It’s Beatles day! In this deep dive into one of music’s most legendary partnerships, Ian Leslie and Tyler unpack the complex relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Leslie, whose book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs examines this creative pairing, reveals how their contrasting personalities—John’s intuitive, sometimes chaotic approach and Paul’s methodical perfectionism—created a unique creative alchemy that neither could fully replicate after the Beatles split.
They explore John’s immediate songwriting brilliance versus Paul’s gradual development, debate when the Beatles truly became the Beatles, dissect their best and worst covers, examine the nuances of their collaborative composition process, consider their many musical influences, challenge the sentiment in “Yesterday,” evaluate unreleased tracks and post-Beatles reunions, contemplate what went wrong between John and Paul in 1969, assess their solo careers and collaborations with others, compare underrated McCartney and Lennon albums, and ultimately extract broader lessons about creative partnerships.
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Recorded March 4th, 2025
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Thanks to Ben Stein from Keeper for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m delighted to be chatting with Ian Leslie. He has a new book out, which I just loved. It is called John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. If you know anything about Ian or about me, you will know that John and Paul is John Lennon and Paul McCartney, namely a big part of the Beatles. Ian, in fact, has many other accomplishments and writings, but today is not Generalist Day, today is Beatles Day. Ian, welcome to the show.
IAN LESLIE: Hello, Tyler. It is an honor to be here.
COWEN: I have so many questions. How is it that John got to be such a great songwriter so quickly? If you look at the early songs, like “If I Fell,” “Not a Second Time,” “Please Please Me,” “It Won’t Be Long,” “All I’ve Got To Do,” they seem to come from nowhere. Paul builds up and eventually is doing “Hey Jude,” “Golden Slumbers.” But John, who supposedly is lazy, just starts with incredible creations. How does that happen?
LESLIE: It’s a good question, and I don’t have a definitive answer, but perhaps it’s connected to what you were saying. John was less methodical than Paul, perhaps a little less analytical in the way he thought about songs and song structures, and more prepared to just blunder his way into things and see what happened. Of course, he had wonderful intuitions. He had some kind of innate talent. He’d been raised on different forms of music, as had Paul, both rock and roll and blues and skiffle, but also, he was introduced to the Great American Songbook by Julia, by watching movies and so on.
He had this incredible, I guess what we’d call today, sense of agency, this sense that, “Well, I’m just going to do it this way.” The very first time Paul saw John playing was at Woolton village fete. They met properly for the first time afterwards. Paul was thrilled by how John got the words wrong to a song that they both knew, that Paul knew. It took me a while to work out why Paul was so thrilled by John getting the words wrong.
I think he was taking from John this sense that, “Yes, this is American music, but we don’t just have to imitate it. We can actually do it in our own way. We could do it wrong, and it’ll come out right.” I think John was the first to get onto that in a really strong way, and that’s probably what pushed him furthest ahead in those early years.
COWEN: What’s your model of how lazy John was? Because in the Get Back movie, he seems detached. In the middle years, it seems it’s always Paul driving them into the studio. How is he so agentic and possibly so lazy at the same time?
LESLIE: That’s a great question. I think if the Get Back movie had been shot while they were recording Revolver, for instance, a couple of years earlier, we would have seen a very different John. Much more voluble, much more energetic, more obviously charismatic, but I do think that even then he had this different attitude to work, which was, “When I get the time to lie around and do nothing, I’m going to do that, and maybe I’ll take some drugs at the same time.” Whereas, Paul was much more, “Oh, come on, guys, let’s go to work, let’s write some songs, let’s play.”
Now, this is all relative. They all worked hard. If you look at their schedule during the ’60s, it’s absolutely crazy. But when they got time off, John was often quite happy just lying around on a sofa. From his point of view, he was just going deep into the recesses of his mind — sometimes enhanced by drugs, and pulling things out, whereas Paul was always on and looking out. I think John thought Paul was missing something, and Paul thought John was missing something. Their two different attitudes to the world come together and create this incredible new thing.
COWEN: With what song, in your view, did the Beatles really start as an entity? Many people would say, “Please Please Me.” I have a slightly different and surprising nomination, but what’s your view? When do you say, “This is the Beatles?”
LESLIE: You’ve made my answer sound really boring because I think “Please Please Me” is the point when they turn into a pop machine. It’s the point at which they both create something which is emotionally truthful because it’s full of jealousy and yearning. It’s got real authentic emotion in it, but it’s also this absolutely incredibly hook-y pop song. It’s got tremendous propulsive force, and I think it’s slightly underrated in the Beatles’ repertoire. Of course, it’s the second single that they release. But you tell me yours.
COWEN: It’s a strange nomination, but it’s when they’re backing Tony Sheridan. They do “Ain’t She Sweet” with John singing, which I feel he sings with total confidence, and it fully sounds like the Beatles. They did plenty of covers early on, as you well know, so we can’t rule it out on those grounds, but if “Ain’t She Sweet” were on, say, what Americans call The Beatles’ Second Album, I wouldn’t think twice about it. I wouldn’t think, “Oh, that song doesn’t belong there.”
LESLIE: Typically, it’s quite an odd song to cover. I don’t think many other bands, if any — or singers — would have considered covering that. It’s one of those strange, quite hard to see, “Why would you do that?” Yet those are the songs they often sought out. They were often making deliberately weird choices in the songs they covered.
Of course, as you allude to, nearly all the songs they played before they got famous were covers, or 90 percent of them. The songwriting started earlier, but actually performing the songs that they’d written started relatively late, really, just before they got famous.
