In this episode, Ian Leslie discusses the history of the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the truth we all share in their story. Ian explores how two young men from Liverpool created something together than neither could have made alone, not just music, but a shared consciousness that changed culture forever. John and Paul’s story isn’t just about music. It’s about how we all navigate loss, love, and connection.
Key Takeaways:
- [00:01:44] John and Paul’s connection
- [00:06:12] Lennon and McCartney dynamics.
- [00:08:17] Paul McCartney’s complex persona.
- [00:12:16] Vocal parts and shared consciousness.
- [00:16:10] John and Paul’s musical chemistry.
- [00:20:26] Intense male friendships in music.
- [00:22:27] Relationship dynamics between John and Paul.
- [00:28:11] Communication and miscommunication in relationships.
- [00:39:23] Lennon and McCartney’s complex relationship.
- [00:45:37] McCartney’s reaction to Lennon’s death.
- [00:51:19] McCartney’s emotional process after loss.
Ian Leslie is a writer and author of acclaimed books on human behaviour. Ian’s first career was in advertising, as a creative strategist for some of the world’s biggest brands, at ad agencies in London and New York. He now writes about psychology, culture, technology and business for the New Statesman, the Economist, the Guardian and the Financial Times. He co-hosted the podcast series Polarised, on the way we do politics today, and created and and presented the BBC radio comedy series Before They Were Famous. He advises CEOs and CMOs on communication and workplace culture. Ian is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His new book is John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
Connect with Ian Leslie: Website | Instagram | X | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Ian Leslie, check out these other episodes:
A Journey of Music and Friendship with Colin Gawel & Joe Oestreich
Music as Medicine: How Rhythm and Melody Transform Wellness with Daniel Levitin
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Episode Transcript:
Ian Leslie:
Right from that very young age, when they first start getting into it as teenagers, they pour their feelings into pop songs. And they were very intense young men. They were of a generation where you didn’t talk about your feelings that much. You didn’t go around kind of gushing, right? Let’s put it that way. And you certainly didn’t go to therapy. That wasn’t a thing.
Chirs Forbes: Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer: At different points in my life, I’ve been anywhere from just loving the Beatles to being unhealthily obsessed with them. As a recovering heroin addict at 24, I bought into the whole John Lennon is troubled genius with Paul McCartney, sort of his shallow sidekick narrative. But what if those stories we tell ourselves about people are just that, stories? What if the truth is always more complex, more human, and ultimately more beautiful? Today I’m talking with Ian Leslie about his wonderful book, John and Paul, a love story in songs. We’ll explore how two young men from Liverpool created something together that neither could have made alone. Not just music, but a shared consciousness that changed culture forever. John and Paul’s story Ian’t just about music. It’s about how we all navigate loss, love, and connection. So join me as we have a conversation about the Beatles that’s really about all of us. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Ian. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Very nice to be here. I am really excited to have you on. We’re discussing your latest book, which is called John and Paul, a love story and songs, and it’s about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And I have been at different points in my life, anywhere from just loving the Beatles to unhealthily obsessed with the Beatles. And so this book I really wanted to read and I’ve really, really enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorites that I’ve read in a while. It’s a great subject matter. You’re a great writer. And I’m going to be tasked with making this an interview that appeals to people who don’t even love the Beatles. So we’ll see how we do with that. But before we start, we’ll do the parable like we always do. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with his grandchildren. He says, in life, There are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Ian Leslie: Well, in the work that I do, it’s fascinating for a couple of reasons, or it makes me think about a couple of different strands of my work. My last couple of books have been about human behavior and human psychology. So I wrote a book about curiosity and how that works. And the book I wrote after that, my last book, is about conflict and disagreement. And I’m really interested in the dynamics of disagreement and how we have better more productive disagreements and more productive conflicts. So immediately these two wolves which are kind of opposed to each other and which kind of struggle for domination of a person’s soul at any one time rings bells with me. And then the other reason is of course because i’m writing this book i have been writing this book about two very strong personalities who are very very close but also often in conflict with each other it also makes me think about how sometimes we externalize our internal struggles so that conflict that we have within us between our drive to be kind and empathetic and our drive for jealousy and fear to pull people towards us and to push them away. You could see it playing out in the drama of these two guys. But I think you often see it dramatized in groups and externalized within people. And I think that’s a really interesting dynamic.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah, the other thing I was thinking about as I thought about this question and about the book is in many ways the parable is exactly that. It’s a story that loosely maps on to reality and I would use the term loosely there. And I was thinking about how people like to divide things into this and that. And one of the points you make throughout the book is we’ve done that with Lennon and McCartney. We’ve made those guys very binary in a public consciousness kind of way. You know, John Lennon was the brilliant tortured artist and Paul McCartney was the cute commercial success who was very light. And while through one lens some of those things are true, the book does a really good job of pointing out that they are both. far more multifaceted than that easy character of each other. And it really struck me because I’m someone who had bought into that narrative at one point in my life about the Beatles.
