John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to and themes of death, loss, and mental health.

John & Paul traces the evolution of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship over time to capture the beauty and complexity of creative partnerships. While Lennon and McCartney’s entanglement is an elemental part of the 1960s and 1970s zeitgeist, Ian Leslie seeks to revise myths about their dynamic in his biography. Instead of simply casting them as the removed pop stars responsible for propelling a cultural revolution, he presents them as distinct individuals whose uncanny connection offers insight into human intimacy:

This is also a love story. John and Paul were more than just friends or collaborators in the sense we normally understand those terms. Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender, and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy. This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood (3).

Throughout the text, Leslie seeks to correct these misunderstandings. He does so by presenting all the messy and raw facets of their relationship (from friendship to songwriting, from attachment to frustration) alongside the more tender facets of their history. By incorporating these seemingly dichotomous elements of their relationship, Leslie captures the distinct nature of Lennon and McCartney’s dynamic—one that can’t be distilled into an easily digestible news headline as it has been since their public emergence.