COWEN: In terms of the recordings, which do you think are their least successful covers? Again, I have my own nominations here.
LESLIE: Oh, good question. Maybe we should talk about yours first. I’m thinking of “Mr. Moonlight,” but as everyone says that, I’m loathe to mention it. Give me yours.
COWEN: The two Chuck Berry songs. I think “Roll Over Beethoven” — the George vocal is somewhat weak. It’s not nearly as good or as interesting as Chuck’s version. Then “Rock and Roll Music,” which John does quite energetically, but again, Chuck’s is just more interesting. Chuck is the one early rock and roll figure who, in that sense, defeated them.
I think “Mr. Moonlight” is fantastic. I might nominate it as their best cover. It’s so much better than the original. It’s one of John’s best vocals. It’s done with complete conviction. The notion that it sounds ugly and the organ is weird — I think they were just doubling down on everything and that it works. It’s one of the Beatles’ songs I listen to most often, in fact.
LESLIE: Okay, I’m persuaded by that. I wouldn’t actually go that far, and I don’t often listen to it, but I do think his vocal is so bizarre that it absolutely is incredibly memorable and cuts through. I actually like “Rock and Roll Music.” Again, I think he sounds so committed to it. I think I would agree with George’s version of “Roll Over Beethoven” — it’s kind of limp. But George was lagging behind as a vocalist and as a performer, and then at the time, as a songwriter as well. But since almost everybody else in the world was, I don’t really blame him for that and, of course, he started to catch up.
COWEN: I think “Words of Love” is slightly weak. Like “Rock and Roll Music,” I think it’s done well, but it’s not better than the Buddy Holly original. Nor is “Rock and Roll Music,” I think, better than the Chuck Berry original. It doesn’t quite add some special thing in either case. Whereas Anna does; Anna’s a great cover.
LESLIE: Yes. It’s interesting because, maybe, they were less good when they were covering artists whom they really, really respected and loved. The closer they got to that, the harder it was for them to get distance on them.
It’s interesting, for instance, that they covered very little, if any — now that I think about it — Elvis Presley songs. Of course, there were huge Elvis Presley’s songs. I think they found it harder with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly — who were their formative influences — harder to take a step back and say, “Well, how can we do this differently?” Ended up producing these slightly weaker — I mean, they’re still great in my mind — but slightly weaker imitative versions.
COWEN: That’s a good point. Noam Dworman and I agree that either Paul McCartney or Wings covers of Beatles songs are almost uniformly mediocre. They’re faithful, they’re well executed, but I never want to hear them. I can’t think of a case where they improved on anything or gave it much of a new slant. Do you agree with that? Or is there a really good Macca or Wings cover of a Beatles song?
LESLIE: I think some of the performances on Wings Over America are pretty good, but I generally agree, and it leads my mind to this larger point, which is that part of the reason they were so incredibly innovative in the first place was that they were British and therefore had this distance from American music. They were not organically part of the American traditions of blues and jazz and gospel that fed into rock and roll. This music was an alien language to them.
It connected to some of the music from home, but it was, in other senses, wildly different, and that enabled them to see things about it and to perhaps be a little bit more analytical about it because they had this distance on it. To say, “Why can’t this go with that? Why can’t we mix up this style with that style? Why can’t we change this chord structure so it’s not like the normal one?” In a way that perhaps native American artists at the time were not able to do with the same facility. I think that sense of distance from it is actually what creates the innovation.
COWEN: Two of the best covers for me are “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” sung by John, and Paul doing “Long Tall Sally.” I think those are just amazing, much better than the originals [Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Little Richard].
LESLIE: I think “Please Mr. Postman” [original: the Marvelettes], as well, is one of my favorites. Again, a lot of the early ones — it’s just this sheer incredible commitment of the vocal: “Long Tall Sally,” Paul; “Please Mr. Postman” and others for John. They find the emotional heart of these songs in a way that sometimes the originals, which are a bit neater and have the edges sawn off, were not able to do, and I think that is just what makes them really so powerful.
COWEN: I have some questions about joint composition. These may be matters of opinion, but how much of “Help” do you think Paul actually wrote?
LESLIE: [laughs] Tell me why you asked the question because otherwise, we’ll be going through the track listing, and I’m trying to remember —
COWEN: Paul has claimed — I stress the word claimed — that he wrote parts of “Help” and helped John with the melody. Now, that could mean many different things, but when I hear “Help” —
LESLIE: The song as opposed to the album.
COWEN: Yes, the song. It does sound to me truly joint, the way, say, “From Me to You” is truly joint. Whereas a John song is . . . I don’t mean to sound negative, but John melodies are more monotonous in the sense that “I Am the Walrus” or parts of “In My Life” just run on and push on. “Help,” to me, has some Paul-like chord changes, but I’m not sure. What’s your view?
LESLIE: Yes, it could be. It is always very hard to tell because they were so . . . Their principal influences, apart from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and girl groups and doo-wop, and everything else — Bob Dylan — their principal influences were each other. So, they’re stealing things from each other all the time. You might be right. It might have been a Paul contribution, or it might be just John saying, “Let me run Paul software in my head now. What would he do?”
The thing that I think we do know that Paul contributed to “Help” was those backing vocals, “and now those days are gone.” The backing vocals act as this countermelody, and they do this odd thing, which is quite unusual, which is they start before the lead line. The backing vocals announced the line, and then John comes in and sings, and it creates this lovely effect, as if John’s friends are anticipating his thoughts. It creates this incredible empathy. I think that’s one of the most powerful effects of that song.