Ian Leslie: Yes, you’re absolutely right. That was a sort of central concern of my book was to, if you like, get over this culture war that we’ve invented around John Lennon and Paul McCartney where you’re meant to be for one or for the other. One of them is either the great genius of the band and the other one is is a lesser being of some kind. As you say, more often than not, it’s been presented as John Lennon being the great creative genius and Paul being his accomplished but shallow sidekick. That’s clearly completely wrong. Well, I think so anyway. But I didn’t want to write a book which overturned that and just switched the binary around. And just said, look, you know, Paul McCartney was a real genius. John was just this angry, difficult guy who happened to be on Paul’s coattails. Of course, neither of the binary interpretations are true. And the most wonderful and most complex and interesting and fascinating and beautiful thing about this relationship was that they both supported and effectively created each other. Through their intimacy, through their friendship, you know, John is as much a product of Paul as Paul is as much a product of John. So actually trying to break it down into John versus Paul, it just doesn’t make any sense.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah, you won’t know this about me, but listeners do. I was a heroin addict at 24, so I was very much drawn into John Lennon and that whole narrative and McCartney was sort of the, you know, shallow. So I had bought all that hook, line, and sinker at one point in my life. I’ve reversed a lot since then and your book really helped me also. I knew John Lennon really well, but I did not know Paul McCartney as well. And I think you do a great job of giving him more depth than at least the public narrative usually has.
Ian Leslie: The truth about people who are as talented and complicated as these two is always much more interesting than the myth. So the myth of Paul McCartney, that he’s just this, at best he’s this kind of like slightly idiot savant kind of figure, just like has these amazing melodic talents, but is otherwise rather kind of shallow and dull and twee and sentimental and all these other things that get attributed to him. The truth is much more interesting. He is both tougher, maybe a little meaner at times than that suggests, but he’s also more thoughtful, more generous, more loving. And he’s also just this kind of relentless torrent of creativity. Lennon, we know that he’s difficult and he’s often tortured and self-torturing. We know that he could be very mean and sort of amusingly sardonic and witty. Perhaps we are less familiar with how uncertain he was, how vulnerable he was, and how sentimental he could be at times, and how warm and loving and empathetic he could be. So I really kind of enjoyed painting these much more fine-drawn portraits of these guys in the book.
Eric Zimmer: And I think that the next thing that happens in the book, at least for me, that I really enjoyed was let’s first move away from seeing them or anyone as sort of these characters of a person. right? That’s, I think, good. We can apply that in lots of areas of our lives. The second was how clearly these two influenced each other. And as you said, they were the product of each other. And you even say at a certain point, they almost share the same consciousness. The two of them come together into this thing. And I think, again, sort of applying that to us in general, it shows how in all of our relationships, the thing that is created between us is different than each of the people individually. And that we’re actually different people to different people, meaning John and Paul were a certain way with John and Paul and a certain thing got created there. But John and Ringo might have created a different thing.
Ian Leslie: That’s absolutely right. And I think the extraordinary thing about the John, well, one of the many extraordinary things about John and Paul’s relationship is that, let me put the literal truth about them, which is that their voices blended beautifully. It’s an extraordinary fact that you get these two melodic geniuses living about a mile and a half from each other. Both turn out to be great songwriters, right, once they start working together. That’s one thing. But the fact that they also happen to be two of the greatest singers of all time, I mean, people kind of underrate that. That needn’t have happened, right? One or neither of them could have been a mediocre singer or a terrible singer. No, they’re both great songwriters, great musicians, and they’re great singers. And Their voices blend in a perfect manner. So they sound really good together. They sound just similar enough to blend and just different enough so that the blend is much richer than they’re just sort of singing double tracking themselves. And so you end up with just these incredible metaphors. I don’t know even if they’re metaphors, because it’s just really part of the same thing, which is when they’re singing harmonies, just the two of them, you get this third voice, which is the two of them together, which Ian’t something that exists with just one and couldn’t be. And this third voice, which is even bigger and more beautiful than either of them alone, is part of the reason that they take over the world, because they sound so good together. And of course, that was true of them as a whole, that the sum was much, much greater than the parts. This is true of all four, but just because those two were so close and because their talents were so immense, they’re kind of at the center of the group. That’s why I wanted to write about them.
Eric Zimmer: Right. And regards to that vocal, you tell a story how early on their producer George Martin had them switch vocal parts. I don’t remember who it was, but they found out that John sang better lower in the range, Paul sang higher in the range. And so they switched vocal parts. And you say the effect was two men who share the same eye, 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 internalize the voices of those we know and love. I just love that.
