Francis Kenny - Understanding John Lennon

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.

chapter 1

1800s

City of Outsiders

JOHN LENNON was born in 1940 in wartime Liverpool. His music, his persona and his beliefs were formed through the varying influences of his home city and its port, people and culture. The city represents the single most powerful influence on John’s life. Indeed, after the break-up of The Beatles, having moved to New York’s Dakota building, John still kept a sea trunk inscribed with ‘Liverpool’, which was full of mementos from his city of birth. His feelings for Liverpool were often ambiguous and, at certain periods of his career, the city’s deep-seated blue-collar ethos became an obstacle and a source of friction to his later musical success. Nevertheless, Liverpool was passionately championed by its favourite son.

It is only by coming to understand the impact of his home city on John, the place in which his (paternal) Lennon and (maternal) Stanley families were born and nurtured, that it becomes possible to gain a valuable appreciation of one of the 20th century’s greatest musical talents. The thread of passion for Liverpool’s culture, music and people would run throughout John’s life. He came to love the edginess of a seaport with a workforce more comfortable in Barranquilla, Boston and Buenos Aires than Bolton, Bury or Blackburn. In some ways, though, the influence of the city could be a double-edged sword. Much of his personality and strength came from his affinity with Liverpool’s Irish culture. The most obvious characteristics of this culture that John embodied were humour and accent, but also the seeming Irish tendency towards defiance and argumentativeness, together with a healthy irreverence for authority and cant. His own view of his hometown was candid and revealed the depth of feeling for what would be the prime mover in shaping his life and music:

It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty, and it’s an Irish place. It is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever. It is cosmopolitan, and it’s where the sailors would come home with the blues records from America on the ships. 1

John was fully aware of the unique nature of his hometown. Liverpool’s influence on John and the rest of The Beatles is self-evident, not just in their accent but in their outlook, spirit and stoic determination to survive. The sense of being an outsider, of mutual support and the ability to laugh at one another was drawn from the city; it was this that kept them together in the whirlwind of Beatlemania and beyond. Liverpool was ‘a transitional place looking out over the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean while turning its back on the rest of the country’. 2

It was in 1699 that the Liverpool Merchant became the port’s first slave ship to sail for Africa, docking in Barbados with 220 Africans before making its return trip to Liverpool. In 1799, ships sailing out of Liverpool transported 45,000 Africans into bondage. The commercial success story of Liverpool and its relationship with the slave trade saw a rapid growth in port-related activities. This matched the growth of the British Industrial Revolution, in which the demand for imports and exports seemed insatiable on the back of that slave trade. At this time of mercantile expansion, Liverpool sailors were soon gaining a particular reputation and character. Indeed, novelist and sailor Joseph Conrad would comment: ‘That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It’s my experience they always have.’ 3