COWEN: I have another hypothesis — tell me if you agree. Now, I’m not talking here about pieced-together bits like side two of Abbey Road or “Cry Baby Cry,” but genuine joint composition. I think of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” as maybe the last genuinely joint John-Paul composition.
LESLIE: Oh, I see. So “I’ve Got a Feeling” wouldn’t count in your book because it’s two separate songs.
COWEN: It was two separate songs, and Paul said, “Let’s put these together.” And it was wonderful, but it wasn’t jointly composed.
LESLIE: Yes. I’m trying to think now, after 1967, if there are examples of those truly jointly composed songs, and I’m not sure, so you might be right. Sometimes this is exaggerated and people say, “They basically became independent forces after 1967.” People put it on different dates. I actually think they were writing together all the way through. It’s just that some of the contributions are very subtle.
Actually, you saw that in the Get Back movie. Even when Paul’s writing the lyrics to “Get Back,” the song, [John] is throwing in little ideas, and Paul is using him as a sounding board. Yes, I think those absolutely fluid — where you can’t tell where one person’s contribution starts and the other’s ends — those songs, yes, you’re probably right. They didn’t really happen after 1967.
COWEN: “Flying” is the only song, I believe, credited to all four Beatles, but who do you think actually wrote it?
LESLIE: I would imagine Paul, although there may be a collaboration between Paul and George. Because George was involved in some of the wackiest stuff around that period. He hadn’t actually been that present during the making of Sergeant Pepper, but he came back renewed from “Magical Mystery Tour” onwards. I don’t know, what’s your guess?
COWEN: I agree with your hypothesis. Parts of “Flying” remind me of “Zoo Gang” and some other weird McCartney B-sides of the early to mid ’70s, like “Lunch Box/Odd Sox.” Then there’s something else in there which seems to me more George than John, so I think we agree completely.
LESLIE: Yes, you’re right. Any time there’s some weird, really avant-garde thing to do, we should be thinking about Paul. Not always the case, of course, because there are tracks like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” where John really goes full blast, but even then, it’s —
COWEN: That’s a Paul song in my view, in a funny way. John did the composition and the vocal, but I think Paul did the arranging, the orchestration, worked with George Martin to do the production.
LESLIE: Yes. It’s an interesting example of where the composition starts and where the production starts because you might say it’s a John composition and vision and Paul executes it incredibly. I think what John wanted from the song was to create a psychedelic experience so that the song was not just about the void. It wasn’t just about a psychedelic experience. It was a psychedelic experience. He wanted to it embody it, and I think he successfully communicated that vision to Paul and the others.
Of course, then Paul is incredibly well placed to deliver on that because he’s been thinking and he’s been immersed in that world of avant-garde noise production, so he knows exactly where to take it. Yes, I see what you mean. It’s almost a Paul song, but I do think it’s John’s vision. It wouldn’t have happened without John.
COWEN: This is now pre-Yoko — did John Lennon care about John Cage in the way that Paul did? Or did he just think it was silly, like this isn’t music?
LESLIE: I don’t think he thought it was silly. I’ve never detected that. I think there’s some quote where he says, “Avant-garde is French for bullshit.” I don’t think he really believed that. I’ve seen more quotes from 1966, 1967 where he’s talking about, “Me and Paul are into this.” Or “Paul played me this. Then we started listening to Indian music.” Or “We started listening to avant-garde stuff.” No, I don’t think he got it. He wasn’t quite as into it in the way that Paul was, but I think he was open-minded and curious, and he loved to check out new noises, too.
COWEN: Was John as impressed by Brian Wilson as Paul was?
LESLIE: It’s a good question. He clearly had more of an influence on Paul, partly because they were both bass players. They both had these expansive melodic gifts, so you can see the affinity more clearly. It’s harder for me to see what the connection between Brian and John is, but also, I’ve never seen John deprecating the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson either. Of course, he was quite capable of doing so. I’m not sure. Have you got a feeling for that?
COWEN: My sense is he felt it as distant, not negative, impressed in the abstract but somehow not sad in the right way and, in some ways, too much of a false cheeriness for John who was willing to just dig in and be negative. Emotionally, I doubt it resonated with him, but that’s speculation. I don’t know.
LESLIE: Yes, that’s a really great point there because I think what John always looked for — they both did, but John perhaps more than anyone — was a visceral, emotional connection, a physical feeling that comes off the song like flame. I think in the Beach Boys, you’re right. I can imagine he listened to the Beach Boys and thought, “This is very clever and very melodic and very beautiful, but it’s not breaking my heart, or it’s not making me want to dance and so, therefore, it feels a little distant.”
Whereas Paul was more likely to be seduced by the complex and extraordinary beauty of Brian Wilson’s composition. So, I think what you’re saying makes sense.
COWEN: I view Brian Wilson as embracing sadness, whereas John uses anger to deny sadness, on average.
LESLIE: Yes. John always throws sadness together either with anger or humor or both. He didn’t deny sadness necessarily. If you think about the songs on the White Album — “Yer Blues” — he’s literally talking about being lonely and wanting to kill himself. There isn’t much more of an explicit —
COWEN: But it turns into suicide rather quickly, right?
LESLIE: Yes. It’s theatrical, but I think it’s also very heartfelt. When we sense that there’s some humor going on in a John song, we shouldn’t think, “Oh, therefore he’s just having a laugh. He doesn’t really mean it.” You should actually think the opposite. You should think, “Oh my God, if he’s joking about it, he’s really, really, really feeling it.”
