It is a strange and beguiling experience to find music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer colour and nuance, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it.
This is the effect of reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant study of the Beatles’ music, a book that offers not only a lesson in listening (again) but an enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss. At its centre is the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the unprecedented peaks the two of them scaled in remaking English popular music. You may find it impossible not to be awed by their achievement all over again. But Leslie also wants to challenge a myth about the pair. After the Beatles finally disbanded, a consensus formed that Paul was the straight man to John’s rebel bohemian – vanilla against brimstone – which hardened into holy writ on Lennon’s murder in 1980. McCartney’s inadequate off-the-cuff response to the news (“it’s a drag”) took some living down. Leslie lays to rest this old opposition, arguing that there was “no John without Paul, and vice versa”. Their collaboration was as tight and co-dependent as two climbers roped together on a mountain face.
