Julian Lennon

• 1. Introduction

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  Julian Lennon was born John Charles Julian Lennon on the 8th of April 1963 at Sefton General Hospital in Liverpool, carrying a name almost nobody calls him by. He was named not after his famous father, but after his paternal grandmother, Julia Lennon, who had died five years before he arrived. His godfather was Brian Epstein, manager of the most famous band in the world. Before Julian had any say in the matter, he had already shaped rock history. A watercolour painting he made at nursery school, showing his classmate Lucy O'Donnell surrounded by stars, became the seed of one of the most analysed songs his father ever recorded. A divorce, when Julian was five years old, prompted Paul McCartney to write another. A lullaby closed The Beatles' most ambitious double album because of him. Three songs, three landmarks of the catalogue, and Julian was not yet a teenager. The questions that follow are harder: what do you do with an inheritance like that, and who are you when the world already thinks it knows?

• 2. Three Songs Before He Could Drive

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  Paul McCartney wrote "Hey Jude" in 1968 while driving out to visit Julian after his parents' divorce. McCartney's original title was "Hey Jules", and he changed it simply because "Jude" was easier to sing. The song was consolation, addressed directly to a five-year-old trying to make sense of the collapse of his family. John Lennon and Cynthia Powell had divorced that year, following John's relationship with Yoko Ono, whom he married on the 20th of March 1969. Julian had almost no sustained contact with his father after the split, not until the early 1970s when his father's then-girlfriend, May Pang, encouraged regular visits during her time with John. Those years with Pang would become the ones Julian later described as the happiest memories he had with his father. For Christmas 1973, John gave his son a Gibson Les Paul guitar and a drum machine, and taught him some chords. It was an overture, arriving a decade late.

• 3. The Weight of Valotte

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  Lennon's debut album, Valotte, arrived in 1984, produced by Phil Ramone, and its success was immediate. Two singles broke the top 10, the title track and "Too Late for Goodbyes", and the album earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 1986. Music videos for both tracks were directed by filmmaker Sam Peckinpah. After the record's release, Paul McCartney sent Lennon a telegram to wish him well. The comparison to his father was instant and relentless. Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, reviewing the 1998 album Photograph Smile, wrote that it was "the kind of music that would receive greater praise if it weren't made by the son of a Beatle." The remark cut in two directions at once. Lennon's second album, The Secret Value of Daydreaming in 1986, was dismissed by critics but still reached number 32 on the Billboard 200, and its single "Stick Around" topped the US Album Rock Tracks chart, his first number one on that format. On the 1st of April 1987, he appeared as the Baker in Mike Batt's Royal Albert Hall production of The Hunting of the Snark, a benefit for the deaf that also featured Roger Daltrey, Justin Hayward, Billy Connolly, and John Hurt as narrator, attended by the Duchess of York.

• 4. An Unresolved Father

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  John Lennon was murdered on the 8th of December 1980. Julian was seventeen. In the years that followed, he spoke openly about anger and betrayal, quoting remarks his father had made, including the comment that Julian had "come out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night." He told The Daily Telegraph, "I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son." He added that Paul McCartney had spent more time with him as a child than his father had. John Lennon had excluded Julian from his will, leaving only a trust of £100,000 to be shared between Julian and his half-brother Sean. Julian sued his father's estate, and in 1996 reached a settlement reportedly worth £20 million, authorised by Yoko Ono. By 2009, speaking to CBS News, Lennon said something had shifted. Recording the tribute song "Lucy", in memory of Lucy Vodden, the childhood friend who had inspired "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", had helped him find a way to forgive. He described writing as therapy and said it had allowed him to, for the first time, truly embrace his father's memory. In 2010, on what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday, Julian and his mother Cynthia unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool on the 9th of October.

• 5. Beyond the Record

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  In the mid-1990s, Lennon stepped away from music for several years after an encounter with elders from the Mirning people of Australia. What they asked of him shaped the next phase of his life entirely. A conversation he recalled having with his father added another layer: John had told him that if he ever passed away, a white feather would come as a signal that everything would be all right. When Indigenous elders of the Mirning tribe in Adelaide handed Lennon a white feather and asked him to help give them a voice, the connection was impossible to ignore. He produced the documentary Whaledreamers about their tribe and its relationship with whales; the film was shown at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and won eight international awards. In 2007, he founded The White Feather Foundation, with a mission focused on environmental and humanitarian issues. The foundation works across four areas: clean water, the preservation of Indigenous cultures, education and health, and the environment. In 2008, Prince Albert II of Monaco presented it with the Better World Environmental Award. After his mother Cynthia died in 2015, Lennon named the foundation's scholarship program in her honour; by the time the source was written, it had awarded over 50 scholarships to girls across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

• 6. A Name Reclaimed

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  Lennon's 2022 album Jude was released on BMG on the 9th of September 2022, his first in eleven years. The title came from the McCartney song that had been written for him in 1968. Paul McCartney provided a handwritten "Jude" motif for the album's artwork, and May Pang, his father's former companion and the woman who had helped reconnect father and son decades earlier, supplied the cover photograph. Lennon spoke about what the title meant: "Calling it Jude was very coming of age for me in that regard because it was very much facing up to who I am." He described the material as drawn from over three decades of songwriting. In 2020, Lennon had legally changed his full name from John Charles Julian Lennon to Julian Charles John Lennon, reordering it to match the name everyone had always used. That same year, he was honoured with the CC Forum Philanthropy Award in Monaco and named a UNESCO Center for Peace Cross-Cultural and Peace Crafter Award Laureate. In December 2024, he spoke on The Joe Rogan Experience about waiting for biopsy results, a disclosure that showed the same directness he had brought to speaking about his father for decades. His photograph book, Life's Fragile Moments, published by the German house teNeues, had appeared earlier that year.