Ian Leslie: I think it was a very unusual thing for the group, for anyone to do, really. The Beatles were very unusual to begin with because there were almost no other groups like them at the time for several different reasons, but one of them was that almost all groups had a leader. There weren’t many groups full stop, but when you did have groups, they tended to be Johnny and the Beatles. There would be Cliff Richard and the Shadows. There would be X and the Ys. So there was always a lead. People always thought there needed to be a focal point because you have pop stars like Elvis. If you’re going to have a group, it’s got to be the singer plus the guys around them. you And the Beatles, right from the beginning, always refused that model. John and Paul were always equals. Neither of them wanted to step out and say, no, actually, it’s me, because they saw themselves as a pair. And when they were first recording songs, they start to sing these love songs. And usually, in a love song, you sing, I love you, I’m this, love me do, right? You’re singing in the first person. I am this, you are there, I love you. And to have a song like Love Me Do, and then they do it with others as well, where two different singers are singing the song, not harmonizing, but they will take different lines in the song. George Marshall was the first to make them do this in Love Me Do, and then they kind of develop it from there. So you take different lines in the same song, and you’re both singing I. So that means you’re the same person inside the song. Do you see what I mean? So inside the song, the consciousness of these two individuals merge, and they’re different expressions of the same consciousness. I think that’s a really beautiful thing. Once they discover this trick, almost by accident, the reason they do it, just to quickly say, is that in Love Me Do, Just as they come to the end of the chorus, please love me do, there’s a mouth organ solo, right? And John had been singing the song. And when he says love me do, he’s got a straight into the mouth organ solo. And it just sounded really too abrupt. I mean, it didn’t work. So George Martin said to them when he first heard them play it, wouldn’t it make sense if Paul comes in and says love me do at that point? And they go, yeah, OK. And I think the reason they hadn’t done that until that point, because it makes sense, is that they maybe thought it was a bit odd to have one person singing Love Me Do earlier on in the song and then another person come in. And from that point on they realised that actually this is a really interesting trick. They could kind of swap the I, in inverted commas, between them in a song and actually it sounds even cooler and there’s something amazing about it. And you hear it in, say, A Hard Day’s Night, right? So John sings that hard-driving verse. So the verse is like, you know, it’s been a hard day’s night and I’ve been working like a dog. And then Paul comes in on that middle A and says, when I’m home. So it’s the same guy in the song. It’s the same narrator. But you’re hearing that same narrative consciousness expressed by these two similar but different voices. And that is kind of a thrilling effect for anybody that’s listening to it. Obviously, nobody’s going to express it like the way I did it, just intuitively. But you hear how special and strange that is, I think, when you hear A Hard Day’s Night. I really think it only works because John and Paul are so close in every way. And that’s what gives it its power.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah, it is sort of thrilling. One of the best parts of the book, it’s in the title, you’re exploring John and Paul through songs. And so, you know, every chapter is a song. And I have to say, I think I said this to you in the email I sent you partway through the book where I was like, oh, I’m I’m loving this is listening to their music is joyful enough for me. But then reading some of the ways that you describe it as I’m listening to it was just overwhelming emotionally for me. There’s something about the way you’re describing certain parts of their songs. You talk about how in She Loves You, how it goes from the relative minor and then through two majors. And of course, everybody’s like, yeah, OK, if you don’t know what music that is. But you talk about how it’s sort of dizzying and disorienting, like tumbling down a hill without being sure when you’ve hit the bottom. I really enjoyed that part of the book a lot and unfortunately this is just me and you talking. We’re not really hearing their music but adding that into it makes all the difference in the world.
