All you need is love: How John Lennon and Paul McCartney's songs with The Beatles reinvented male friendships

Mint

26-07-2025

Rock critic Lester Bangs once famously called The Beatles 'the firstest with the mostest". A phrase that is patently true, even if Bangs used it ironically. The Beatles certainly were the first to a staggering number of new experiences within pop culture, not to mention re-writing or inventing new ways of composing, recording and delivering popular music.
They were also the first in other, less apparent, if equally important ways, like growing up together within an intense maelstrom of public scrutiny, falling apart in a fog of recrimination and sorrow just when divorce became a real cultural phenomenon, and charting very individualistic lives in the aftermath, while very much remaining a 'Beatle".
All this is fairly well known by now. What writer Ian Leslie's new book does is get to the heart of The Beatles—the friendship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is one of the definitive portraits of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, and thus, one of the definitive portraits of the band. While previous biographies have focused on one or the other of John and Paul—clearly taking sides—Leslie goes in search of the duo's dynamic in the music that they wrote together, and then apart in their solo years.
Reading the book, the first thing that strikes me is just how much our understanding of The Beatles has changed over the past decade or so. The myth of the band started forming almost as soon as they broke up in 1970, and the attention shifted immediately on what Lennon and McCartney would do as solo artists.
In this respect, Lennon was out of the blocks in a flash, giving a series of unforgettable interviews to the likes of Rolling Stone magazine, where he proceeded to methodically deconstruct the band's aura, and especially that of the partnership that had defined the 1960s: between him and his friend Paul. 'I don't believe in Beatles! Just believe in me," he sang in God.
No one realised at the time that they were buying a disingenuous story from a bitter lover, an anguished and angry version of the truth. As Leslie writes in the introduction, Lennon's edgy, take-no-prisoners and radical re-casting of The Beatles in general, and McCartney in particular, entranced the tastemakers of the day—young journalists, nearly all male, who's entire raison d'etre was to demolish cultural certainties. Thus did a compelling image form of radical, straight-talking rock'n'roller John, and the safe, baby-faced, straight-laced balladeer Paul. Lennon's assassination in 1980 only cemented the myth.
It's only now, when the attention has shifted to The Beatles' music, away from The Beatles as celebrities, that a clearer understanding of the band and its two principal songwriters is beginning to emerge. And that is frankly much more riveting and revealing.
Leslie understands the true underpinning of the Lennon-McCartney partnership: that of a remarkable friendship that began when they were in their teens, bonding over their shared trauma of losing their mothers, and a visceral love for rock'n'roll and other forms of Black American music. This only deepened as they lived through their most formative years together as cultural titans with a Midas touch, holding space for the other to flourish.
The story of John and Paul is an examination of male friendship so radically new for the time that it changed culture. 'It's like you and me are lovers," says Lennon, while smiling bashfully and brushing away his hair, in a scene from Peter Jackson's Get Backdocumentary of The Beatles rehearsing and recording in 1969. He says this in response to McCartney suggesting that his and Lennon's new songs (Get Back, Two of Us, Oh Darling! and Don't Let Me Down) are in conversation with each other. 'It's like, after Get Back, 'we're on our way home". So, there's a story. There's another one: Don't Let Me Down, 'Oh Darling, I'll never let you down'," McCartney says. When Lennon suggests they may be lovers, McCartney says 'Yeah," and brushes his hair, mirroring Lennon.
It is this conversation in song, which lasted from when the two met in 1958 to Lennon's death in 1980, that Leslie seizes on. And it's a fine conceit, since Lennon and McCartney are both on record saying that they prefer to communicate through their songs. 'Talking is the slowest form of communication anyway. Music is much better," Lennon once declared.
As Leslie masterfully shows through his analysis of 43 songs, no matter what Lennon and McCartney may or may not have admitted to each other, they were constantly talking to each other through their songs. Whether it is in the way they constructed harmony vocals for If I Fell, referenced their joys as hitchhiking teenagers in Two of Us, elevated the other's song through lyrical contributions as in Getting Better or We Can Work it Out, or sang as if their two distinct voices belonged to the same person as in She Loves You, Lennon and McCartney's artistic collaboration was deeply rooted in the fact that they were friends who loved, understood and cared for each other.
This bedrock of love in their partnership has always been an open secret, but in bringing it to the fore, the book shows very clearly just how The Beatles re-invented male friendships and its possibilities. Growing up in a conservative English Protestant society, where men were supposed to work hard, be tough, sexist, homophobic and suppress their feelings, each of the four strove to shed that patriarchal burden and fashion a different reality for themselves.
None more so than Lennon and McCartney, who often exhibited all the flaws of fragile masculinity, only to turn around and point out to themselves and to their fans that it was wrong, and that men can do better. 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved. Man, I was mean, but I'm changing my scene, and I'm doing the best that I can," they sing in Getting Better. They could change their scene because they had the empathy of each other to work with.
They referenced their love for black girl groups like The Supremes and The Shirelles to craft songs like She Loves You, From Me To You or Thank You Girl. In their lyrical construction and musical arrangements, Lennon and McCartney essentially chatted with each other and with their women fans, as if they were all friends together, looking out for, consoling, hyping and loving each other. No wonder the male commentators of Beatlemania were disapproving of just how 'girly" The Beatles seemed, such 'pussies", as Cassius Clay labelled them.
The Beatles are often credited with making androgyny in pop music cool, but what they really did was to show that men could be in touch with their feminine side, even to the extent of being queer coded, and that doing so was a source of strength. That men needn't be islands of self-pity and resentment, because they could always reach out to their friends, who would happily lift them up. They fumbled their way towards this realization in their personal lives, since they, as usual, were working without a blueprint.
The fact that at a very foundational level, Lennon and McCartney were in love with each other is not lost on modern fans. Indeed, do a round of the countless Beatles pages on Instagram Reels and TikTok and you will find fans shipping the two, or stanning on just how cute the two are together. The teenage girls of Beatlemania probably sensed the same thing.
And the ferocity with which Lennon lashed out at McCartney after the band's split, while McCartney suffered from serious depression and aimlessness, speaks to that love as well. When the initial pain faded and the sniping ceased, they were back to proclaiming their love for each other, this time from a distance.
Lennon felt inspired in 1980 to return to recording music after hearing McCartney singing Coming Up on the radio ('You want a love to last forever, one that will never fade away, I wanna help you with your problem, stick around, I say, coming up"). He responded with the song (Just Like) Starting Over('Why don't we take off alone, take a trip somewhere far, far away. We'll be together, all alone again, like we used to in the early days").
Although Leslie doesn't write about it, this nearly romantic conversation between John and Paul continued all the way to the song Now and Then, released as the final Beatles record in 2023. Working off a Lennon demo from the late 1970s, the other three Beatles tried to complete it during the Anthology project in the mid-1990s. But the muddiness of the demo's sound led to the song being abandoned. Until 2022 that is, when it became possible to isolate Lennon's vocals from the demo using AI.
Hearing the finished version, it's easy to see why McCartney was so obsessed with the song. In it, Lennon sings: 'Now and then, if we must start again. Well, we will know for sure that I will love you. Now and then, I miss you. Oh, now and then, I want you to be here for me, always to return to me." It's easy to imagine that Lennon is singing to McCartney, and in finishing the song, Paul is returning that love to John. McCartney repeatedly says in interviews these days that he regrets the fact that he never could say the words 'I love you" to Lennon, because, well masculinity. In Now and Then, he does so in song.