COWEN: Do you think Paul’s song, “Yesterday,” is excessively sentimental?
LESLIE: No, I don’t. First of all, it’s not really sentimental in any way. I think it acquired this reputation because it does seem to come from a different tradition, perhaps a more easy-listening tradition in the first instance, although, I can hear echoes of music going far back from that in history.
But as a song about this person, this woman has left me and I have no idea why, it doesn’t then go on to describe how wonderful this girl is. Just says she’s gone and I don’t know why. It’s bleak. [laughs] The way he sings it is clipped, it’s brusque, it’s northern. It’s almost this northern folk sound to the way he sings it.
The string arrangement — he made sure that it wasn’t sentimental. He said to George Martin explicitly, “We’ve got to find a way of not making this sound saccharine.” So, George Martin asked the players not to play with vibrato or to play with very little vibrato. I think it’s very unsentimental, and in a way, it’s not that far off from “For No One,” which is an anti-sentimental song, where there’s very little hope.
COWEN: Or “Another Girl” even, right? The girls were leaving all the time in that song. It’s quite brutally about something very particular.
LESLIE: It’s interesting because I think in that year, 1965, with “Another Girl” and “I’m Looking Through You,” he is really soaking up, I think, from John. Or “The Night Before.” He’s leading into his Johness in the sense of he’s finding some anger and some hostility.
COWEN: “You Won’t See Me,” most of all.
LESLIE: “You Won’t See Me.” Whereas before, he really had two modes. He was full on rock and roll, “I Saw Her Standing There,” or this beautiful romantic reflective side, “Things We Said Today.” By 1965, mainly because of John, partly because of Dylan, who was incredibly boiling with hostility and anger, at times anyway, McCartney was really uncovering that side of himself as well and pouring that into songs. Actually, yes, you’re right. I don’t think Yesterday is that far from some of those more ostensibly negative songs.
COWEN: Do you ever, in Paul, hear the influence of Dylan, and if so, where?
LESLIE: Yes, I think you can hear it in those songs, like “I’m Looking Through You.” Just the willingness to put his insecurities and his jealousy and almost spitefulness into a song, which, of course, Dylan was just fantastically willing to do, to put a more complex character into a song. I think you could see even earlier in “I’ll Follow the Sun,” that sense of just keep on keeping on, just a sense of a troubadour with a guitar who’s just going to keep playing and will never get too attached to anybody. I think maybe he gets a little bit of Dylan into his repertoire there.
I think you see quite a lot of Dylan. It’s most often talked about in terms of Dylan’s influence on John, but I think Paul was the first to get into Dylan and introduce Dylan to the others.
COWEN: Do you hear any Dylan in “Hey Jude”?
LESLIE: I don’t.
COWEN: Just making the song long, right? This is the era Blonde on Blonde is coming.
LESLIE: Ohh, I see that point.
COWEN: Something about the cascading —
LESLIE: “Desolation Row.”
COWEN: — extension. Yes.
LESLIE: I do think that cascading extension — it’s very different from “Desolation Row” or those long songs in that it’s not one long song, but neither is it one song welded onto another because in the first part of the song, he’s foreshadowing it when he says, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, yeah. Hey, Jude.” He’s giving you a little hint of what’s to come. Part of what makes that song such an incredible achievement is, we’re moving into another chapter, but we’re taking what was planted in the first chapter with us so that it actually feels integrated even as it takes off like a rocket.
COWEN: What’s the Indian influence on “Hey Jude”?
LESLIE: I don’t know. What is the Indian influence on “Hey Jude”? I might have written about that and completely forgotten it.
COWEN: There’s something in your book, and you could express it —
LESLIE: You tell me.
COWEN: — better than I could, but again, the way the vocals develop reminds me of some parts of South Indian Carnatic music. Paul always had more interest in Indian music than he let on. You hear this in the guitar solo on “Taxman,” which, of course, is Paul, not George, and the Alap.
LESLIE: Yes, I agree. You can hear Paul taking things from Indian music. You can hear it in “I Want to Tell You.” He often contributed Indian-flavored things to George’s songs: “Taxman,” “I Want to Tell You.” He does some wonderful vocal melismas there. “Hey Jude” — maybe. Just the fluidity of the melody might be Indian-influenced. I don’t know. There may be other examples in songs that are quite subtle.
This is not John or Paul, but I think you can hear Indian music in songs like “Here Comes the Sun,” George’s song. “Here Comes the Sun” — it’s almost like he’d digested and absorbed the influence by that time, and had returned to Western music, but with a subtle . . . Those rhythms are quite . . . those “da-da-da, da-da-da” and the fluidity of the melodic line. I’m really fascinated by how the Indian influences worked themselves into Beatles’ music in non-obvious ways as well as the more overt ways.
COWEN: Or an obvious way is the song, “Cosmically Conscious,” which, I’m sure you know, is written in 1968, though it doesn’t come out until, what? The mid ’90s on Paul’s Off the Ground album. That’s a wonderful song. Do you think it would have been better as a Beatles’ song?
LESLIE: You’ve got me there. I actually didn’t know that song. Your Paul nerdery has exceeded mine.
COWEN: My Paul nerdery is hard to beat.
LESLIE: No surprise to me.
COWEN: It’s a great song. It’s online. “Cosmically Conscious.”
LESLIE: You hear quite a lot of the Indian influence in his Fireman albums as well, from the ’90s. It obviously stayed with him at quite a deep level. He wasn’t doing that just to signal, “I’m hip” anymore. This is way after that. I think you’re right. It became a part of his musical soul.