Ian Leslie: That’s great to hear and I want to say a couple of things about that. One is why I wrote it like that and the other is how I went about it. So, as you know, but in case you’re listening, I’d like a quick summary of how the book works. I basically tell the story of their friendship, chronologically, from when they meet as teenagers in 1957, through the Beatles, and then beyond, right? So we take it right until 1980, when John is killed. And so I wanted to kind of make it accessible both to Beatles fans who know this story well, but are looking for a fresh version of the story. There’s millions of people out there who know a little bit about the Beatles, but don’t know much, and are maybe kind of intrigued. And I wanted to write the book for them as well. So we’ve got these kind of two audiences in mind. I tell the story in a way that feels fresh for people who know the story well, but is also accessible to everyone else. And why do I do it through songs? So each chapter in the narrative is a song that’s meaningful to both of them. And I did it that way because these two guys lived their life, especially their emotional life, in music, in songs. Right from that very young age, when they first start getting into it as teenagers, they pour their feelings into pop songs. And they were very intense, emotionally intense young men. They were of a generation where you didn’t talk about your feelings that much. It wasn’t the done thing. They were English from the north of England. It was a bit, you know, you didn’t go around kind of gushing, right? Let’s put it that way. And you certainly didn’t go to therapy. That wasn’t a thing, right? So where do they put all these incredibly intense feelings, including their feelings for each other? They pour them into the lyrics of pop songs. Of course, pop songs are full of love and loss and yearning and desire and anger sometimes, right? They’re very emotional little vessels. Somebody described them to me as an emotional panic room. You can put all your emotions into that three-minute container and they kind of stay up there. These guys learned to do this intuitively and almost compulsively from when they were teenagers. So it struck me when I was thinking about telling the story of the relationship. You cannot tell this story except through the songs because the songs say so much about what’s going on in their heads and in their hearts. Equally, you can’t understand the music without understanding the relationship between these two guys and you can’t understand the relationship without the music. Then how did I do it? It’s interesting you mentioned the major and the minor. So there is some musical analysis of the songs, but again, I’m really writing it in a way where you don’t need to know any of that in order to understand what I’m saying about the song. So I do want to make people understand or help people understand why these songs are special, why they work so powerfully on you, and to highlight the creativity and the innovation of these guys and to show you amazing things they were doing really from very early on. So I’m glad you brought that up because weaving together the narrative and music was really the central challenge of the book.
Eric Zimmer: So the book is also very much oriented, as you said, around this incredible friendship between these two guys. And friendship is something that we’ve had, you know, whole episodes on this show dedicated to friendship. This show started because my best friend Chris and I started it as something together. And so like male friendship has been really, really important to me. over the years and it’s something I think a lot about. And you’re exploring how, you know, to talk about John and Paul as just a friendship is in some ways perhaps to misunderstand it or our term that we generally glom on to friendship is insufficient to talk about how intense and how big such a thing can be, particularly we don’t talk about it in regards to men in the same way.
Ian Leslie: I think that’s absolutely right. I think we find these relationships, and they’re quite unusual, these kinds of relationships, very intense. passionate, almost romantic relationships between two men that aren’t homosexual affairs, right? So, I mean, some people speculate, did Lennon and McCartney have a sexual? I don’t think so. And I certainly don’t argue that in the book. And I think people ask the question almost because they’re confused about what this is, because this relationship And there’s a few other examples. We can talk about one or two. Doesn’t fit any of the normal boxes, right? They weren’t just normal friends, you know, two blokes, you know, having a beer down the pub. I’m sorry, guys. Paul sometimes talks about it like that. No, Paul, it was not like that. Come on, it’s a lot more intense. And they weren’t brothers. They say, oh, they were like brothers. I mean, I don’t know. It’s nothing like the relationship I have with my brother. I don’t think there were many brothers who have this kind of relationship. And neither were they competitors and rivals, because that’s the other place people go to. They’re like, oh, they must have really hated each other and that’s been incredibly competitive with each other. Well, no, not really. Not in that sense. I don’t think they wanted to do each other down, put it that way. So we could talk about the competition between them, but it wasn’t like that. So because it didn’t fit any of those boxes, We’ve misunderstood it, and I think that’s a big part of the reason it’s turned into this silly kind of, oh, John is better than Paul, Paul’s better than John kind of culture war, because it kind of blurs the boundaries between love and romance and friendship and everything else. And of course, it’s also bound up with creativity. You know, they’re creating stuff together. It wasn’t just a thing they did at work, you know. It was absolutely central to every aspect of their relationship. It’s what they found so exciting about each other. It’s what really kind of turned them on about each other, if you like. And it was this very intense and very inherently volatile relationship. And the fact that they ended up falling out towards the end of the Beatles career should not be a surprise because they were very willful, headstrong, emotionally engaged young men. And, you know, when creativity is involved, you know, that adds another level of kind of volatility.
Eric Zimmer: And money and fame and, you know, all those things add levels of volatility. Yeah. You talk about a relationship between the essayist Montaigne. He’s talking about a friendship he had with someone And he says something along the lines of, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another. And when I talk about my friend Chris, that’s how that felt when we met. It was just this… intensity of friendship that was very different than most of what I had experienced. And there’s a line also that Montaigne goes on to say, and I love this, when he was trying to sort of talk about, like, why? What was it about it? And I just think this is beautiful. He says, because it was him, because it was me. And I think that speaks to John and Paul so much too, like why was it the way it was? It’s because it was John and it was Paul and what they were to each other.
