YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Leslie

lines on the record: 64
first: 2025-04-16
most recent: 2025-04-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, it could be, it is always very hard to tell because they were so their principal influences, apart from Church Berry and Buddy Holly and girl groups and do up and everything else. Bob Dylan, their principal influences were each other. And so they're kind of sealing things from each other all the time. So you might be right, it might have been a poor contribution, or it might be just John saying, let me run kind of pool software in my head. Now, what would he do? The thing that I think we do know that Paul contributed to help was those backing vocals, you know, and now those days are gone. And, you know, the backing vocals kind of act as this countermelody. And they do this odd thing, which is quite unusual, which is they start before the lead line. So the backing vocals kind of announce the line and then John comes in and sings and it creates this lovely effect of as if John's friends are anticipating his thoughts that creates this incredible empathy. I think that's one of the most...”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me why you asked the question because otherwise we'll be sort of going through the track listing and I'm trying to remember.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think, please, Mr. Postman as well as one of my favorite. And again, a lot of the early ones, it's just the sheer incredible commitment of the vocal Long Tall Sally, Paul. Please put Mr. Postman and others for John. And they kind of find the emotion heart of these songs in a way that sometimes the originals, you know, which are a bit neater have the kind of edges sawn off, were not able to do. And I think that just is what makes them really so powerful.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to say, well, why can't this go with that? Why can't we mix up this style with that style? Or why can't we change this chord structure so it's not like the normal one? In a way that perhaps Native American artists at the time were not doing or not able to do with the same facility. So I think that sense of distance from it is actually what creates the innovation.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of the performances on Wings Over America are pretty good, but I generally agree. And I think it leads me, or at least my mind, to this kind of larger point, which is that part of the reason they were so incredibly innovative in the first place was that they were British and therefore had this distance from American music. They were not part, you know, organically part of the American traditions of blues and jazz and gospel that fed into rock and roll. And so this music was a kind of alien language to them. It connected to some of the music from home, but it was, in other senses, wildly different. And that enabled them to see things about it and to perhaps be a little bit more analytical about it because they had this distance on it.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because maybe they were less good on when they were covering artists whom they really, really respected and loved. You know, the closer they got to that, the harder it was for them to get distance on them. And it's interesting, for instance, that they covered very little, if any, now I think about it, Elvis Presley songs. And of course, there were huge Elvis Presley songs. So I think they found it harder with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, who are their kind of formative influences, harder to kind of take a step back and say, well, how can we do this differently? And ended up producing these slightly weaker, I mean, I still great in my mind, but slightly weaker kind of imitative versions.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm persuaded by that. I wouldn't actually go that far. I don't often listen to it, but I do think his vocal is so bizarre that it absolutely is incredibly memorable and kind of cuts through. I would agree on, I actually like rock and roll music because, again, I think he sounds so committed to it. I think I would agree with George's version of rollover Beethoven. It's kind of limp. But you know, George was lagging behind as a vocalist and as a performer.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, good question. Maybe we should talk about yours first. I mean, I'm thinking of Mr. Moonlight, but as everyone says that, I'm sort of loath to mention it. Give me yours.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's typically quite an odd song to cover. You know, I don't think many other bands, if any, would have or singers would have considered covering that. It's one of those kind of strange, quite hard to see song. You know, why would you do that? And yet those are the songs they often kind of sort out. They were often making deliberately weird choices in the songs they covered. And of course, as you allude to, nearly all the songs they played before they got famous were covered, or, you know, 90% of them, the songwriting and, well, the songwriting started earlier, but actually performing the songs that they'd written started relatively late, really just before they got famous.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I'm going to give that you've made my answer sound really boring because I think, please, please, me is the point when they turn into a kind of pop machine. Both create something which is emotionally truthful because it's full of jealousy and yearning. It's got real kind of authentic emotion in it, but it's also this absolutely incredibly hooky pop song. It's got tremendous propulsive force. And I think it's sort of slightly underrated in the Beatles repertoire. And of course, it's, you know, it's the second single that they release. But you tell me yours.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mind, sometimes enhanced by drugs and pulling things out Whereas Paul was always on and kind of looking out and I think John thought Paul was missing something and Paul thought John was missing something and they're two different kind of attitudes to the world come together and create this incredible new thing.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question. I think if the get back movie had been shot while they were recording Revolver, for instance, a couple of years earlier, we would have seen a very different John, much more voluble, much more energetic, obviously kind of charismatic. But I do think that even then he had this kind of different attitude to work, which was, I'm going to just, when I get the time to lie around and do nothing, I'm going to do that. And maybe I'll take some drugs at the same time. Whereas Paul was much more, oh, come on, come on, guys, let's go to work. Let's write some songs. Let's play. Now, this is all relative. They all worked hard, right? You look at their schedule during the 60s. It's absolutely crazy. But when they got time off, John was often quite happy just lying around on a sofa. But from his point of view, he was just kind of going deep into the recesses of his.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They met for the properly for the first time afterwards. And Paul was thrilled by how John got the words wrong to a song that they both knew, that Paul knew. And it took me a while to work out why Paul was so thrilled by John getting the words wrong. And I think he was taking from John this sense that, yes, this is American music, but we don't just have to imitate it. We can actually do it in our own way. We could do it wrong and it'll come out right. And so I think John was the kind of first to get onto that in a really strong way. And that's probably what pushed him furthest ahead in those early years.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question, and I don't have a definitive answer, but perhaps it's connected to what you were saying. John was less methodical than Paul, perhaps a little less analytical in the way he thought about songs and song structures, and more prepared to just sort of blunder his way into things and see what happened. And of course he had wonderful intuitions. He had some kind of innate talent and he'd been raised on different forms of music, as had Paul, both rock and roll and blues and skiffle, but also he was introduced to the great American songbook by Julia, by watching movies and so on. But he had this incredible, I guess what we'd call today, sense of agency, this sense that, well, I'm just going to do it this way. The very first time Paul saw John playing was at Wilton Village Fate.”
2025-04-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source