COWEN: The 1968 Beatles version is called “Child of Nature,” written by John. It later becomes “Jealous Guy” on John’s Imagine album. Do you think it would have been better as a Beatles’ song?
LESLIE: I think everything would be better as a Beatles’ song because I think that when they played together, there was just this magic thing that happened. I think there’s just no question that with Ringo, George, and Paul, it would’ve sounded better. I’m really glad he turned it into “Jealous Guy.” “Child of Nature” is just a really terrible song. It obviously has this pretty melody, but it’s so awkwardly gawkish and sentimental.
“Jealous Guy” is just John at his best in that he was just able to tell the truth in a way that’s very simple. Sometimes, he can write these incredibly surreal, baroque, complicated word pictures, like “I Am the Walrus.” Other times, he could just say, “I’m just a jealous guy” and make the words fit the melody in such a perfect way that it goes straight to your heart. He always bypasses the music altogether. So, “Jealous Guy” is one of his greatest solo songs.
COWEN: This is a very important question, and I think we maybe disagree on this. If I think of “Junk” written by Paul in ’68, but of course, it appears on the McCartney album in what, 1970? George’s “Isn’t It a Pity,” which Paul kept off Beatles albums — I think they’re better on the solo albums. I actually think it was efficient that the Beatles split up when they did. I’m glad they did. I didn’t think that as a kid, but I feel we got more first-quality output and that they would’ve been getting in each other’s way, say, in the ’70 through ’74, ’75 period. Do you disagree?
LESLIE: No, I don’t.
COWEN: All Things Must Pass is a great album, but we never would’ve had it if George was rationed to two cuts per whatever.
LESLIE: That is doubtless true. I think the better version, better alternative history might have been George does All Things Must Pass, John does Imagine, and Paul does Ram, and then the next year, they do a Beatles album. Then the year after that, they do their solo projects, and they come back and do a Beatles album. They would be going back and forth, and they did discuss something like that very briefly. You see it in the Get Back documentary.
I’m kind of glad they didn’t. I think part of the eternal power and resonance of the Beatles’ story is that they are seven years and out. There’s this incredible narrative tightness to what happens. They get famous, they change the world, they change music, and then they split at the top of their game. I can’t think of many other groups, if any, who split up after recording one of the best albums. Abbey Road is the last album they record, right?
It’s not like they’ve just declined in form, and they’re thinking, “Well, we’re not that good anymore. We’ve got to split up.” Which is what most groups do. They’re making this really, the first album of the ’70s, and then they split up. They split up after “The End,” at the end of a medley. I think the god of narrative just said, “This is the way it shall be.”
I’m very glad that they didn’t then dribble on, as you say, reforming and forming, getting back together, maybe getting another member in, maybe someone leaves. All that narrative junk that most bands go through — they didn’t do that. They just exploded, and then they flamed out.
COWEN: There’s this free rider problem, which they already had toward the end, that if you’re getting back together again, you save your best songs for your solo album. Maybe George was doing a bit of that.
LESLIE: Yes, I think that’s right. All Things Must Pass — he had that at the sessions, and you see him rehearsing it with the others during Get Back, and it’s sometimes said John and Paul should have realized how great that song was, “Isn’t It a Pity.” I actually think it was George thinking, “No, I’m going to keep that one for my solo album.” So, you’re right. There would’ve been this divided loyalty for all of them, naturally. It’s a great point.
COWEN: Is there a great unreleased Beatles track or not?
LESLIE: Unreleased now? No.
COWEN: Unreleased during their tenure. All the demos have come out, but is there one where you hear it and you think, “My goodness, they should have put that one on one of the albums?” I don’t have a strong candidate. I think my lead would be, “What’s the New Mary Jane,” that if you had given Paul his way with it over the course of a week, he might have turned it into something great, even though it’s a John song. But I don’t have a clear nomination. Do you?
LESLIE: I like “Come and Get It.” I don’t think there’s a truly great song that should have been released. Some of the songs that — just to refer to our previous bit about that — ended up in solo albums, like “Maybe I’m Amazed.” Not “Maybe I’m Amazed,” but “Backseat of My Car” were floating around and maybe they could have been on one of the final albums, but —
COWEN: “[Getting] Better” is a pure Paul song, I think. Just Paul and Linda deeply in love, and John and George would get in the way.
LESLIE: Yes. That incredible sense of defiance — it really becomes about the breakup in a sense. I don’t really think so. I think it goes to, one of the extraordinary things about them is that they had incredible taste, and they were very good at judging their own work. If you listen to the demos that get released and the offcuts, you very rarely think, “That song should have been in an album.” As you do with Dylan, for instance. You often think, “Well, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ obviously should have been on an album.”
You don’t really get that with the Beatles, and you also never think, “Oh, that earlier take should have been the album cut,” or you very rarely think that. They pretty much had a perfect record of choosing the best cut and the best songs for each album.
COWEN: How good is “Free as a Bird”?
LESLIE: I quite like it. All those post-Beatles songs — there’s a poignancy to them, and I like George’s playing, and I like Paul’s middle eight, actually, on that song. Is it a song that I really need to listen to? Not really. Do you like it?
