Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time
Ian Leslie, author of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, joins fellow Beatles obsessive Tyler Cowen for a song-by-song forensic tour of the John Lennon–Paul McCartney partnership — who really wrote what, why their weakest covers were of the artists they revered most, whether the 1970 split was creatively optimal, and what the pairing reveals about intense, unsustainable male creative partnerships more broadly.
Key ideas
- John’s early genius was agency, not method. John’s precociously assured early songs came from a willingness to ‘blunder’ into a song and trust the result, in contrast to Paul’s more analytical, structure-first approach — a licence Leslie traces to a specific moment: Paul’s delight, at their first meeting, that John got a song’s words wrong and made it work anyway.
- They were weakest covering the artists they loved most. The Beatles’ least successful covers (Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly) were of their most revered formative influences, where reverence left little room for reinvention; their strongest covers were of more obscure or unlikely songs where they had creative distance.
- Authorship inside ‘joint’ songs is genuinely contested, even by experts. Leslie and Cowen repeatedly trade attribution hypotheses for nominally single- or dual-credited songs (‘Help!’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Flying’) based on stylistic fingerprints rather than documentary proof, and both concede that fluid, undifferentiable joint composition effectively ends after 1967.
- The 1970 split was creatively efficient, whatever the personal cost. Both agree the breakup produced more first-quality music than a diluted extended Beatles run would have (All Things Must Pass, Imagine, Ram), and Leslie values the narrative completeness of splitting at their peak — after Abbey Road — rather than declining and reforming.
- Intensely bonded, non-romantic male creative partnerships are rare and structurally volatile. Leslie situates John and Paul in a small class of history-making pairs — Wordsworth and Coleridge, Kahneman and Tversky — whose creative power and eventual rupture spring from the same source: an intensity too consuming to sustain as a steady, low-temperature working relationship.
Content
John’s precocious songwriting
Cowen opens by pressing Leslie on how John arrived at fully formed songcraft (‘If I Fell’, ‘Please Please Me’) seemingly from nowhere, while Paul’s development looks more gradual. Leslie locates the answer in temperament rather than talent: John was less methodical and more willing to ‘blunder his way into things and see what happened’, backed by strong musical intuition from an eclectic childhood diet of rock and roll, blues, skiffle, and the Great American Songbook via his mother Julia. The formative episode is Paul’s first sight of John performing at the Woolton village fete, where Paul was struck by John confidently getting a song’s words wrong — teaching Paul, in Leslie’s reading, that American music could be reinterpreted rather than merely imitated. The two speakers also reconcile John’s reputation for laziness (visible in the Get Back footage) with his productivity: even then, John preferred to lie around and ‘go deep into the recesses of his mind’, sometimes with drugs, in a way Paul — constitutionally always driving the group into the studio — never did.
Judging the Beatles’ cover songs
Cowen and Leslie trade nominations for the Beatles’ best and worst covers, converging on a structural explanation: the group performed weakest covering the artists closest to their hearts (Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly), where reverence made reinvention harder, and strongest on more obscure or unlikely choices (‘Mr. Moonlight’, ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’, ‘Please Mr. Postman’), where they had licence to find ‘the emotional heart of these songs’ the originals sometimes lacked. Leslie extends this into a wider claim about the group’s Britishness: distance from the American blues, gospel, and rock-and-roll traditions that fed rock and roll let them treat the music as ‘an alien language’ they could recombine — asking ‘why can’t we mix up this style with that style’ — in a way native American artists of the period found harder.
Who actually wrote what
A recurring thread is forensic attribution within nominally joint or single-credited songs, argued almost entirely from stylistic inference rather than documentary record. Leslie credits Paul’s countermelody backing vocals on ‘Help!’ — which anticipate John’s lead line rather than follow it — as a rare identifiable Paul contribution to an otherwise John song. Cowen’s hypothesis that genuinely fluid joint composition, where authorship cannot be disentangled, effectively ends after 1967 (‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’ as the last example) draws Leslie’s tentative agreement; songs like ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’ are, they agree, two separately written songs stitched together rather than true co-composition. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ becomes the conversation’s clearest boundary case: John’s compositional vision — to make the song not describe but be a psychedelic experience — required Paul’s immersion in avant-garde production to execute, leading Leslie to call it ‘almost a Paul song’ built on John’s idea.
