John Lennon didn’t fit into any neat classification because he never stayed the same John Lennon for very long. He was a labyrinth of contradictions. As a singer, he disliked the sound of his voice so much he would increasingly disguise it on record; as a rock and roll purist, he also came to consider himself an avant-garde artist; and, as a born leader, he would sometimes find himself being very easily led.
By the end of his life he was a bohemian multi-millionaire who still liked to romantically consider himself a working-class hero, although he had been brought up comfortably off in a roomy home in a pleasant and green suburb outside Liverpool. In truth there was never anything working class about him. Not once in his adult life did he have to do any kind of work other than that of being an entertainer or writer.
But it was in his attitude towards the Beatles that he showed his contrariness, and, perhaps, foresight, most fully. Having started and then helped build the group into the most loved musical and cultural ensemble of the twentieth century, he then merrily turned himself into the iconoclast who destroyed them. In so doing he broke hundreds of millions of hearts.
That the Beatles had to break up at all would become a debate among fans that lasted for decades, but, viewed in retrospect, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to them. By killing them at or near their peak, John was, albeit unknowingly, preserving them, freezing them in time before their music began to be received with a lessening of enthusiasm, as would inevitably have happened had they stayed together.
I was as shocked as anyone when it happened, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Because John had already become a master of reinvention as he cast off one persona and pulled on a new one. The bookish little boy, who enjoyed nothing more than staying in his bedroom drawing cartoons and rereading Alice In Wonderland, would turn into a thieving little devil when outside the house with his school friends. The truculent, rock-mad art student, who would become the clowning, most sharp-witted Beatle, was unrecognisable when he metamorphosed into the late Sixties psychedelic guru, who in turn gave way to the angry, anti-war crusading, feminist John Lennon of 1971. The changes would continue into the Seventies as, almost overnight, he went from being an occasional but famously out-of-control public drunk on what he would later call his eighteen-month ‘lost weekend’, to becoming a reclusive new father hiding in his New York apartment.
John Lennon was all of these people and more besides. But, most importantly, he was a clever songwriter and a pithy sloganeer who had an ear for the murmurs of his time long before they became the shouts of the multitude; and, who, with others, helped capture that time in song.
He could be whimsical, hyperbolical, cruel, untruthful, self-mocking, occasionally even violent and often impatient and unreasonable. But, never able to sidestep a joke if he could see one coming, he was also often very funny and always imaginative. Had he been born a couple of decades later he might easily have made a living as a stand-up comic. ‘Part of me would sooner have been a comedian,’ he once said. ‘I just don’t have the guts to get up and do it.’
He wasn’t always very nice, and could be unreasonable and difficult to live with, as his first wife, Cynthia, his second, Yoko Ono, and his mistress May Pang would have agreed. But, jealous and generous in equal measure, he was both well-mannered and sharp-tongued. In truth there seemed to be no constant thread throughout him, other than that in everything he did there was always a restlessness, a desire to be doing something else, to wish, perhaps, to be different from the person he was.
Before the Beatles, popular entertainers were almost universally deferential towards their managers, diplomatic in their utterances to newspaper writers and polite to radio and television interviewers. Most of them took care to be uncontroversial in their political views, too. John Lennon didn’t. He was direct and spoke his mind, perhaps sometimes when he wasn’t fully informed and when it might have been easier, and perhaps wiser, not to have done. Always he showed a broad streak of the nonconformist in whatever he did, not necessarily in an aggressive way, at least not in the early Sixties, when his barbs were usually delivered with a smiling, jokey insolence. On many occasions, though he might not have been being deliberately rude, his sardonic answers would give interlocutors pause for thought. He had, it could be said, attitude – an air which, although it could irritate and cause suspicion among older detractors, resonated among many of those of his own age.
But why was he like that? Where did that attitude come from? Where did the need for continual reinvention begin? What made John Lennon the person he was? The fractured relationship of his parents must have helped shape the first few years of his life. But, like all of us, John Lennon the man would become the sum of many different contributory factors as well, from the time and place of his birth onwards. The time was the Second World War, and the place was the unfashionable port of Liverpool in the north-west of England.