COWEN: I like it. One of my hypotheses is that if you had had a Beatles reunion, it would’ve sounded — that is a Beatles reunion in a sense — a lot like “Free as a Bird,” which is Paul completely in charge. The others contribute bits. Paul might even, in terms of vocals, subordinate himself to the others, but it would be fairly artificial, as is “Now and Then,” which I also like, but it doesn’t thrill me. I don’t sit down and think I need to hear “Now and Then.” Maybe I feel that now and then, but I think that is a template for the Beatles reunion — Paul being the boss and pretending he’s being subordinate.
LESLIE: I agree, and I think this points us to one of the fundamental truths about the Beatles, which I talk about in the book, which is, the music was really rooted in the personal chemistry between them. It wasn’t just that they had these talents and abilities, and then they bring the talents and abilities together, and they collaborate, and they make something really good. It was spending time together and knowing each other intimately that created this extraordinary music.
This is why the model of them going apart and then coming back together, getting into a studio and leaving and never seeing each other again for a year, would’ve been very unlikely to work. They needed to be in this intense hothouse atmosphere where they’re present, particularly John and Paul. When John and Paul were not in physical proximity to each other, they just found it much harder to have a creative connection. The creativity and the personal relationship are inextricable for those two.
COWEN: Do you agree with the common view that in 1969, something very bad and damaging happens between John and Paul, and John becomes so upset or hurt by Paul? Do you think that’s true? If so, what was the reason?
LESLIE: I don’t think there is a thing, really. I don’t think Paul hurt John in any kind of concrete way. John talks about being wounded, but nobody’s quite sure what he means by that, even Yoko. When Yoko was interviewed by Philip Norman — I’m not sure if it’s the ’80s or ’90s, she was like, “John used to talk about how Paul had hurt him more than anyone else in the world, but I was never sure what he was talking about. I couldn’t work it out.”
I think there was a pivotal moment. I really think that India was the turning point, and the aftermath of India was the point at which something inside John snapped. John was always on the verge of snapping because he had this incredibly volatile personality. His childhood was just wild, so difficult and unstable. So, he was plagued by insecurities and all sorts of personality problems. He goes into India feeling very close to Paul, very close to the others. He comes out of it quite bitter and angry.
There’s an element of a wildness to him and a malignancy that wasn’t as prominent before and certainly hadn’t been for a few years. It had actually been relatively calm couple of years previously. Something happens around then, but I think it happened inside John’s head. I don’t think there was a concrete thing that happened. I think it was just the way he was feeling, and particularly the way he was feeling about his relationship with Paul. He started to feel, “I’m never going to be as close to Paul as I would like to be.”
I think he had this vision of them as completely wrapped up in a personal and creative relationship in which he could be blissfully happy. I think during India, for whatever reason, perhaps because he was just spending a lot of time meditating and actually by himself thinking. Then Paul goes home, and he’s bereft because he spends the last few weeks by himself. I think that tips him over into a personal crisis, and out of that comes “Blues” and “I’m So Tired,” some of those miserable songs, which afterwards he said, “I really meant those songs.”
COWEN: “Sexy Sadie” too.
LESLIE: “Sexy Sadie.” He starts taking a lot more drugs. He gets drunk a lot, splits up with Cynthia in a horrible way, gets together with Yoko. So, I think that is the turning point.
COWEN: You mentioned what good taste the Beatles had, and I agree with that. Why is it they were not better judges of talent at Apple Records? Other than Badfinger, it seems pretty weak to me. And Badfinger’s best song was written by Paul.
LESLIE: [laughs] There’s James Taylor, Billy Preston, Mary Hopkins. I agree they’re not heavyweights, but were they turning away great talents? They would’ve had loads of applicants, but I don’t know if there was a good filtering process, because there was no process whatsoever at Apple. In a way, that might have been the problem. There was nobody being the stage one filter, so they had a lot of randomness in the process.
COWEN: If Paul was so upset about the Phil Spector arrangement of “The Long and Winding Road” with all the strings, why did he play, more or less, the same arrangement in concert for so many years?
LESLIE: I agree. It’s a pretty good string arrangement. You’re right, he plays it with taking the best melodic phrase from that string arrangement from Phil Spector. I think he was upset at Spector just more generally for having the arrogance to come in and change the Beatles’ music in any way without Paul’s permission. Paul hated anybody who was going to mess around with the Beatles and his music without his say so. I understand why he was angry, but I think you’re right. I think in that case, Spector did a good job.
COWEN: What was Paul like as a collaborator with Denny Laine in Wings?
LESLIE: It’s a difficult relationship. Denny Laine was a good singer, decent guitarist, but he obviously was not a talent anywhere on the same scale as Paul or as John or indeed of George. Of course, Paul was an ex-Beatle, there was always this inbuilt imbalance, but he did stick with him all the way through the ’70s until the very early 1980s, so it was an enduring musical collaboration, if not an equal one.
There was also this question of the money. Denny was being paid by Paul rather than them both getting royalties. Although Paul did co-write “Mull of Kintyre” with him. I don’t know how much of “Mull of Kintyre” was contributed by Denny, but that might have been Paul letting Denny in as it was.
COWEN: “No Words” they co-wrote on Band on the Run. I think I can hear which is the Denny part and which is the Paul part. The Paul part just makes the song become magical. The Denny part is good, but I wonder how that was for Denny.
LESLIE: To say, “Look, here’s my song.” Then Paul takes it and just takes it to another level. I agree. I do think the result is really beautiful and a really underrated song from Paul’s post-Beatles career.
COWEN: What was John like as a collaborator with Harry Nilsson?
