The Beatles shook the world to its core in the 1960s and, to this day, new generations continue to fall in love with their songs and their story. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the dynamic between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Few other musical partnerships have been rooted in such a deep, intense, and complicated personal relationship.
John and Paul’s relationship was defined by its complexity: compulsive, tender and tempestuous; full of longing, riven by jealousy. Like the band, their relationship was always in motion, never in equilibrium for long. John & Paul traces its twists and turns and reveals how these shifts manifested themselves in the music.
Leslie, a British journalist and author, has a deep affection for, and a penetrating understanding of, these complex characters and their unprecedented friendship ... It is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey.
Leslie’s comprehensive assembly of lyrics, memos and actions of the two men strays into gossip sometimes in his effort to define their relationship. The book labors to find where the Lennon-McCartney relationship fell in the spectrum of best buds to bromance.
[This book] celebrates the convoluted, beautiful and tragic nature of a songwriting partnership that still reverberates across the universe ... Mr. Leslie is bracingly forensic in his reading of both the early days of the Lennon-McCartney partnership and the road to its dissolution.
