Beatles News
Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” takes a detailed look — 426 pages — at how John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked together from their meeting as teenagers until John’s death.
Had McCartney not decided at age 15 to go hear Lennon’s band playing in a Liverpool suburb, the world would have been denied the multitude of Beatle songs that brightened a generation and brought escalating musical innovation to rock music.
As Leslie affirms in the book, Lennon and McCartney early on developed a personal and creative chemistry that allowed them to elevate each other’s work to the timeless song classics still heard around the world.
And into that relationship dives Leslie, analyzing the mountain of articles and books written about the Beatles and interpreting messages the two men were sending to each other in their solo songs, particularly after the band’s break-up when both were writing and performing as solo acts.
Leslie focuses on exploring the often-tortured relationship between the introverted, sometimes jealous and frequently depressed Lennon and the more outgoing, driven and business-like McCartney.
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. Leslie includes a quote from Lennon, when asked if he ever had sex with a man, answers “not yet.” But no other evidence follows that Lennon and McCartney were more than good friends who loved each other as brothers.
Leslie doesn’t pursue what might have blossomed musically had McCartney connected with a Lennon-like collaborator after the Beatle founder’s passing. What songs might McCartney and Brian Wilson might have written, for example? Leslie so thoroughly dissects the relationship between Lennon and McCartney, though, that it is difficult to imagine another creative equivalent partner for either man.
Source: avpress.com/JEFF ROWE Associated Press
In 1972, the FBI tapped John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s phone at the request of Richard Nixon, who worried Lennon might undermine his reelection bid. The paranoid president couldn’t have anticipated that the couple’s son would be thrilled to hear the captured conversations.
“Growing up without my father, most of my experience of him has been through videos and film and music,” Sean Ono Lennon says. “So I always feel like I’m gaining extra time with him. It was really great fun to hear the audio calls. It’s nice because it’s so candid and unfiltered.”
Those phone calls − some amusing, others goosebump-inducing − are at the center of the new documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” (exclusively in IMAX theaters Friday, in theaters everywhere April 18), which culminates in a benefit concert that would be Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles show.
John Lennon (left) and Yoko Ono making music in New York in the early '70s, when they became involved with radical activism. "My parents ultimately felt they were in danger," Sean Lennon says. "The people they were hanging out with were pushing for violence, which they were absolutely against."
Sean Lennon − who has produced the music for a Record Store Day EP and a box set to mark Lennon’s 85th birthday on Oct. 9 − describes it as “an unmanicured window into their lives during a very tumultuous but also very creative time period.”
By the early ‘70s, “my parents had fused into a superorganism. Everything they did, they did together; all the songs they were writing were together. It was a team of two,” he says. “This film represents the reality of that moment in time very faithfully and accurately.”
“One to One,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, follows John and Yoko as they align with Jerry Rubin and other leaders of the radicalized left. Plans are hatched for the couple to head the all-star Free the People tour, with a final stop at the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, the two peaceniks grow uncomfortable with the potential for violence and call the whole thing off.
Source: usatoday.com
Kevin Macdonald’s immersive documentary follows the couple from their heady first days in New York to their galvanizing concert at Madison Square Garden in 1972.
That John Lennon contained multitudes and mysteries was clear to anyone who listened to him when he was in the Beatles and after he discovered himself anew with Yoko Ono, who united with him mind, body and soul. They first met in 1966, kept in touch and finally shared a long night that ended with their making love at dawn. “It was very beautiful,” Lennon later said. They were still together in 1980 when he was fatally shot in New York. He was only 40. In the years since his death, Ono — who turned 92 in February and has retreated from public view — has helped keep him vividly present through her art, music and activism.
Lennon and sometimes Ono are exhilaratingly present in “One to One: John & Yoko,” a documentary flooded with music and feeling that revisits a narrow if eventful period in the couple’s life. Directed by Kevin Macdonald and heroically edited by Sam Rice-Edwards (who’s also the co-director), the movie focuses on the early 1970s when Lennon and Ono were living in a modest apartment in the West Village amid clutter, clouds of smoke (cigarette and otherwise) and a hardworking television. “I just like TV,” an offscreen Lennon says in the documentary. “Whatever it is,” he adds, “that’s the image of ourselves that we’re portraying.”