LESLIE: He was very professional and workmanlike, which is slightly surprising, but in a sense, not surprising because he’d grown up as a recording artist in the Abbey Road Studio where everything ran like clockwork. Harry Nilsson said he was always in the studio in the morning then, saying, “Right, let’s get to work.” They did work, but then in the afternoon or the evening, they would go crazy and go on drinking bouts and take drugs. I think he was a pretty efficient and professional producer. I’m not sure they produced great work together.
COWEN: What was Paul like collaborating with his brother, Mike McGear? People have forgotten about that album somehow, but it’s quite interesting. I don’t know that it’s good. Paul is deferring too much. I think he should have just taken over, but he does, I think, only in the one song called “All My Loving,” which sounds quite like Paul, and the title itself tells you something. [laughs]
LESLIE: Exactly. I think it sounds much more of its time than anything the Beatles did. That’s probably because, as you say, Paul was not really pushing it and perhaps was being a little bit careful not to be the dominant voice in the room with people who he didn’t know very well. Perhaps he was eager not to be the big guy in front of his brother. I don’t know, I think your answer is as good as any.
COWEN: What do you think is the most underrated Paul album? Paul or Wings or any combination.
LESLIE: Ooh. I think maybe Venus and Mars, I really like. I’m trying to think which ones are underrated. A lot of them are underrated. Give me your answer.
COWEN: I would say Red Rose Speedway. Then, I know this is not an album, but YouTube cuts of Wings playing live with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar, I think are generally better than Wings Over America, which is quite good for a live album. But to see Jimmy and Paul on YouTube — those are just phenomenal performances. Songs like “Magneto and Titanium Man” quite come to life on YouTube live, whereas it’s only pretty good on Venus and Mars, I think. Or “Letting Go” or “Call Me Back Again” — they just become phenomenal blues cuts on YouTube.
LESLIE: Yes. I think the very underrated ones — because very obscure ones — are the Fireman albums, including Rushes, which is this almost totally instrumental album that he records in the wake of Linda’s death. It is very poignant, and the few words and fragments of recordings from life that you do hear are very moving when you know the context. It’s typically Paul in that. I think it’s one of his most personal and raw albums, and he says very little in it. It’s kind of hidden away, and in fact it’s under another name altogether.
I think that’s the fascinating thing about Paul as an artist. If we’re thinking about him in comparison to John, it’s particularly fascinating that Paul is emotionally complex, but with a complexity hidden inside brilliantly simple, powerful pop songs a lot of the time. I’m not talking about the Fireman, now; that is a more avant-garde example. Just something like “Penny Lane.” It seems like this bright breezy pop song, but then you go to “Strawberry Fields,” and it’s obviously radical and weird and odd.
There are layers of complexity to Paul’s songs that are not obvious to the naked eye. They reward a kind of, as you would put it, Straussian reading. A song like “Oh! Darling,” which appears to be a love song — I think it’s partly about him splitting up with John as I write about that in the book, but he overloads it with emotion.
This is something he does in a song now and again. He’ll write a simple pop song, and then he’ll turn up the emotion somehow, the way he sings in a way that distorts the song and puts it on and takes it into this strange place, so there is this screaming vocal in “Oh! Darling.” I hear in it a lot of anger. I don’t just hear love and sadness and loss. I hear anger in it or a subcurrent of violence, actually. I think a feminist reading of that song would be that Paul is exposing the possessiveness, and sometimes the violent possessiveness, that underlies some of these male rock-and-roll songs about “don’t you leave me, baby.”
COWEN: It’s his version of John’s “Run for Your Life.”
LESLIE: Exactly. [laughs]
COWEN: Hardly anyone knows that. What’s the most underrated John album?
LESLIE: I think Walls and Bridges is really pretty good. With the exception of Imagine and the Plastic Ono Band, I’m not a huge fan of his subsequent albums, but I do think Walls and Bridges and Mind Games are pretty good.
COWEN: I would say Mind Games.
LESLIE: I don’t have strong feelings about them. You would say Mind Games — why?
COWEN: There’s a lot of songs on it, like “Meat City” or “I Know” that seem forgotten, but they’re very good. I think the production is systematically weak, but the songs are excellent. If he had brought Paul in, it would’ve been an incredible album, maybe better than Imagine. I don’t feel all of Imagine has worn that well.
LESLIE: I think one of the problems is that — I don’t know if you agree with me on this — I think John lost his voice much sooner than Paul lost the top level of his voice, not unsurprisingly because he’d been screaming in songs and in therapy so much. He had been shredding his vocal chords. He’d obviously been smoking a lot, he’d been taking drugs, and so on.
I think quite quickly, from the early ’70s onwards, his voice is thinner and, to me, not nearly as powerful. On the Rock ’n’ Roll album that he makes in 1973 — whatever it is — I think part of the reason it’s not very good is that his voice is just not there anymore. It’s no longer this incredible instrument that it was through the ’60s into the very early ’70s.
COWEN: There’s not enough diversity of sound on that album. I feel it was great he did two albums with Phil Spector, but he should have moved on and looked for someone else, and that it kept on sounding the same too much. When you do that when you’re doing covers and your voice is somewhat subpar, a lot of things went wrong there.
LESLIE: Yes, I agree.
COWEN: I like John’s contributions to Pussy Cats. You can debate who did what on Pussy Cats, but “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — I think of them as much John songs as Harry songs. That’s debatable, but they’re two of the highlights of his solo career. Harry never did anything like those on his own on.
LESLIE: There were little glimpses of John’s brilliance throughout the recordings he made in the ’70s, but overall, I’m just struck by how much he missed that really annoying guy telling him to try this or do that. Or “How about this?” Or “Come on, John, let’s go to work.” And George did too, of course.
