The Beatles... all for one!

The other day I popped into London for a first-time visit to a spot steeped in Beatles folklore and which still has enormous emotional resonance for fans today.

Just down from St John’s Wood tube station lies the famous Abbey Road Studios, revered for being the creative base for so many world-renowned musical recordings through the years, including Beatles records such as St Pepper’s.

And right outside the Studios is the iconic zebra crossing where John, Paul, George and Ringo were photographed walking across for the cover of their Abbey Road album - the last they ever produced (Get Back came out after the band had split but was recorded before).

That Abbey Road cover has been etched on my musical brain the moment my Dad brought the LP home one day about a week after it was released in 1969 and I started to play it to death. Ever since, it has obsessed Beatles fans all over the world both as an image and a window into the many conspiracy theories about the group, like Paul being dead because he’s strolling across the zebra in bare feet!

Crazy theories or not it was just great fun and, to be honest, quite emotional to be there on a Winter’s day and thinking about those amazing four humans walking across that road - four ordinary but incredibly extraordinary guys from Liverpool who utterly changed the sound of modern music in the 60s and whose creative legacy we are still in awe of today, over sixty years on.

The crossing has become a Beatles shrine and to prove it a whole string of people were there to feel the moment and cross the road just like the boys did back on that sunny day. A family of four stepped out in line over the black and white markings to capture their Beatles experience and when the traffic stopped, naturally, I crossed too.

Lining up on The Beatles' famous zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios

Just as Shakespeare’s words crop up time and time again on any given day - green eyed monster, break the ice, heart of gold, foregone conclusion, the world is my oyster - so Beatles songs and their lyrics, to coin a phrase, pepper so many people’s thoughts constantly today.

Their songs, played endlessly on the radio across the globe, or in most people’s record collections or streamed by the millions every day, are a musical playlist of life since the early swinging sixties. For people of my age, whatever other bands and performers you may adore, The Beatles run like a river through our lives.

For me too, the Abbey Road photo encapsulates the fundamental essence of The Beatles - that the group were what they were because of the four of them. All four are crossing the road, together. Lennon and McCartney wrote most of the songs but The Beatles were The Beatles because of John, Paul, George and Ringo as a single entity. Replace any of them and they were not the Fab Four that conquered the world and still remain the number one band ever.

Abbey Road Studios in London where The Beatles recorded so many great songs

In many ways, The Beatles were not just a musical group. They were also four unique, individual characters that formed a collective force of talent, humour and working-class sparkle which along with their songs projected them all into our homes, hearths and heads and made us love them. It is a love affair that still endures.

Yet this essence, this group singularity, is something utterly missed in a recent book I have just read exploring the songwriting relationship between Lennon and McCartney. Despite the Beatles being a four-part whole, the sum of their parts completely defining what they were, it is valid to explore the way John and Paul wrote all those great songs. All those classics rolled off together from when they were young teenagers in Liverpool, to the rocking and rolling days in Hamburg, through the Beatlemania days and then during the final years from Sgt Pepper’s to Abbey Road.

It is utterly valid to dive into what each genius brought to that unique songwriting partnership, what each supplied to their joint creative process, and then to view it all through the four-sided lens of The Beatles as a unit. After all, John and Paul wrote the hits but the whole group played them. The songs certainly developed and lived in John and Paul’s heads and were transposed onto paper or demo tape but the final result, the tunes we loved and still treasure today, from their early hits like She Loves You to Golden Slumbers on Abbey Road, were performed by all of them (with a little help from their friends!). All the boys went on to have great solo careers after the band split, John’s and George’s tragically cut off early, but while in The Beatles whoever wrote the songs they became iconic because all of them performed it.

We should not forget too that George and Ringo wrote some great Beatles numbers themselves. Interestingly, despite John and Paul’s magnificent, massive output, the groups’ most streamed song on Spotify is George’s Here Comes The Sun.

New Beatles books and other media outputs from podcasts to You Tube blogs are constantly being produced today and every one of them seeks to get a new angle on the Fab Four. Nothing wrong with that, but this latest book on Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting not only entirely misses the ‘Beatles as a four-part whole’ aspect but commits an ultimate crime. It seeks to make one of the two better than the other - and for Ian Leslie in ‘John & Paul - a love story in songs’ that one is Paul.

According to Leslie, John and Paul were certainly geniuses… but Paul was the better one. Both were creative and musical gods … but Paul had the edge. Paul was the driver, the key mover, the prime artist - in effect, the better Beatle. And by extension the best Beatle.

We all have our favorite Beatle (I assume), and mine has always been John, but in any appreciation of the group this is a mere flicker round the edges. The Beatles are John, Paul, George and Ringo - equals.

Leslie develops his Paul’s best obsession slowly - the early years of The Beatles has he and John head to head in a room somewhere each delivering fantastic stuff which will soon swoon the globe and both get full credit. But hit by hit, album by album, the Paul worship gets louder and louder. This even spills over into private life favoritism. At one point we have a couple of pages about Paul and Linda’s dog while a John and Yoko miscarriage gets a small para.

At the end of the book you just want to sling it in the bin and just go back to playing the songs because that’s where you get the real Beatles, that’s all you need.

As the Fab Four sang ‘All you need is love’…. and ‘love’ has four letters not one or two or three but four. And one isn’t better than any of the rest.

• I would normally add a reference to Ian Leslie’s book but it isn’t worth it.