The Beatles' brilliant friendship
John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the lipstick camp. But if Ziggy was from Mars (magical realism with a dash of science fiction) and the Beatles were from Liverpool (trippy social realism) then of the Fab Four, my heart-throb was Ringo. Screeeeam! His wit, deadpan expression and how unbothered he always seemed at the height of the Beatles’ fame made him all the more alluring. When I discovered he joined the band after a summer job drumming at Butlin’s, I loved him even more.
As it happens, George Harrison might be my favourite songwriter out of these four blazing talents – “Something” is a truly uncanny love song. It’s hard to convey a mood that is onside with ambivalence and certainty at the same time. And when I cook spaghetti to “My Sweet Lord”, I appreciate its yearning to see and know something unknowable. Harrison was a Hare Krishna devotee. An older friend once told me that in the Sixties, after chowing down lots of psychedelic drugs, there was a split between those who delivered themselves to spirituality and those who dragged themselves to psychoanalysis.
But Ringo and George are not the subjects of Ian Leslie’s empathetic and enjoyable literary equivalent of a biopic, or perhaps psycho-pic, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Leslie has devoted his considerable writing talent to focus on Lennon and McCartney. As the blurb tells us in somewhat overfamiliar language:
Source: newstatesman.com/Deborah Levy
