What do we know about John Lennon and Paul McCartney's unusually intense relationship?

It's "nonsense" that John Lennon was the creative genius of The Beatles, while Paul McCartney was his slightly talented, but superficial sidekick, Ian Leslie says.

In John & Paul, he explores a "love story" that began at a church fair, when both were 16, and was cut short by Lennon's assassination at 40.

"They were both extraordinary, complicated, weird geniuses, and you couldn't really have one without the other,” he tells Sunday Morning. “They kind of created each other."

It took many bizarre coincidences for two amazing vocalists like McCartney and Lennon to grow up a mile-and-a-half from each other in the south of Liverpool, then come together and ignite a cultural explosion, Leslie says.

One important aspect of their connection, which they didn't talk about much, was a shared a sense of being "different", because their mothers had both died when they were teenagers.

In a "very simplistic" version of their relationship, Lennon was the one who felt things very intensely, Leslie says, but the truth behind their incredible music is that they were both ambitious and extraordinarily emotionally intense young men.

Source: rnz.co.nz

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While both could be jealous and resentful, McCartney was just better at controlling and, to some extent, concealing those feelings, with a more stable personality that partly reflected his more stable family background.

The pair's incredibly intense, very creative, conflicted and tempestuous relationship is hard to put in a box, Leslie says, and more like brotherhood than friendship.