Divergent influences: Brian Wilson, Dylan, and India
The two map each Beatle’s influences with unusual precision. Brian Wilson and John Cage landed on Paul far more than on John, whom Cowen reads as finding Wilson’s melodic sophistication impressive but emotionally distant — ‘clever … but not breaking my heart’ — since John consistently sought visceral, physical emotional connection over polish; Cowen’s broader formulation, which Leslie accepts, is that Brian Wilson embraced sadness directly while John used anger to deny or channel it, so that humour in a John song (‘Yer Blues’) signals deeper, not lesser, feeling. Dylan’s influence, usually credited mainly to John, in fact reached Paul first and more directly, per Leslie — audible in ‘I’m Looking Through You’ and ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’. Indian classical music’s imprint runs wider than the overt sitar tracks: Leslie traces it through Paul’s melismatic vocal contributions to George’s songs (‘Taxman’, ‘I Want to Tell You’) and possibly the melodic fluidity of ‘Hey Jude’, and into George’s own post-Sgt. Pepper writing (‘Here Comes the Sun’). On ‘Yesterday’, Cowen and Leslie agree the song is unsentimental rather than saccharine — Paul specifically asked George Martin’s string players to avoid vibrato, and the lyric offers no consolation, only bare loss, closer in spirit to ‘For No One’ than to easy listening.
Was the 1970 split creatively optimal?
Both speakers agree the breakup was, on balance, efficient: an extended Beatles run through the early 1970s would likely have diluted rather than multiplied the strength of All Things Must Pass, Imagine, and Ram. Leslie values the narrative shape as much as the music — the Beatles are ‘seven years and out’, splitting at their creative peak with Abbey Road rather than declining and reforming, a complete arc he thinks underwrites their lasting cultural power. A ‘free rider problem’ — a member saving strongest new material for a coming solo career instead of a group nearing its end — surfaces as one mechanic behind the split, with George’s ‘Isn’t It a Pity’ (held back for All Things Must Pass) as the clearest instance. On the 1969 estrangement between John and Paul, Leslie resists identifying a single triggering wrong — even Yoko Ono, per a Philip Norman interview, could not say what Paul had done to hurt John — and instead locates the turn in the group’s trip to India, after which John, left alone when Paul returned home early, spiralled into a personal crisis audible in ‘I’m So Tired’ and ‘Sexy Sadie’.
Hidden complexity in the solo years
Surveying underrated post-Beatles work, Leslie’s central claim about Paul is that emotional complexity routinely hides inside deceptively simple, powerful pop songs: ‘Oh! Darling’ reads, in his ‘Straussian’ interpretation, as carrying real anger and a subcurrent of male possessiveness beneath its love-song surface — a mirror to John’s more overtly aggressive ‘Run for Your Life’. His nomination for Paul’s most underrated work is the largely instrumental Rushes, made under the Fireman pseudonym in the wake of Linda McCartney’s death. For John, Leslie and Cowen both point to Walls and Bridges and Mind Games as underrated relative to Imagine and Plastic Ono Band, attributing some of the decline in John’s 1970s output to vocal deterioration from screaming — in songs and in primal therapy — and heavy smoking, audible from 1973’s Rock ‘n’ Roll onward. Both agree John’s solo work missed Paul’s relentless, if erratic, productivity and his role as the one who would always say ‘come on, let’s go to work.‘
What John and Paul teach about creative partnership
Asked to generalise, Leslie identifies a rare category of intensely bonded, non-romantic male creative partnerships that recur across history and tend to produce outsized creative or intellectual leaps: Wordsworth and Coleridge (co-founders of Romantic poetry), and — his choice as the closest 20th-century analogue to John and Paul — psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose bond Kahneman himself described to Michael Lewis as more consuming than romantic love. Leslie’s structural claim is that these partnerships are unstable precisely because of their intensity: a relationship can be a steady, sustainable ‘marriage’, or a wildly compelling, impulsive love affair, but rarely both over decades — which is why they explode rather than fade, in contrast to steadier, more businesslike pairings like Jagger and Richards. Cowen’s counter-nomination, which Leslie accepts, is Monty Python — genuinely competitive and collaborative, linked to the Beatles through George Harrison’s funding of The Life of Brian — and both note that the fusion of music with comedy, an antic, childlike glee, is a distinctly John-and-Paul trait no other major rock group of the era shared.
See also
- Ian Leslie — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- John Lennon · Paul McCartney — the two subjects of the partnership
- John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs — Leslie’s book, the episode’s direct subject