By The Economist
In 1967 Bryan Magee, a British philosopher and author, noted that 40-year-old songs by the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern still had wide currency. Given an “indifference to melody in favour of rhythm and intriguing new sound mixtures”, he doubted that the songs of the 1960s would fare so well. “Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?” he dared to ask.
Fab Four: (from left) Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in 1968.Credit: AP
The question now seems daft. Today, Eleanor Rigby, Norwegian Wood and Yesterday are widely judged to hold their own in the company of American songbook classics. But there is more to the Beatles’ continuing currency than the songs, and more, too, than the performances and recordings (those “intriguing new sound mixtures”) that made them known. In a way, it would be unreasonable to blame Magee for missing that the invention of teenagers as a market and television as a medium changed what it was to be famous. And they did so through the Beatles, making them the very model of a sort of fame that is still around 60 years on.
McCartney and Lennon: Friends and rivals in a partnership that changed the world.Credit: AP
The combination of songs and story means the Beatles remain fascinating; the fact that they are still fascinating means there is a market for fresh stories about them. And, happily, in recent years, those works have been good enough to add to the fascination rather than tapping it out.
In 2020, Craig Brown’s wonderful One Two Three Four used artfully collated vignettes to put the Beatles into the context of both their time and the times that followed. In Love and Let Die (2022), John Higgs built a loosely Freudian fantasia of British social history out of the fact that the Beatles (representing progress, the working class, solidarity, subversion) released their first single on the same day as the first film featuring James Bond (the imperial past, the ruling class, isolation, conformity) opened in cinemas.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, in 2021, was Peter Jackson’s three-part, nearly eight-hour documentary about the making of Let It Be, their last album to be released. The intimate account of music, friendship, silliness and sadness became a hit on streaming services. More is in store. Sam Mendes, an Oscar-winning director, plans to release four films, one for each Beatle, in 2028.
Ian Leslie’s John & Paul is a worthy entry into the canon. He provides a rich, sensitive reading of the relationship between John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney, a teenage crush that turns into a partnership in which two remarkable artists developed an extraordinary complementarity, their strengths combined and their weaknesses cancelled out. Their friendship was a central fact of their existence and success – a story that moved from complicity to competition to something curdled and, eventually, to terrible loss.
Throughout, the author cleverly uses their music both as a source for his understanding of the two men and as a subject matter to which he can apply that understanding. Leslie, who has contributed to The Economist, listens as a musician, a fan and a literary critic, as well as the author of a love story. In doing so, he finds plenty of scope for insights that are academically astute – noting how Lennon, by truncating quotations from Timothy Leary’s version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, transformed them into iambic pentameter, thus adding blank-verse gravity to Tomorrow Never Knows.
There is plenty that is genuinely thought-provoking, too. Leslie notes the way that the songwriters’ use of reported speech (“Last night I said these words to my girl” in Please, Please Me or “It’s you she’s thinkin’ of / And she told me what to say” in She Loves You) broadens their work, taking them beyond the saccharine declarations of love that were pop’s mainstay into songs with room for ambiguity and irony. The urgency with which the narrator offers the assurance that “She loves you” needs to be understood as meaning “I love you, too”.
This richer reading is reinforced by the two men sharing the song’s lead vocal, achieving “the distinct and thrilling aesthetic effect of two men who share the same ‘I’ – the same consciousness. It became an expression of the group’s camaraderie that also evoked how two people can slip in and out of each other’s subjectivity: the way we internalise the voices of those we know and love”.
A day in the life
Perhaps, at times, Leslie overthinks things. But other times, he pulls everything together brilliantly. Lady Madonna, Sir Paul’s funky piano paean to motherhood, is put into the context of his fragile engagement to an actress, Jane Asher, his worries about Lennon’s insecurity and the death of their manager, Brian Epstein. He recognises in it, as in so much else, Sir Paul’s never-assuaged grief over his own mother’s death; he hints at the degree to which a song about “a woman beleaguered by the ceaseless demands of others, trying to hang on to her sense of self” applies, to some extent, to Sir Paul himself.
And then, trading story for song and the specific for the universal, he concludes that though all this matters, none of it gives you the heart of the song: “Insofar as it’s about anything, it’s that two-handed piano riff, the life force itself, shaking us out of sadness, dragging us out of bed, propelling us into whatever comes next.”
The Economist
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