Ian Leslie: It is beautiful and it’s beautiful because it acknowledges the essential mystery at the heart of a relationship like that. You know, Montaigne was a great 16th century writer and philosopher. He was good with words, right, and he tried to define what it was because his friend died. He was heartbroken by this. He wrote this essay to try and work out what it was that made their friendship so special and so intimate and so intense and he found that he couldn’t articulate it. He kept trying to write this piece and he couldn’t quite define the essence of the relationship and he had a few goes and he kind of crossed things out and at the end he just settled on that formulation. Why did we love each other? Because it was him, because it was me. And I think it’s something beautiful and sort of humble and accepting about that. So I wanted to kind of weave that into the book because, you know, I said we find these friendships hard to categorize as a society, right? We don’t quite know what to do with them. Now imagine being in that friendship. You sound like you’re part of one of yourself. It’s hard for the people in it to understand as well because society Ian’t helping them. So it’s kind of baffling and confusing. And so that’s what that is about, I think.
Eric Zimmer: I think today’s day and age is very different. Like, I think that that intensity of friendship between men is better understood. I’m not saying it’s well understood. I’m saying it’s better understood today than it was however long ago it was I met my friend 20, 30 years ago. And let alone go back to McCartney and Lennon, right? A generation before that.
Ian Leslie: Yeah, and you see the insecurity about it and the bafflement about it in Lennon in particular. I mean, McCartney was always less insecure generally as a person. Lennon, partly because he had a very difficult upbringing, was full of insecurities. And one of the things he was insecure about was whether or not his feelings for McCartney meant that he was gay. It wasn’t just the McCartney, he was slightly kind of baffled and confused by his sexuality throughout his life. I think the evidence suggests he was predominantly heterosexual, perhaps with some homosexual feelings. Now, I think today it’s much easier to accept that and even to say that it would not be a big deal, particularly for a musician, an artist. But for Lennon, I think he was kind of tortured by it and just didn’t know what to do with it and worried at it.
Eric Zimmer: At one point, you describe as the friendship between them becomes more strained. You make a point about communication in general between people. And the point is more or less and you put a finer point on it after I’m done here. is that we form impressions of other people early in relationships and we build sort of a model of that other person and of our relationship and then time passes and those models don’t get updated in the same way as people are changing. And so we end up with trying to apply an old model of who you are or how our relationship is to a different version of you, let alone a different version of me. And that’s where we end up in a lot of communication trouble. Say more about that.
Ian Leslie: You put it very well. I’m actually drawing on research I looked at for my last book, which was about disagreement and conflict. And as part of that, I looked at how couples argue and how they handle conflicts and why they argue. And when I was writing about John and Paul, of course, a lot of that became very relevant again. because in some ways it did resemble a very kind of torrid marriage. And there was this interesting research at the show that actually couples who’ve been together for a long time, they become more empathetic in the first couple of years. In other words, they can kind of read each other’s minds. better and better and really well. And then they become oddly, counter-intuitively perhaps, sort of less intuitive in the years after that. They start to misread each other. And the underlying theory is the one you just laid out very well, which is As you’re getting to know someone, and you’re getting to know them fast and intimately, you build this incredibly sophisticated model of their mind, of how they think. And you’re able to kind of predict what they’re going to feel and what they’re going to think about something. And that often means that you don’t need to communicate very much, because you just kind of get it. Or you’re talking code, you’re talking your kind of private language. Or they just say a couple of words and actually you know the rest of the sentence, right? Which is a wonderful and incredibly impressive feat of human communication. It’s a marvelous thing. But, over time, people change, right? And they change slowly, perhaps. but each member of the couple has different experiences and has their own thoughts and their minds kind of develop still somewhat in alignment but different directions but you don’t necessarily update the model because you have this sense that oh i know this person really well i don’t need to update the model so you’re still working with this kind of five ten years into the marriage with a model you developed in the first year and it’s really Bad. Or at least it’s developed lots of faults. And a lot of arguments and difficulties and conflicts stem from us misreading each other at that point. Because I’m saying things that you’re misinterpreting and you’re saying things that I’m misinterpreting because our models are outdated. It’s like we need to upgrade the software. We’re still working with some old version of Windows. You can see this happening with John and Paul, both stages at extremes. So in that first stage, they really are extremely close. They really do communicate extremely quickly and intuitively. They just kind of have to look at each other, glance at each other and know what’s going on. So the people around them would talk about this. They’d say John and Paul just finish each other’s sentences. They had this telepathic connection. That’s often how people described it. And then they, particularly in the mid to late 60s, as they grow up, you know, they move into their mid and late 20s, they meet their partners, you know, Linda and Yoko, they’re changing, right? Which is completely natural. But the two of them are still working with this model. And that’s where the real damaging rows and damaging conflict starts to creep in, because they’re just miscommunicating. And by the end, a lot of what they’re saying is just hitting the other person in the wrong way. And it becomes very difficult. And it takes them a long time to get over that.
Eric Zimmer: Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism. that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news. You can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. You know, you talked earlier about how they didn’t know how to talk about emotion. Most people didn’t in that day and age. That it all kind of went into their songs and came through their songs. And we are all the beneficiaries of that.
