John, aged about 10, with his mother Julia.
John, aged about 10, with his mother Julia.
John, aged 11, wearing the uniform of his new school Quarry Bank High School For Boys. That cap was rarely seen on his head after this photograph was taken.
John’s father, Alfred Lennon. ‘He looked as unkempt and down at heel as a tramp . . . but, alarmingly, he had John’s face,’ said Cynthia Lennon on first meeting him.
John’s ‘Auntie Mimi’ Smith, in the front room of her house, Mendips, on Menlove Avenue in Woolton, south Liverpool, in 1965.
Quarry Bank High School for Boys which John attended from 1952 to 1957. ‘I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh,’ John would say of his time there. But he didn’t do much work either.
John’s childhood home, Mendips. From his bedroom window above the front door, John would watch the cars going by.
On their first visit to Hamburg, the Beatles and party stopped at the war memorial at Arnhem, the scene of a major World War II battle. John is not in this photograph, either because he was holding the camera, or, as some believe, because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of the minibus in which they’d been travelling
The Beatles as they were at the Cavern in February 1961, with Pete Best on drums – and when they were still wearing their black leather rocker suits. By the end of the year they would be managed by Brian Epstein and the leather would have to go if they wanted to get on television. As it turned out, Pete would have to go, too.
John’s friend from Liverpool Art College, Stuart Sutcliffe. His relationship with Stuart made Paul and George jealous.
John and Cynthia in 1963. A rare photograph of John wearing his hated horn-rimmed glasses.
The young, clean-cut Brian Epstein in 1962, the year he signed the Beatles to Parlophone Records. At that time he was still managing the record department in one of his family’s shops.
Mal Evans drives the Beatles away from a gig during Beatlemania. Starting as an assistant road manager, loyal Mal attended every gig and recording session the Beatles ever played. Tragically, he would be shot to death by police in Los Angeles during a misunderstanding.
Producer George Martin working with the Beatles at an early recording session at Abbey Road Studios.
John never enjoyed having to wear what he saw as a ‘Beatle uniform’, so he bought this leather cap in a little act of nonconformity. He was first seen wearing it at Heathrow Airport when the Beatles were on their way to play in Paris in January 1964.
‘Never in a million years did we think anything like this,’ John would say in astonishment at the fan pandemonium when the Beatles began appearing in America in February 1964.
The Beatles after being presented with their MBEs by the Queen at Buckingham Palace in October 1965. John didn’t want his, so he gave it to Aunt Mimi who put it on her mantelpiece.
Music publisher Dick James with the Beatles in 1965 on one of his few visits to one of their recording sessions.
What John called his ‘Hansel and Gretel house’ – Kenwood, the home he bought for his first wife Cynthia, their son Julian and himself in Surrey stockbroker country in 1965. He was never happy there.
The Beatles, with their manager Brian Epstein, set off on one of their last tours in 1966. Playing live to hysterical fans had long ceased to be enjoyable.
‘Christianity will go . . . We’re more popular than Jesus now,’ John told interviewer Maureen Cleave in 1966, in a statement that was wilfully misunderstood by rabble-rousers in the US Bible Belt. Here he apologises to journalists in Chicago before the start of the Beatles’ last US tour.
Brian Epstein in 1966 – by this time the most successful music manager in the world.
‘John with his son, Julian, then aged five, in the little boy’s Kenwood bedroom.
The Beatles and friends with the Maharishi in Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills in 1968. ‘It was nice and secure and everyone always smiling . . . with baboons stealing your breakfast,’ was how John would remember the break for meditation.
When John and Yoko got together in 1968 he seemed to consciously merge his personality and his looks with hers.
The last live gig the Beatles ever played was on 30 January 1969, and took place before Let It Be film cameras on the roof of their Apple headquarters in London’s Savile Row. ‘Thank you very much, we hope we passed the audition,’ John said as police arrived and the session had to end.
John and Yoko exchange a bag of their recently cut hair with Michael X, a self-styled revolutionary leader, for a pair of bloodstained boxing trunks which had been allegedly worn by Muhammad Ali. Michael X, real name, Michael Malek, was a violent con-man, who would be hanged for murder in Trinidad in 1975.
By December, 1969, when John was in Canada, his appearance was radically different from his mop-top days as he went about tearing down what he saw as the myth of the Beatles.
To promote his new single, ‘Instant Karma’, John appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Yoko, who was blindfolded and knitting, for reasons unexplained, was also in the act.
When John and Yoko moved to New York in 1971, they quickly became involved with protest movements which resulted in his being kept under surveillance by the FBI. John would eventually come to believe that he might have been used by some of the movements’ leaders.
John and David Bowie became good friends in 1974, collaborating on Bowie’s hit ‘Fame’.
John during the ‘Lost Weekend’. Out on the town at the Troubador in Los Angeles in 1973 with some celebrity drinking buddies who liked to call themselves the Hollywood Vampires. To the right of John is his friend Harry Nilsson, then Alice Cooper and Micky Dolenz as well as singer Anne Murray.
John and May Pang – the pretty young assistant who Yoko suggested should have an affair with her husband. ‘I’d been trained to believe that men like John . . . never picked women like me . . . We did not have affairs with them,’ May would say. Then she ran off with him for eighteen months.
Julian and Sean in 1980.
‘You’ve captured our relationship exactly,’ John said to photographer Annie Liebovitz when she took this photograph of him and Yoko for Rolling Stone magazine shortly before his murder.