John Lennon

• 1. Introduction

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  At approximately 5:00 p.m. on the 8th of December 1980, John Lennon autographed a copy of his new album for a man named Mark David Chapman outside his New York apartment building, The Dakota. Just under six hours later, the same man shot him at close range as Lennon and his wife returned home. He was pronounced dead at 11:15 p.m. He was 40 years old. The album he had signed was Double Fantasy, released only weeks earlier after a five-year break from music. Lennon had spent that break baking bread and looking after his young son. How does a boy from Liverpool, raised by his aunt and told he would never make a living from a guitar, become a man whose songs were sung by a quarter of a million anti-war demonstrators? The answers lie in a childhood marked by absence, a partnership that became the most successful in songwriting history, and a restless conscience that the most powerful government on earth tried to deport.

• 2. The Five Women

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  John Winston Lennon was born on the 9th of October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, the only child of Alfred and Julia Lennon. His father, a merchant seaman of Irish descent, was away at sea when his son was born, and named the boy after his own father and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Alfred sent regular pay cheques to the house on Newcastle Road where John lived with his mother, but the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When Alfred returned six months later, Julia, by then pregnant with another man's child, rejected his offer to look after the family. In July 1946, Alfred took the five-year-old to Blackpool, secretly planning to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed, and accounts of what happened next conflict. One version has the boy forced to choose between his parents, twice choosing his father before crying and running after his mother. Author Mark Lewisohn instead wrote that the parents simply agreed Julia should take him home, and a witness named Billy Hall called the dramatic version inaccurate. Lennon had no further contact with his father for close to 20 years. He was raised instead at Mendips on Menlove Avenue by his aunt Mimi and her husband George, who had no children. His uncle bought him a mouth organ and set him puzzles, while his mother visited and played him Elvis Presley records, teaching him the banjo. In September 1980, Lennon reflected on the women who raised him. "There were five women that were my family. Five, women, five sisters. One happened to be my mother," he said, calling them "my first feminist education." George Smith died of a liver haemorrhage on the 5th of June 1955, aged 52, the first of two devastating losses that would shape the teenager's rage.

• 3. Trouble In The Classroom

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  Teachers at Quarry Bank High School, which Lennon attended from September 1952, summed him up bluntly. "He has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced," one wrote, while another judged that his work "always lacks effort. He is content to drift instead of using his abilities." He built a reputation as the class clown, drawing comical cartoons for his self-made school magazine, the Daily Howl, while also fighting, bullying, and disrupting lessons. Lennon faced real difficulties from dyslexia, which damaged his reading and writing and dragged down his academic performance. On the 15th of July 1958, when Lennon was a teenager, his mother Julia was struck and killed by a car as she walked home from visiting the Smiths' house. She was 44. The death traumatised him, and for the next two years he drank heavily and got into fights, consumed by what he called a "blind rage." Her memory later became a creative wellspring, inspiring the 1968 Beatles song "Julia." Lennon failed his O-level examinations but was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. There he wore Teddy Boy clothes and was threatened with expulsion. By the account of fellow student Cynthia Powell, who would become his wife, he was thrown out before his final year. It was at that same college, in 1957, that he had first met her.

• 4. The Partnership

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  At the age of 15, in September 1956, Lennon formed a skiffle group named the Quarrymen after his school. At the band's second performance, held in Woolton on the 6th of July at the St Peter's Church garden fete, he met Paul McCartney and asked him to join. McCartney recommended his friend George Harrison as lead guitarist, but Lennon thought the 14-year-old too young. McCartney arranged an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" and won his place. With Stuart Sutcliffe on bass, the group became The Beatles in early 1960. Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl," which became a UK top 10 hit for the Fourmost in 1963. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership remains the most successful in history, and the dynamic was clear from the start. In a 1987 interview McCartney recalled, "He was like our own little Elvis. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest." The Beatles took a 48-night residency in Hamburg in August 1960, where Lennon was introduced to the stimulant Preludin during their long overnight performances. Brian Epstein began managing the group in 1962 and pushed them toward a professional appearance. Lennon resisted before relenting, saying, "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me." Their first single, "Love Me Do," reached No. 17 in October 1962, and they recorded their debut album Please Please Me in under 10 hours on the 11th of February 1963, with Lennon nursing a cold audible on "Twist and Shout."

• 5. Bigger Than Jesus

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  During the Royal Variety Show, attended by the Queen Mother, Lennon teased the audience. "For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery," he said. The Beatles' February 1964 debut on The Ed Sullivan Show carried them from UK Beatlemania to international stardom, and in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire. Constant touring took its toll. Lennon grew worried that screaming fans drowned out the music and that the band's playing was suffering. His 1965 song "Help!" carried real feeling. "I meant it. It was me singing help," he said, recalling a period of weight gain he later called his "Fat Elvis" phase. In March 1965, Lennon and Harrison were unknowingly given LSD when a dentist spiked their coffee at a dinner party. Trapped later in a nightclub lift, they believed it was on fire. "We were all screaming, hot and hysterical," Lennon remembered. In March 1966, Lennon told reporter Maureen Cleave, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. We're more popular than Jesus now." The remark passed unnoticed in England but caused great offence when quoted in the US five months later, prompting record burnings, Ku Klux Klan activity, and threats. The furore helped push the band to stop touring after their final concert on the 29th of August 1966.