Ian Leslie: Yeah, in a sense, we’re all the beneficiaries of emotional male repression. Thanks a lot for screwing us up, Second World War and everything else, and the Victorians, because these guys weren’t used to talk about their emotions. They put it into the music. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. But you read some of it now and I couldn’t help but thinking like if these guys could have just articulated a point or two of what they were feeling for each other, things might have gone very differently. Right. But that just wasn’t in either of their skill set. Right. And it didn’t work. But it doesn’t seem like it was, you know, by any stretch, irreconcilable differences. Right. It was an inability to talk about this strange thing they had between them.
Ian Leslie: Beautifully put. I think that’s exactly right. And, you know, particularly towards the end of the group and the kind of rupture in the friendship that accompanied it, they thought each other wanted different things. Paul thought that John was trying to reassert his control over the group and was kind of eager to give that to him. You see in some of the conversations that are recorded right towards the end, Paul is saying, you know, you should absolutely be the leader, you know, you should be driving things forward. Don’t let me kind of get in the way. And John, although he doesn’t say it, it’s pretty clear I think from the way he behaves and the way he acts, is not actually interested in leadership if he ever was very much. He wants Paul to acknowledge him and that he needs him emotionally, I think. And he doesn’t know how to say that. Paul doesn’t know how to give it either. And so you get this kind of fundamental miscommunication, this fundamental clash. I think, as I put it in the book, that Paul thought John wanted power, but what John wanted was love. And so, you know, they go their separate ways, effectively.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah, you make another point in the book that I think is very interesting, is that Paul seemed to be, to everyone else, the really put-together one, the driven one. He was clearly the most sort of across the board in all different ways of musical genius. Like, he could play all the instruments better than most anybody could play them. Like, he was at a slightly different level. And that the thing that John never could really understand, and maybe even the other Beatles had a hard time, was how their behavior towards Paul could make Paul feel bad. They almost thought he was impervious to that. And that’s also heartbreaking.
Ian Leslie: Yes, so the worst part of the rupture of the friendship, this is after the group have split up. They start recording solo albums and solo songs and John records this really horrible song about Paul and it’s pretty clearly about, he doesn’t say Paul in the song, but there are strong hints that it’s about Paul and it becomes clear to everyone that it is. It’s called How Do You Sleep and it is a full-on pretty mean assault on his friend or his former friend at that time. And you could interpret it different ways. But one of the questions I had about it as I was thinking about it was, how could John have done that? Why would you want to do that to anyone in public? It’s such a horrible thing to do. Had he stopped liking or loving Paul? And the other thing about it was that George Harrison played on this track and was around there when John was writing it. Ringo was around too. And I just thought, how could any of them do this to their former bandmate and their former friend? What a thing to do. And I think the reason why is that what you just said, which is they thought Paul was invulnerable. So actually, when kids are mean about their parents, it’s because they can’t imagine their parents would ever care. They can’t imagine their parents would be hurt by something like that, because their parents are the authority figures. Parents are always going to be OK. and paul played a similar role in the beatles at least in the last couple of years he was that invulnerable figure who was always gonna be okay sprint everything pick up any musical instrument and make it saying it was the most organized the most thorough the most relentless and methodical the most energetic. He was good at everything. He could play cards really well. He used to beat them all with cards. He could make furniture, things like that. He was just that guy. He was just good at everything. And so for them, I just thought, we could throw anything we want at this guy. It’s going to roll off him anyway. So why not just have some fun? And of course, it’s not true. It was really hurtful to Paul. Very hurtful. And the other things that John said about him in the press and interviews, again, some of them quite mean. Paul was really, really hurt by that. You know, he wasn’t invulnerable at all. Yeah, I think there’s just a lesson there about how sometimes you think those people who are just always going to be fine, you should be careful of them too, because they’re not always fine.
Eric Zimmer: As the book went on, as I was reading it, I had a vision of how it ends. I mean obviously I know Lennon gets assassinated in 1980, obviously we all know that’s kind of the end of a story that’s got John in it. But I had another view of it and it was how hard they fell out and that they really hated each other. And so as I was reading the book I was getting sad as I went. in anticipation of what was coming. And one of the things that I really liked about the book was that it wasn’t exactly as clear that they hated each other. They had had some degree of reproach, maybe not a ton, but there was still warmth and love in that relationship. And they expressed it to each other. And this is going to be melodramatic, right? Because it just is going to sound that way. But it healed something in me. that was so saddened by the fact that, in my mind, the story was Lenin died before they ever got to have any sort of rapprochement. And it sounds like, based on what you’re saying, is there was some of that. It’s not as bad as I thought it was.