The image of Lennon and Ono in “One to One” is of an appealing, loving, creatively — and politically — fired-up couple who have happily lost and found themselves in the ferment of New York. By the time they landed in the city in 1971, Lennon and Ono were married, and the Beatles were no more. (The group made it legal in 1974.) When the couple met in 1966 it had been at one of her gallery shows. There, Lennon climbed a ladder featured in one of Ono’s artworks to read a single word that she had scribbled on the ceiling: “Yes.” Perhaps it was prophetic: They were married to other people, but soon said yes to each other, leading to a lot of ugliness directed at Ono, who was wrongly blamed for the Beatles’ breakup.
Source: nytimes.com/Manohla Dargis
The Beatles' break up is a legendary moment in music history, but fans of the Fab Four think they've only just worked out some of the reasons Paul McCartney quit the group on this day in 1970
2nd July 1964: The Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison (1943 - 2001), Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, pictured on their arrival in London following a tour of Australia. Fans of The Beatles are only just working out the reasons they think Paul McCartney left the band.
Fans of The Beatles are convinced they've worked out why Sir Paul McCartney left the band 55 years ago today [April 10].
The Fab Four broke up for good in April 1970, with the band never playing together again after this point. McCartney, who said he was no longer working with the group on this day in 1970 sparked a media storm ahead of the release of his debut solo album.
His self-titled release featured hit track 'Maybe I'm Amazed' but was overlooked at the time due to the reaction to his departure from The Beatles.
McCartney, now 82, would later go on record and confirm the band had more or less ended before his statement, with John Lennon informing McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison that he intended to leave the group.
Source: Ewan Gleadow/themirror.com
In Beatles lore, no person is as divisive or controversial as Yoko Ono, the lover and eventual bride of John Lennon, who arrived on the scene as the band was facing its toughest hardships. It was a time of deep loss, psychological questioning and bitter in-fighting over leadership and business that would ultimately end in the band’s split.
But was Ono to blame for the breakup of the Beatles? The Beatles were already 'breaking up' before Ono came around
Regardless of public record in the intervening decades since the group went their separate ways, many fans still lay the blame at Ono’s feet. Addressing the rumor directly in 2012, Paul McCartney told British interviewer David Frost that Ono "certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was breaking up."
“There is not a Beatle fan out there that doesn’t have strong feelings toward her, either hating on her or thinking she and John had the greatest love story ever,” says Robert Rodriguez, author of Revolver: How The Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll, and host of the podcast Something About The Beatles.
Ono entered the world of the Beatles in 1966. The 33-year-old conceptual artist had been living in New York but was now in London and first met Lennon, then 26, when he previewed an exhibition by Ono at the Indica Gallery in November 1966. They would not officially become a couple until 1968 with their marriage to follow in March 1969.
Source: biography.com
In March 1967, while recording the Sgt. Pepper track "Getting Better," John Lennon inadvertently took LSD after mistaking it for an amphetamine. Paul McCartney decided to take LSD alongside Lennon for the first time, leading to an intense bonding experience.
In his book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, author Ian Leslie suggests that such moments of vulnerability and support strengthened Lennon and McCartney's artistic synergy and personal connection
John Lennon and Paul McCartney changed the world with the 162 songs they wrote for the Beatles, but few demonstrate the creative and emotional complexities of their relationship quite like “Getting Better,” from the band’s 1967 opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Speaking to PEOPLE 50 years after writing it, McCartney would cite the track as emblematic of their contrasting philosophical dispositions — with himself handling the bright and buoyant “It’s getting better all the time” chorus while Lennon offered the tart counterpoint: “It can’t get no worse.”
In John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, author Ian Leslie details their union with perceptive insights bolstered by extensive research. The book highlights not only how “Getting Better” illustrates Lennon and McCartney’s individual personalities, but also how the recording session became an unexpected bonding experience of the psychedelic variety.
As with many songs from this era, the initial idea came from McCartney. While strolling in the park on an early spring day in March 1967, he recalled a favorite phrase of part-time Beatles’ drummer Jimmie Nicol, who subbed in for a few dates on the 1964 world tour while Ringo Starr recovered from tonsillitis. When interviewers asked how he was coping with the whirlwind role, Nicol would invariably reply with a hopeful “It’s getting better!” Nearly three years later, the line bubbled into McCartney’s consciousness, appealing to his innate sense of optimism.
Source: people.com/Jordan Runtagh
When I Want to Hold Your Hand topped the U.S. charts, Paul McCartney and John Lennon felt the pressure to write another hit song.
