CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Foreword

  1    ‘I forgot about my father’

  2    ‘I was aggressive’

  3    ‘The sort of gang I led’

  4    ‘I must be a genius’

  5    ‘Nobody was fighting’

  6    ‘The way I looked’

  7    ‘What’s so sad about the past’

  8    ‘Paul looked about ten’

  9    ‘The copper came to the door’

10    ‘The underlying chip on my shoulder’

11    ‘It was terrible’

12    ‘I ruined his life!’

13    ‘This guy who had a drum kit’

14    ‘I grew up in Hamburg’

15    ‘Women should be obscene and not heard’

16    ‘Is this what I want to do?’

17    ‘You’d call them groupies now’

18    ‘I wasn’t too keen on reaching twenty-one’

19    ‘We were in a daydream’

20    ‘I was the closest to Brian’

21    ‘I looked up to Stu’

22    ‘Cyn’s having a baby’

23    ‘I had to do the talking’

24    ‘We sang for twelve hours’

25    ‘The holiday was planned’

26    ‘I play a guitar, too . . .’

27    ‘This isn’t show business’

28    ‘We just walked through it’

29    A Hard Day’s Night

30    ‘A rock and roll musician’

31    ‘We were like Kings of the Jungle’

32    ‘Once you plug in and the noise starts’

33    ‘Nowhere Man’

34    ‘We’re more popular than Jesus’

35    ‘It’s like we’re four freaks being wheeled out’

36    ‘Our lives had been threatened’

37    ‘An imaginary nail’

38    ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’

39    ‘Mick Jagger wears a codpiece’

40    ‘I was scared’

41    ‘I am the egg man’

42    ‘Flying on a magic carpet’

43    ‘I think I’m Jesus Christ’

44    ‘Someone as barmy as I am’

45    ‘Get your drums out’

46    ‘You’re not worth any more’

47    ‘My prick on an album’

48    ‘We hope we passed the audition’

49    ‘It was Yoko that changed me’

50    ‘I’m leaving the Beatles’

51    ‘A crutch for the world’s social lepers’

52    ‘Free means free

53    ‘I might just as well have been a comedian’

54    ‘The radicalism was phoney’

55    Imagine’ is anti-religious

56    ‘New York is at my speed’

57    ‘Don’t fuck with my ears’

58    ‘To finish off . . . we thought we’d do a number’

59    ‘If I began writing with Paul again’

60    ‘I’ve battled all the monsters’

61    ‘A second chance’

62    ‘Wanting to make music’

63    ‘Playing guitar and singing’

64    ‘I don’t believe in dead heroes’

Afterword

After John died what happened to . . .

John Lennon’s best recordings

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Notes

Picture credits

Index