Ian Leslie: Oh, absolutely. And you don’t have to apologize for being emotionally engaged in it, because me too, you know, that’s why I wrote the book. Yeah. And so I know exactly how you feel and where you’re coming from. And I too felt that when I kind of found out about what happened in the 70s. So, yeah, they fall out pretty badly in the early 70s, but they never stop being interested in each other, even at the worst times, right? There are relationships that end because one or both of the partners are just tired of the other one, right? They’re just bored, exhausted. Just don’t want to see this person again. Life is going to be a lot simpler when I don’t have to deal with this person anymore. And it often happens in pop groups when they split up. That’s often the reason why. That was never the case with Lennon and McCartney. They were never bored of each other. They were never cold, really, in their hearts towards each other. They were really angry at each other and very confused by the other one. and there were always feelings and they had the foresight to kind of fix the relationship to patch it up to some degree. So they meet kind of quite early on 1972 or something like that and they have dinner with their wives and they basically say let’s just stop being mean about each other in public and let’s try and be friendly again. Now, you can’t restore the closeness and the intimacy and that special chemistry that they had quickly, if you could do it at all. And they spend the rest of the decade friendly, but it’s quite a fragile relationship and they’re sort of walking on eggshells a bit. The nice thing about it is that when they talked on the phone, They really did get on, well it was just the two of them. When they met in person it was always with their families and it was just a little bit different. But there’s a really great anecdote of somebody who worked on one of Lennon’s albums in the mid to late 70s and there’d be a phone call in the studio and it was, oh it’s Paul and John would just stop the session and he’d go and talk for like a couple of hours. It was kind of annoying for the other musicians. But he said, you know, we could hear laughter, we could hear this constant stream of chatter and John was telling stories. You know, when they talked on the phone, they were still getting on really well, right? And they were also writing songs about each other. John wrote some actually very, in contrast to How Do You Sleep, some songs that John wrote were pretty clearly veiled messages of affection towards Paul.
Eric Zimmer: Let’s talk about Yoko Ono because there’s a certainly popular narrative that Yoko broke up the Beatles. I’m not going to ask your opinion on whether that’s true. I just want to read something that you wrote and then let you elaborate. And you said, it’s not that John and Paul split up because they found the loves of their lives so much as they found the loves of their lives in order to split up. explain that?
Ian Leslie: Well, this is really kind of one of the surprises for me, anyway, of looking in more depth and detail at the timeline of what happened with regard to their respective spouses, right? You know, Paul gets together with Linda and that’s it, right, until unfortunately Linda dies of cancer at the end of the 20th century. John gets together with Yoko. They have a bit more of an up-down relationship, you know, and kind of split up for 18 months and so on and get back together. But certainly she is the love of his life, really. And they’re certainly still very much together when John is killed. In typical, like, weirdly symmetrical fashion, they both meet these women at the same time, get married within two weeks of each other. you know early 1969 and it’s always been presented as oh the reason they split up is that John fell in love with Yoko and then to a lesser extent Paul fell in love with Linda and therefore they couldn’t be in the band anymore they couldn’t be with each other anymore so they left each other for these women And actually when you look at it, it’s not quite like that because Yoko had been around and John and Yoko had been friendly for quite a while, since late 1966, you know, a couple of years. And so it wasn’t this kind of great coup de foudre, as they say in France, you know, it wasn’t this great instant love affair where John was like, oh, now I’ve got to be with this woman. It’s more like he got to a point in his relationship with the Beatles and with Paul where he was like, this Ian’t working, this is almost psychologically damaging for me. I think he felt it was just too intense in a way and he needed to kind of escape. And I think he then, to Yoko effectively, said, right, Let’s go. I want to be with you now. And she was around and she was up for it. And they do. And she becomes the love of his life. But it’s almost like he chose her to be the love of his life, rather than just sort of falling for her and then saying, well, I’ve got to go now. Do you see what I mean? And similarly with Linda, Paul, again, it wasn’t a complete break from what was going on. He’d been seeing – I mean, Paul saw a lot of women all the way through the Beatles’ career. He was an extremely promiscuous guy until he suddenly became very monogamous. But there was this period in between where he was seeing Linda, he was also seeing other women, like other girlfriends that he was seeing regularly. Linda was one of them. And when John gets together with Yoko in a big way, then Paul makes his move for Linda and says, right, OK, it’s you and me now. And this is going to be exclusive. You know, he doesn’t use those words, obviously, but that’s basically the gist of it. And so again, he was reacting, he was kind of finding a way to kind of push himself away from John and towards Linda, as John was pushing himself away from Paul and choosing Yoko. Yeah, I just thought that was a really kind of fascinating dynamic. I think they’d got to the stage where they were like, we’ve got to make quite a hard break from each other. At the moment, we’re just sort of too entangled in each other and it’s not sustainable.
Eric Zimmer: So I’d like to wrap us up with the place that you both begin and kind of end the book, which is McCartney and how he reacts after he finds out that Lennon has been shot. And I’ll let you tell that however you would like.
