{"id":109544,"date":"2025-08-31T09:58:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T09:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/109544\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T09:58:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T09:58:13","slug":"its-all-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/109544\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s All Too Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs<\/a> by Ian Leslie, 432 pages, Faber & Faber (March 2025)<\/p>\n

For a four-piece rock \u2018n\u2019 roll outfit that formed in provincial England in 1960 and disbanded just ten years later, the Beatles have had a remarkable afterlife. Their records and performances have been repackaged innumerable times, most recently in Peter Jackson\u2019s 2021 miniseries Get Back<\/a> and Disney\u2019s 2024 film<\/a> about the band\u2019s first American tour. They have been the subject of countless documentaries and multiple dramatised films, including Backbeat<\/a>, Nowhere Boy<\/a>, Midas Man<\/a>, Yesterday<\/a>, and a planned tetralogy of biopics scheduled for 2028. Their songs have been adapted into a Cirque de Soleil show and an edition of the Rock Band video game. And their likenesses have been retailed on a veritable shopping mall of clothes, posters, cards, and collectibles, as well as on stamps issued by the UK\u2019s Royal Mail. It\u2019s now possible to say that the Beatles have been almost literally done to death, since two of the group suffered murderous attacks by deranged fans (John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980, and George Harrison was recovering from a 1999 knife assault when he succumbed to cancer in 2001).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The foregoing litany of products doesn\u2019t even include the vast library of published works about the Beatles, a trove now so voluminous that even books about the books have been written. Beatles scholarship, complete with assigned reading lists and competing critical schools, is a real thing. The latest entry in this ever-expanding catalogue is Ian Leslie\u2019s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which analyses the relationship between the band\u2019s chief composers through key Beatles and post-Beatles tracks like \u201cPlease Please Me,\u201d \u201cEleanor Rigby,\u201d \u201cI Am the Walrus,\u201d \u201cHow Do You Sleep,\u201d \u201cLet Me Roll It,\u201d and enough other titles to fill an awesome triple album. Leslie has a good ear for music, and offers fresh, often moving assessments of anthems like \u201cHey Jude\u201d: \u201cWhat started so modestly, one human addressing another, culminates in this massed glory,\u201d he writes. <\/p>\n

Yet there is increasingly a sense, in John & Paul and elsewhere, that the Beatles phenomenon is being mined for more meaning than the people at its centre ever intended to convey. Of course, plenty of other subjects\u2014from World War II and the Ming Dynasty to Ludwig van Beethoven and Alexander the Great\u2014continue to be re-evaluated for contemporary readerships long after they\u2019ve passed into history. And if any entertainment act merits ongoing study despite being formally inactive for over five decades, it\u2019s John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Next to them, even political leaders from the period, like British Prime Minister Harold Wilson or Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, seem less influential.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem is that books like John & Paul blur the line between biography and fandom. Drawing almost entirely on published secondary sources\u2014previous interviews, press coverage, insider gossip, and hours of recorded songs and performances\u2014Leslie\u2019s book is as much the armchair interpretation of a devoted Beatlemaniac as it is a project of serious psychosocial research. This is an inevitable hazard of covering professional entertainers, whose public output is openly cross-referenced with their private lives, and whose careers are by definition meant to be publicised\u2014and no one\u2019s careers were more publicised than those of the Beatles. <\/p>\n

As a result, despite Leslie\u2019s sensitivity towards Lennon and McCartney as individuals, John & Paul sometimes reads like historiography, as the author gathers well-known and obscure nuggets of information about the Beatles narrative and then selects the quotations and anecdotes he finds most compelling. In various passages, he acknowledges that what he\u2019s describing is already \u201cinfamous\u201d or has been \u201cfamously\u201d described before. It\u2019s a fun ride for the hardcore Beatles community, who\u2019ll appreciate the inclusion of details they will no doubt recognise from other texts. But whether or not this particular perspective will find a place in the canon of Beatles literature is less assured.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Peter Jackson\u2019s \u2018Get Back\u2019\u2014A Review<\/p>\n

The recording sessions appear harmonious, and although they only have five songs that they are confident enough to play on a cold rooftop in January, the gig above their Apple office\u2014the laziest possible location\u2014goes without a hitch.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the Beatles\u2019 breakup, Lennon was reflexively portrayed as the quartet\u2019s tortured social and artistic conscience, with McCartney relegated to little more than a lightweight pop balladeer. This image was further embellished by Lennon\u2019s 1980 martyrdom and the appearance of Philip Norman\u2019s 1981 biography Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation<\/a>, a well-written but biased account that credited Lennon with most of the band\u2019s originality and largely dismissed McCartney as a pretentious arriviste. But in 1994, Ian MacDonald\u2019s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles\u2019 Records and the Sixties<\/a> went deep inside the musical nuts and bolts of the foursome\u2019s product and concluded that it was really McCartney who was the genius innovator, whereas Lennon\u2019s more limited creative skills were disguised by his outsized personality. <\/p>\n