• 6. Studio And Schism

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  In late June 1967, the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" as Britain's contribution to the Our World satellite broadcast, before an audience estimated at up to 400 million. The song formalised Lennon's pacifist stance and became an anthem for the Summer of Love. That same year brought "Strawberry Fields Forever" and the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with lyrics that broke sharply from the group's early love songs. The same year carried grief. While attending the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales, the group learned of Epstein's death. "I knew we were in trouble then," Lennon said. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared." The cracks widened in 1968. After a trip to the Maharishi's ashram in India, where they wrote most of the double album The Beatles, the band formed the multimedia company Apple Corps, which Lennon described as "artistic freedom within a business structure." That year he insisted on having his new girlfriend, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, beside him in the studio, breaking the band's policy. By early 1969 Allen Klein had been appointed Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, though McCartney never signed. Lennon left the Beatles on the 20th of September 1969 but agreed to keep quiet during contract talks. He was furious when McCartney announced his own departure in April 1970. "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" Lennon said, later writing, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."

• 7. Give Peace A Chance

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  Lennon and Ono married in Gibraltar on the 20th of March 1969 and spent their honeymoon as a week-long bed-in at the Hilton Amsterdam, which drew worldwide media ridicule. A second bed-in followed in Montreal at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance." The single was quickly read as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators in Washington on the 15th of November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. That December they paid for billboards in 10 cities declaring "War Is Over! If You Want It." The couple poured money and presence into causes. They supported the family of James Hanratty, who had been hanged in 1962, staging a banner march and producing a 40-minute documentary on his case. They sent red roses and a cheque for 5,000 pounds to the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15,000 people attended the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, where Lennon performed an acoustic set; Sinclair, jailed for selling two joints of marijuana, was released four days later. Lennon's radicalism reached Northern Ireland too. After the Bloody Sunday incident in 1972, he said that given the choice between the British army and the IRA he would side with the latter, and he and Ono wrote "The Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday." His final act of activism was a statement on the 5th of December 1980 supporting striking sanitation workers in San Francisco, whose protest he and Ono planned to join on the 14th of December.

• 8. The State Versus Lennon

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  Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. President Nixon feared that the musician's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection. The next month the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings, citing his 1968 cannabis conviction in London as grounds to bar him from the country. The legal fight stretched across years of hearings. On the 23rd of March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave within 60 days while Ono was granted permanent residence. The couple responded with a press conference at the New York City Bar Association, announcing the state of Nutopia, a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people," and asking for political asylum while waving two handkerchiefs as a flag. Bob Dylan wrote to the immigration service in their defence. "John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution," he wrote. "Let John and Yoko stay!" The tide turned with Watergate. Nixon resigned, and on the 8th of October 1975 a court of appeals barred the deportation, ruling that "the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds." Lennon received his green card the following year and attended Jimmy Carter's Inaugural Ball in January 1977. The state's interest did not end there. Historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI's files, and the Bureau admitted to holding 281 pages while refusing to release most. It took 14 years of litigation, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, before all but 10 of the contested documents were released.

  As Lennon prepared to record Mind Games in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The 18-month period he called his "lost weekend" was spent in Los Angeles and New York with May Pang, a personal assistant whom Ono herself had suggested begin a relationship with Lennon. The stretch was chaotic and heavily fuelled by alcohol. In March 1974, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad to his forehead and scuffled with a waitress at The Troubadour club, then weeks later was ejected from the same venue with Harry Nilsson for heckling the Smothers Brothers. Out of the chaos came hits. Walls and Bridges, released in October 1974, included "Whatever Gets You thru the Night," featuring Elton John, which became Lennon's only solo single to top the US Billboard Hot 100 in his lifetime. He had doubted the song, and promised to join Elton John on stage if it reached number one. He kept the promise at Madison Square Garden on the 28th of November 1974, introducing "I Saw Her Standing There" as a song by "an old estranged fiance of mine called Paul." Pang also encouraged Lennon to rebuild contact with his son Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. Lennon bought the boy a Gibson Les Paul guitar and taught him chords, and Julian recalled they "got on a great deal better" during that time. In February 1975 Lennon reunited with Ono, and Pang believed he had been brainwashed when he returned stupefied from a hypnotherapy session.

  Sean Ono Lennon was born on the 9th of October 1975, his father's 35th birthday, after Ono had suffered three miscarriages. The condition for the pregnancy was that Lennon become a househusband, and he kept the bargain completely. He rose at 6 a.m. daily to plan and prepare Sean's meals, had a photographer take pictures of the baby every day of his first year, and made drawings later published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones," Lennon said, "because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish." He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977. The five-year silence ended in June 1980 with a sailing trip. Lennon chartered a 43-foot boat to Bermuda, and when a storm left the crew seasick, he alone took control and sailed through it. The experience reinvigorated him. He spent three weeks at a Bermuda home called Fairylands refining the songs for Double Fantasy, music that reflected his stable new family life. He recorded enough extra material for a follow-up, Milk and Honey, which was issued posthumously in 1984.

  In the weeks after the murder, "(Just Like) Starting Over" and Double Fantasy topped the charts in both the UK and the US. "Imagine" reached number one in the UK in January 1981, and "Woman," the second single from Double Fantasy, succeeded it at the top. Roxy Music's tribute cover of "Jealous Guy" also became a UK number one that year. Mark David Chapman avoided trial by ignoring his lawyer's advice and pleading guilty to second-degree murder, receiving a sentence of 20 years to life. Lennon's remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, and Ono scattered his ashes in Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. The honours accumulated long after his death. Double Fantasy won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. As a performer, writer, or co-writer, Lennon scored 25 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2002 a BBC history poll voted him eighth among the 100 Greatest Britons, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, first with the Beatles in 1988 and then as a solo artist in 1994. Three days before his death, Lennon was asked whether the Beatles were enemies or friends, and gave an answer that outlived him. "The Beatles are over," he said, "but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."