They spent the last couple of years of the Beatles having a bit of a moan about Paul, but without Paul, they wouldn’t have made some of the incredible music they made at the end of the ’60s. And through the ’70s, they very quickly lose momentum while Paul just tunnels on, not always brilliantly — in fact, his solo and Wings records are erratic — but my God, he’s productive. He just keeps going.
COWEN: Now you’ve studied this one artistic collaboration in great, great detail. What do you feel you’ve learned about artistic collaboration in general? How do you now look at other artistic collaborations through a different lens?
LESLIE: There’s so much to say about that. I’m going to narrow the lens a little bit and say I think it’s really interesting that there are very few male romantic but platonic relationships that are very creative. I think this is a particular type of relationship that you see recurring a few times throughout history, and it often makes a big difference. There’s a big leap forward to some creative or intellectual revolution that happens.
I think it’s distinctive to this relationship where they’re not lovers, they’re not just mates, and they’re not homosexual, but they are two men who have very, very intense feelings for each other, and that feeds into the creativity. I was thinking about a couple of examples recently. One is Wordsworth and Coleridge. In some ways, it mirrors John and Paul.
They’re a couple of years apart. Coleridge is a bit younger. They’ve got very different personalities. Coleridge is flamboyant and voluble. He talks a lot, he’s wild, he takes drugs. Wordsworth is a little bit more distant and a little bit cooler, a little bit more methodical. But they turn each other on. They spend a lot of time thinking and writing poetry together and really birth the Romantic poetry movement together.
Then the other example I was thinking about — the best 20th-century analogy for John and Paul, I think, is Kahneman and Tversky. If you read Michael Lewis’s book, The Undoing Project, as I have, the similarities are just too strong to ignore. Here, it’s Tversky who’s this wild font of insight and speech. Kahneman is a little bit calmer, more reflective, but they’re completely in love with each other.
Kahneman said to Michael Lewis, “Well, I’ve been in love and all, but with Amos, I was just rapt. I was completely compelled by him. I was lost.” They just spent hours and hours together, just wanted to be with each other all the time. Kahneman’s wife said, “This is much more intense than a marriage.” Of course, when something is really intense like that, it’s going to explode.
In all these cases, the partnership splinters, and sparks, and falls apart at some point. Then there’s this great aftermath of sadness. It’s inevitable because there are really two ends to a relationship. You can have a sustainable, steady marriage-type relationship where you love each other in this wonderful, loving, calm way, or you can have this wildly creative, impulsive, dramatic, and volatile relationship, but that can’t last forever.
COWEN: One thing that struck me is just how few examples there are. Another one that occurs to me is Picasso and Braque. Obviously, that doesn’t last. You have a lot of examples where the people do quite different things, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stravinsky with both Balanchine and Diaghilev. Those work, but they’re not competing against each other at all. They’re just working together. I think of Jagger-Richards as ultimately a business relationship, where they’re quite happy to give up being creative just to make a lot of money, and it becomes not interesting for 50 years.
LESLIE: Exactly. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think Jagger and Richards is much more like a marriage versus a love affair. I think they love each other, but they’re not wildly compelled by each other. I’m not sure they ever were. They always thought, “Yes, this is the guy I want to make music with. He’s obviously great, and our talents fit together. Let’s get married.” It was nothing like this intense, jealousy-ridden, tempestuous, conflicted, hot, John-and-Paul relationship.
I think there’re other examples like Picasso and Braque. I don’t think they were like John and Paul either. They were just partnerships who came together, got on with each other, but turned each other on creatively and then spun apart, and that was it. I doubt that Picasso gave Braque much of a thought after they stopped working together, and probably vice versa, whereas John and Paul’s relationship was much deeper. I think that’s important because, actually, I think the scale of the achievement of what they did together was rooted in that incredibly rich and deep relationship. It wasn’t just a byproduct or a coincidence.
COWEN: It’s striking to me that what to me is the very closest example comes from the same place and broadly the same period, and that’s Monty Python, which is truly collaborative. They compete with each other — whose skit gets to be done. They do TV; they do movies. It has a brilliant peak. At some point, it collapses. Members have quite different skills, but they’re truly working together. That’s the other British Beatles, I think.
LESLIE: There’s that wonderful link between them, as well, via George Harrison, who becomes friends with them and funds The Life of Brian. I would buy that. Of course, it reminds me of this other aspect of the Beatles, which we haven’t touched on. It’s another thing that’s so unique about them is that they were a comedy group as well. Can you think of any other groups where laughter is so important, where humor is so important?
Again, that’s primarily John and Paul. They were all funny, right? George could be very dryly funny, but that sense of antic, overflowing, childlike glee and humor that runs all the way through the Beatles is John and Paul. It’s not true of any other group. The link between music and comedy is just so interesting.
COWEN: Before my last question, let me just plug your book again, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I loved it. It’s one of those books — I started it, and I didn’t really get up till I finished it. Just read it straight through.
LESLIE: That’s great to hear.
COWEN: Final question. What will you do next?
LESLIE: I am going to spend the spring and summer talking about John and Paul. I’m going to love every minute of it. It is just wonderful to hang out with John and Paul and the Beatles, and a great thing to talk about when there’s lots of other darker stuff going on in the world. I’m going to keep writing my newsletter, The Ruffian, my Substack, and I’m going to think about what to write next, and I have no idea. All suggestions welcome.
COWEN: Ian Leslie, thank you very much.
LESLIE: Thank you, Tyler.