The Beatles had already won the hearts of fans in the U.K. and Europe, but soaring to the number one spot on the American charts in February 1964 took their fame to even greater heights. The band's song I Want To Hold Your Hand climbed swiftly to the number one spot in America just days before they landed in New York for their debut U.S. performance.
Dominating the top spot for seven weeks, the song triggered Beatlemania across the States. Amid this frenzy, and while touring in Paris, news of their chart-topping success reached The Beatles, leaving Paul to head straight to their hotel piano to write their next hit.
Paul ended up writing Can't Buy Me Love. Discussing the song, Paul said, "Can't Buy Me Love is my attempt to write a bluesy mode."
He further explained, "The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won't buy me what I really want. It was a very hooky song. Ella Fitzgerald later did a version of it which I was very honored by."
While John openly acknowledged the song was mostly Paul's, he claimed to have contributed to the chorus. Recounting in a 1980 interview, John commented, "That's Paul's completely. Maybe I had something to do with the chorus, but I don't know. I always considered it his song."
Source: themirror.com/Dan Haygarth
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were each other’s favorite audience. That was plainly clear as the besotted Beatles bantered, bickered and obsessed over the 23 years they were friends and rivals.
Ian Leslie’s new biography “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” (Celadon, 436 pp., out now) unpacks their intense and complicated relationship from their first meeting in 1957 to Lennon’s murder in 1980.
Along the way, there’s psychoanalysis (Leslie specializes in writing about human psychology, communication and creativity) and the occasional hair-curling discovery.
Nothing here is entirely new: Leslie relies on previously published interviews and conducted just one himself for the book, with “Let It Be” director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. But Leslie does an extraordinary job of providing context for familiar anecdotes, and there are many that will feel surprising.
Among the biggest revelations:
Paul McCartney planned to pursue a solo career if The Beatles never hit it big. The complex relationship between Beatles songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney is the focus of the new book "John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs."
When the Fab Four signed their contract with manager Brian Epstein in 1961, Paul requested a clause allowing Epstein to split up the artists “so that they shall perform as separate individual performers.” Epstein’s assistant, Alistair Taylor, recalled Paul saying he would go solo if things didn’t work out with the band.
Source: usatoday.com
The Beatles biopic is officially happening, which means it's time to brush up on all there is to know about the Fab Four.
Actually, make that biopics—there are four of them: one for Paul McCartney (Paul Mescal), one for Ringo Starr (Barry Keoghan), one for George Harrison (Joseph Quinn), and one for John Lennon (Harris Dickinson). And naturally fan-casting has already started for the giant cast of characters in each of these men's lives. Specifically, their wives and girlfriends.
If you aren't up-to-date on who The Beatles were dating in the 60s due to reasons like not being born yet, let's start with a deep dive on Paul's famous relationships with the likes of Jane Asher and Linda Eastman.
Paul and Dot met at Casbah Club in 1959 and immediately hit it off. As in, they dated for two-and-a-half years and even got engaged. But since their relationship was largely pre mega-fame, not much is known about Dot and there aren't readily available pictures of her and Paul together. In fact, Beatles biographer Bob Spitz told The Globe and Mail, "She was very reluctant at first to talk. This takes her from being a very private person to a very public person. This was a story she had kept to herself for nearly 40 years. It took a lot of time to convince her talk to me. She told me her story very hesitantly, in a halting way. In the manner she told it, I knew it was absolutely accurate."
Source: cosmopolitan.com/Mehera Bonner
Music icon George Harrison never understood Paul McCartney's 'fruity' Abbey Road song.
By 1969, the cracks that had formed between The Beatles during the recording of The White Album and Let It Be had turned into craters and they were on the brink of breaking up. However, they wanted to squeeze out one more hit album, Abbey Road.
Harrison had already quit the band once in January 1969, during the recording of Let It Be, due to rising tension between him and McCartney. He was also fed up with constantly being pushed to the side along with his music and eventually began hating all the tracks McCartney put forth.
Reflecting on his time in The Beatles during a 1977 interview with Crawdaddy, Harrison said: "Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs. I mean, my god, Maxwell's Silver Hammer was so fruity. After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head... But Paul's really writing for a 14-year-old audience now anyhow. I missed his last tour, unfortunately."
Whether or not McCartney's songs were good or not, Harrison had grown sick of working on them instead of his own. An over-arching tension began for Harrison during the recording of The White Album. George Harrison didn't like one of Paul McCartney's Abbey Road songs.
Source: themirror.com/Hannah Furnell
