-McCartney as a joint enterprise, and the miracle of the songs they wrote together, with their singing voices sometimes indistinguishable and credit to one or the other beside the point: “They were so far inside of each other’s musical minds that it doesn’t matter.”

Get the Android app

Or read this on The Guardian

Read more on:

Photo of john & paul

john & paul

Photo of ian leslie review

ian leslie review