Ian Leslie: Sure, so there’s quite a famous interview that the press do with Paul the day after John’s murder. He comes out of a building, he’s been recording all day and there’s a group of journalists, they stick microphones in his faces and turn the lights on and they say, how do you feel about John being killed? And Paul is very weirdly, matter of fact, doesn’t show any emotion. He’s chewing gum. And he says, yeah, it’s pretty bad, Ian’t it? The phrase that made headlines was, it’s a drag. It’s a drag, Ian’t it? It’s a drag, says McCartney, about death of his best friend. And it was a terrible moment for him, just from a reputation point of view, because everyone said, oh, this is just what we thought about McCartney. He’s this weirdly kind of cold, ambitious individual. And he’s just not responding to his best friend’s death in a human way. I wanted to start the book with that because the question that people were raising was whatever happened to John and Paul? We saw these guys together, they seemed to be so happy together, they did these wonderful things together. Did they hate each other at the end? Because it certainly seems like that if you see Paul’s reaction to John’s death. I leave it there and then I go back to the beginning in 1957 when they meet. When they meet, Paul’s mum is dead. She died just eight months before he met John Lennon and started making music with him. The year after they meet, John’s mother is killed, of course. So this is one of the things that bonds them together is this terrible symmetry of bereavement. They both lose their mothers. They don’t talk about it much. Another thing they don’t talk about much But my God, they know each other, felt it. And it brings them closer together and makes the relationship even more intense. Now, I wanted to come back to that moment when McCartney learns about John’s death at the end. Once we know everything we know about John and Paul, as in the book. So we know by the time the book ends that Paul was not cold and that he never really hated John. He still loved him. And so I wanted to kind of look at it in a new light and say, well, what do we know about it now? How can we understand it differently? And one thing it really kind of chimed with was the reaction that Paul had as a kid to his mother’s death, which he’s told and his brother has told. His aunt and uncle pull him aside and his brother aside, and they say, your mom’s dead. It was a big surprise to them. She’d just gone into hospital, died very quickly, and they didn’t know what happened. So your mother’s dead and Paul says, well, what are we going to do about money? And again, the anecdote is told because it’s so oddly kind of like cold. Now, Paul loved his mother so much, you know, he wrote, let it be about her. You can hear the love in his songs about her. And there’s no question how much they loved each other. So do we really think that when Paul says, you know, what are we gonna do about money, he wasn’t feeling anything inside? No, of course, he was absolutely shocked to his core, and he was trying to deal with that shock, the best way a 14-year-old kid knew how to deal with it, right? So now let’s go back again and look at what happened with Paul when he finds out about John’s death, and he says, it’s a drag, Ian’t it? Do we think that’s because Paul had no feelings about his best friend being shot? No, of course, it’s completely the opposite. He’s terrified. He’s trying to avoid this shattering psychological blow. He’s got microphones stuck in his face by people he doesn’t know shouting at him. He is just trying to shut down emotionally, get out of there, get into his car. And sure enough, Linda says, when I saw him driving up the driveway and I could tell as soon as he got out of the car, he was absolutely broken. And he just falls into Linda’s arms and is sobbing. So I wanted to kind of bracket it that way, just because I think by the end of the book, we have a much deeper and richer understanding of Paul and John, of course, and the relationship. And that was just a way of illustrating that.
Eric Zimmer: Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. oneufeed.net slash ebook. I love that as a, just a writing device in general is a good way. And also just to sort of show about how there still was a lot of love there. And you tell some other stories before that about McCartney at different points where you can see, or someone else will tell an anecdote about just how shattered he was by John’s loss and how long it stuck with him.
Ian Leslie: Yeah, I think it haunted him and he was sad about it. I think he just missed his partner and his friend. Yeah. Probably still does. I think he’s come to terms with it very slowly, but it was almost like his second self had just disappeared. Because even when they weren’t together, I think he was in dialogue with him, especially when he was making music and he said this himself. He said even now, I’ll go, well, what do you think about this, John? talking to his spirit. So, yeah, I think it’s been a long process of coming to terms with John not being there.
Eric Zimmer: Well, Ian, thank you so much. I loved the book. I think anybody who loves music will love the book and anybody who loves good writing and a lot of emotional depth in a story is going to love the book. And you and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where we’re going to change directions here. And we’re going to talk about does being left wing make you unhappy? And maybe some of your rules for life, your Occam’s razors. So listeners, if you’d like access to this post show conversation, to add free episodes, to a special episode that I record each week just for you, called Teaching Song and a Poem. You can go to oneufeed.net slash join, become part of our community, and support the show. Again, Ian, thank you so much. It’s been so fun reading your book and getting to talk with you.
Ian Leslie: Eric, thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.
Eric Zimmer: Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
