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Introduction

JOHN LENNON was one of the most radical and controversial musical icons of the 1960s. Even forty years after his death, he still remains celebrated around the world as a figure of musical genius, and one of deep contradictions. Despite his global fame, John’s ‘real identity’ has been notoriously difficult to pin down. His famously challenging and confrontational attitude can be readily linked, however, to his formative years in his hometown of Liverpool. John’s life began, and tragically ended, in two different port cities – Liverpool and New York – each facing each other across the Atlantic Ocean, each on the edge of their own countries, ports whose histories were defined by the contradictory cultural norms of their home country – edgy cities, sister cities, bonded together by a transatlantic trade route and an Irish diaspora.

As a child, John’s mind seems to have been a fog of confusion, ‘rejected’ by both parents and forced to accept life under an aunt who was, by all accounts, a dictatorial head of household. This left him isolated and constrained. For the young John, the restrictive and critical atmosphere during his time being brought up at his aunt’s home, Mendips, fashioned emotional scars that never fully healed. From almost the time of his separation from his mother Julia, John began to develop defensive, hostile and aggressive behaviours. Even with the long-awaited success of The Beatles, he still couldn’t shake off the dread of being unloved that he had carried with him since his early years. Although he was known to wear his emotions on his sleeve, shown with brutal transparency in songs such as ‘Help!’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, to a large extent his childhood memories were so painful that most of the bruises remained on the inside. He may have remained forever hostage to his childhood, but it was during this time that the young John learned to use his talent as a barrier against the intermittent periods of despondency.

It was at Mendips that the apprenticeship of his creativity was to be found in the self-defence mechanism of isolation, of story writing, books and poetry. This insular but creative lifestyle was to nurture his art, and later, the studio would make this creativity available to a wider audience. In many ways, John fits neatly into the stereotype of the tortured artist. As John himself declared:

All art is pain expressing itself. I think all life is, everything we do, but particularly artists – that’s why they’re always vilified. They’re always persecuted because they show pain, they can’t help it. They express it in art and the way they live, and people don’t like to see that reality that they’re suffering.¹

As a musician and artist, he displayed a fierce independence and marched to the beat of his own drum, but at the same time he was dogged by insecurity, pessimism and depression. For all his musical and artistic success, John was forever haunted by fears, living most of his life shadowed by doubt. On meeting John, Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline was to comment that ‘John’s whole history speaks to a desperate kind of nurturing’.²

As a teenager, John’s character and musical creativity were strongly influenced by his attempts to gain access to and acceptance in a culture of rock ’n’ roll. For John, this culture was to be found in a largely blue-collar teenage population in Liverpool’s inner city. He was determined to shed a background in the leafy boulevards and manicured parks of Woolton by adopting a smokescreen of rebelliousness, sarcastic wit and belligerence. He desperately needed to have a grounding to support his vulnerable self-esteem. It was in rock ’n’ roll that he found an identity which was to be crucial and life-saving. John’s life support of music and writing was also to be supplemented by the cultural impact of the city and port of Liverpool. John desperately needed and wanted the raucousness, spontaneous humour and vibrancy that could be found in Liverpool’s blue-collar life.

As a teenager, his early trips into inner-city Liverpool found John intrigued and in awe of the locals with their sharpness, wit and streetwise dialogue. He adopted a Scouse accent, which came into conflict with John’s surrogate mother from the age of five, Aunt Mimi, and the conditioning of John towards King, Country, Empire and the linguistic fabric of these in the shape of ‘BBC English’. John’s conservative upbringing by his aunt left him ill-equipped for validation within the local rock ’n’ roll community, and to win acceptance by his peers he proceeded to adopt an exaggerated toughness that he never fully abandoned.

Liverpool has always had a deep-seated historical Celtic connection – the city sits with its back to mainland Britain, looking out instead to the Atlantic Ocean, so much so that the Mersey was viewed as an inland river of the Irish Sea. This, combined with its sense of otherness and the outlook of defiance that existed in Liverpool’s inner-city population’s irreverence to status, bolshiness and verbal gymnastics, fitted John like a glove. His search for rebellion was nurtured by his embrace of Liverpool’s Irish influence and the dynamic effect of the city’s seafarer culture via the movement of ideas across oceans. ‘We came from Liverpool,’ John declared, ‘and reflected our past.’³

As The Beatles were catapulted into worldwide fame, John increasingly found himself battling a deep-rooted range of emotional and psychological issues. The greater The Beatles grew into a global phenomenon, the greater John’s uncertainties about his own talent and the greater his abrasiveness and volatility. Perhaps it was just a coincidence on the part of the film’s screenwriter, or insight into John’s belligerence, that while in Yellow Submarine the character of Ringo is presented as a typical local Liverpool lad, George as an Indian mystic aficionado and Paul as a self-assured music hall performer, John is introduced as Frankenstein’s monster! Understanding John Lennon traces the restrictive conformity of John’s Aunt Mimi’s narrow-mindedness and its clashes with John’s pathological aversion to authority. It examines his inner turmoil and salvation through art, as well as the complexity of values found in his childhood that would aggravate him and hurl him towards inhabiting a self-contradictory persona. John’s life is too often airbrushed. Some accounts have been distorted with a view to making the Lennon ‘story’ acceptable to the reader, presenting a saintly, refined version of John at which he would have baulked.

Understanding John Lennon challenges the ‘Beatle version’ of John that has become mainstream.

An obvious example of these contradictory, standard versions of the John Lennon Story is in John’s place of birth: Liverpool. Outside The Cavern Club in Mathew Street, where The Beatles played 292 times, is a life-size bronze statue of John, resplendent in his heavy leather boots, standing with one foot hooked behind the other, leather trousers, leather jacket and … a Beatle haircut. Fine, except that the Beatle haircut is normally associated with the Pierre Cardin ‘bum freezer’, ‘Beatle suits’ and tens of thousands of screaming fans: not leather, definitely not leather. But when this statue was first unveiled, it had a DA Teddy Boy slicked-back hairstyle – just like The Beatles had when they played Hamburg, when they wore leather suits. Those responsible for the statue’s commission, upon viewing this accurate depiction of Lennon at a particular time in his development, decided that this wasn’t what they wanted. History was rewritten, and, despite the statue being modelled on a photograph taken in Hamburg, which was later to become the cover for John’s 1974 Rock ’n’ Roll album, the ‘greaser’ look head was removed and replaced by the more familiar ‘mop top’ image.

This book is a challenge to such obvious historical rewrites. As the only writer on John Lennon to have spent all his life in Liverpool, I am uniquely placed to challenge orthodox versions of the ‘Lennon Story’. Understanding John Lennon presents a journey into the confusion and pain that lay behind one of popular music’s most researched – yet most misunderstood – geniuses. What follows is how John Lennon came to be John Lennon, musical genius. And it all starts in Liverpool.