Across the universe – John and Paul are in each other’s songs forever

The world’s love affair with the Beatles began, arguably, with the release in October 1962 of the group’s first single ‘Love Me Do’, full-blown Beatlemania following hard on its Cuban heels. Will we still need them, will we still feed them, when they’re 64? The answer appears to be a resounding and remunerative yes. Beatlemania is for life, not just for Christmas.

Beatles books increasingly obtain to the condition of poetry, in that more people want to write them than read them. Yet still they keep appearing in bookshops. And every time a new volume about the group is published – like all those of sound mind, I have loved their music, films and minutiae since childhood – I ask myself: what is different about this one? Will it be in the style or the substance? What’s the angle? And then I read it anyway.

Ian Leslie’s angle is that John loved Paul and Paul loved John. In this he is consciously returning to a cornerstone of the Beatles myth laid in the 1960s: Lennon and McCartney were the genius duo at the heart of the Fab Four, i.e. the Talented Two plus the Other Two. The Beatles and those around them colluded in this version, the sole dissenting voice being George Harrison’s, whose contribution is duly marginalised here – the ‘unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of focusing on John and Paul’.

So what’s new, according to Leslie? ‘The gaps in the literature are perhaps now less about what happened than why,’ he writes, ‘and it was here that I felt I might contribute something.’ He carried out just one interview for John & Paul, preferring to immerse himself in Mark Lewisohn, Hunter Davies, Ian MacDonald et al.