Ian Leslie reinforces MacDonald\u2019s view today, suggesting that Lennon was, if anything, intimidated by McCartney\u2019s superior talent, and conceded his vulnerability in songs like \u201cIn My Life,\u201d \u201cYer Blues,\u201d and his solo track \u201cJealous Guy.\u201d Like MacDonald, John & Paul also emphasises Lennon\u2019s heavy LSD ingestion in the mid-1960s, which produced psychedelic classics like \u201cTomorrow Never Knows\u201d and \u201cA Day In the Life,\u201d but at some cost to the musician\u2019s psychic health and discipline. \u201cWhen John wasn\u2019t working, he was tripping,\u201d Leslie tells us. \u201cLeft to drift aimlessly, he might lose himself altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n

The newest spin Leslie puts on the Lennon-McCartney legend is in his scattered references to John\u2019s supposed physical attraction to Paul. Lennon was known to have an adventurous appetite for a lot of things, and there has long been speculation about a brief intimacy he may have shared with the Beatles\u2019 gay manager Brian Epstein (naturally, this speculation has been developed into a film, 1991\u2019s The Hours and Times<\/a>). Yet an LGBT Beatles angle\u2014based on pretty thin evidence scavenged from reams of interview transcripts and personal dirt on two male rock stars who took full advantage of their popularity with women\u2014may just be a trend-chasing claim for the band\u2019s permanent \u201crelevance,\u201d in the same way that fashionable dramatists stage all-black or modern-dress updates of Shakespeare. No doubt, future authors will argue that Beatles were actually pioneers of climate activism, the manosphere, or polyamory. In 2025, John & Paul may stand as the definitive Beatle exegesis\u2014until someone else comes along to posit an entirely different take on the same familiar story.<\/p>\n

Continued bids to reinvent the Beatles for yet another generation reflect how much the band has already been recycled critically, politically, and above all technologically. First issued on vinyl records made with analogue equipment, then broadcast on radio and performed in concert and on network television, the music and shows can now be found streaming on Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube, after passing through every available media format since 1962. The 2023 release \u201cNow and Then\u201d used Artificial Intelligence to mix Lennon\u2019s and Harrison\u2019s voices from the 1970s and 1990s with McCartney\u2019s and Ringo Starr\u2019s latter-day input to generate a final \u201cofficial\u201d Beatles single, about which the New York Times\u2019 Peter Baker commented<\/a>, \u201cThis path has less to do with software producing new work and more to do with tech advances facilitating the ongoing monetisation of existing intellectual property.\u201d John & Paul, on the other hand, is only a book, but it also capitalises on the enduring multi-platform marketability of all things Beatle.<\/p>\n

Two dangers arise here. The first is that the band\u2019s original works will become subsumed into a vast franchise of special editions, sequels, remasters, reissues, and re-imaginings, wherein the initial artefacts become indistinguishable from the advertisements for them. Just as it\u2019s hard to recall that Star Wars was once an entertaining 1977 film rather than a corporate trademark, it\u2019s easy to forget that the Beatles were once a functioning ensemble who wrote and recorded a lot of catchy songs between 1962 and 1970, rather than global icons endlessly adaptable into any form of profitable spinoff.<\/p>\n

The second risk is that books like John & Paul perpetuate the very self-seriousness the Beatles themselves so often, and so appealingly, disavowed (\u201cThis guy knows more about my life than I do,\u201d George Harrison once quipped about a biographer). As early as 1967, John Lennon was fed up with people finding significance in the Beatles\u2019 lives and music that he knew wasn\u2019t there. \u201cIt\u2019s nice when people like it, but when they start \u2018appreciating\u2019 it, getting great deep things out of it, making a thing of it, then it\u2019s a lot of shit,\u201d he told British journalist Hunter Davies. \u201cWe hated all the shit they wrote and talked about Beethoven and ballet, and now it\u2019s happening to us. None of it is important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I say all this as a confirmed Beatle buff. I was a kid when Lennon was killed, and the impact of his assassination changed me forever. The first concert I ever attended was the tribute act Beatlemania; I\u2019ve walked across Abbey Road and made a pilgrimage to Liverpool; as an amateur guitarist, I have a Shea Stadium\u2019s worth of Beatle songs in my repertoire; my bookshelves sag with Beatle bios and my music collection is crammed with Beatles LPs, cassettes, and CDs; I once saw an ex-Beatle play a small gig and got his signed photograph afterwards (Pete Best, but still…). Like hundreds of millions of other people, I\u2019ve held the Beatles to be indelible, invaluable fonts of inspiration and joy. For the posthumous industry that keeps putting old Beatle wine in new Beatle bottles, typified by peripheral musings like Ian Leslie\u2019s John & Paul, I certainly have diminishing reserves of patience. But for the Beatles\u2019 essential and eternal music, to quote \u201cAcross the Universe,\u201d I have only limitless undying love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A review of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie, 432 pages, Faber &…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-109544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}