While it would be invidious to say that John Lennon died at the wrong time, when he was fatally shot by a deranged fantasist outside Lennon’s apartment in the Dakota building, in Manhattan, on 8 December 1980, his critical standing was hardly at its peak. Double Fantasy, the comeback record he had made with Yoko Ono, had been released just a few weeks before and had been resoundingly panned by the critics. Rolling Stone hated it. The Times hated it. Everyone seemed to hate it. It was labelled weak, lame and completely bereft of cultural relevance. In one especially perceptive review, the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray wrote, “It sounds like a great life, but it makes for a lousy record,” and, “I wish Lennon had kept his big happy trap shut until he had something to say that was even vaguely relevant to those of us not married to Yoko.”
One particularly insensitive news commentator suggested that “artistic betrayal” may have even been the motive for Lennon’s murder, although in this he was alone, as almost immediately his death not only transformed him into a martyr, it made Double Fantasy a hit. A funereal fervour helped it sell three million copies in the US alone, it was No1 in more than a dozen countries and went on to win the 1981 Grammy Award for Album Of The Year.
The critics didn’t change their minds, although the opprobrium has softened over the years and Lennon’s childlike doodles have been re-evaluated so much that many now think of them as some of his best work. But at the time, the likes of “(Just Like) Starting Over”, “Woman”, “Watching the Wheels” and “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” were derided by anyone who professed to be in touch with the intricate post-punk, proto-hip-hop, electronic culture of 1980.
Needless to say, the dismal nature of the record didn’t alter the shock of hearing that Lennon had been shot. I can still remember where I was when I first heard, listening to the early morning radio in my anaglypta-clad bedroom in the eaves of a freezing cold student flat above a greengrocer’s in Stamford Hill, North London, the following day. I wasn’t a huge John Lennon fan – and in fact had always preferred Paul McCartney, not that you were allowed to say such things in 1980 – but this was less about the death of a washed-up house husband and far more about the death of a Beatle. Beatles didn’t die and, even though Lennon had been largely invisible since 1975, in his absence he had acquired an almost mythic glow.
My flatmates didn't think so. At the time I was living with some rather stern ex-punks, the kind who preferred to listen to The Cramps and Siouxsie And The Banshees rather than Imagine or the Plastic Ono Band. That night, after a day at St Martin’s, where, disappointingly, the other students I spoke to seemed a lot less interested in the assassination of a Beatle than I thought they might be (if only from a journalistic point of view), I watched hours of hastily assembled tributes to Lennon on television with the other people in my house. On a late-night panel show just before we turned in, one of the guests called Lennon “the first punk”, which made my flatmates choke on their Special Brew. “What about Iggy Pop?” said one, dismissively, stroking his spiky Lux Interior locks.
To them, Lennon was already a has-been, a fogey who had exhausted his finite talent. I felt the same disappointment that John Peel felt three years earlier when the announcement of Elvis’ death at the Vortex, the punk club in Wardour Street, was greeted by an exultant roar.
My flatmates couldn’t see the John Lennon who had been a tearaway in Hamburg, when the Beatles played their residencies there. They couldn’t see the misanthrope who defined – no, invented – sardonic rock lyrics in the 1960s. They couldn’t see the sharp-tongued middle-class yob who didn’t take any truck from anyone. They couldn’t see the oven-baked rock star with the ever-ready quips – never forget that it was Lennon who said, about his own bandmate: “Ringo? He’s not the best drummer in the world. You know what? He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles.” (Lennon once said that the reason Jeff Lynne’s ELO stopped having hits was because they’d run out of Beatles records to copy.)
They couldn’t see the man largely responsible for the second side of A Hard Day’s Night. The soundtrack album to the Fab Four’s second film, recorded in July 1964, this was not only the first Beatles album to feature entirely original compositions, but – while McCartney was (is) undoubtedly the stronger songwriter – this was the high-water mark of Lennon’s 1960s songwriting; never again would he scale these heights; never again would he match McCartney for sheer volume and variety. The second side contains the best selection of Lennon songs on any Beatles LP, songs that actually suggest he could have gone in many other directions had the drugs, the apathy and the cynicism not devoured him.
Nor could they see the man revered by Keith Richards. I interviewed Richards a few years ago, when his book, Life, came out, and I asked him about the self-deprecating tone of the text. “I’ve slowly grown into that,” he said. “When you’re supported by millions all over the world, you can either go nuts or try to feed off the goodwill. If you get that feedback, especially from an early age, it’s indescribable. It was the same with the Beatles, John Lennon in particular. It’s something you have to handle all the time. I’ve never taken it for granted. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
But then maybe it wasn’t so surprising that my flatmates couldn’t see all this. By 1980, John Lennon was almost an exile. Exiled, some would say, from himself. New York had given him the opportunity to reinvent himself and when he moved there, in 1971, he had immediately enjoyed the access he was allowed to the cultural underground. For the first few years in the city he thought of himself as some sort of activist, mixing with the radicals, making repeated political pronouncements and publicly celebrating his relocation (the only thing he didn’t like about the city was his inability to buy Bath Oliver biscuits). He was in a bubble and he seemed to have deliberately annexed himself from Liverpool, from London, from the UK completely. And like Paul McCartney, like George Harrison, even like Ringo, he operated on a plane that purposefully positioned itself above criticism. He expected people to say his new records were brilliant and didn’t seem to care when critics said they obviously weren’t; after all, he was John Lennon, something they would never be.
His solo career had started proper with the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album in December 1970, which was such a statement of intent that it looked as though he would own the decade to come. “Working Class Hero”, “Mother”, “Isolation”, “Love”, there was hardly a duff track on it. Nine months later came Imagine, his commercial high point and his most memorable record, containing “Jealous Guy”, “How Do You Sleep”, “Crippled Inside” and the title track as well as perhaps his greatest ever solo recording, “Gimme Some Truth”.
Seriously, what couldn’t he do next? The expectation after the critical and commercial success of Imagine was almost overwhelming and, perhaps predictably – during the 1970s, every ex-Beatle appeared to make a habit of following gold star albums with mediocre sequels – the follow-up was a stinker. In the summer of 1972, he released Some Time In New York City, an agitprop double album that revelled in its exploration of sexism, racism, colonialism and incarceration. Mind Games, which appeared a year later, was certainly more orthodox, although the quality of Lennon’s songwriting seemed to be on the wane, with only the title track being worthy of inclusion on any subsequent greatest hits albums.
Walls And Bridges, which appeared in October 1974, was slightly better, with “#9 Dream” being one of the best singles of his career; May Pang, who was Lennon’s girlfriend for a while, said, “This was one of John’s favourite songs, because it literally came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote down those words along with the melody. He had no idea what it meant, but he thought it sounded beautiful.” Four months later came Rock’N’Roll, a collection of covers that included Lennon’s extraordinary version of the Leiber and Stoller classic “Stand By Me”.
After his son Sean was born in 1975 (on Lennon’s 35th birthday), he started a five-year hiatus from the music industry, looking after his baby and baking bread. When Double Fantasy eventually appeared, in 1980, Lennon appeared to have succumbed to Cyril Connolly’s trenchant quote about creativity and parenthood: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”
I disliked the record as much as everyone else, but I couldn’t accept the abuse Lennon continued to receive even after his death by some of the more committed members of the artistic community. In 1977, The Clash had rubber-stamped the punk ethos of a “Year Zero” mentality with their “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones” battle cry, but even to my callow ears this sounded like a lot of nonsense. I realised it was largely symbolism, but even though I loved The Clash, I was fairly suspicious; after all, I never trusted anyone who said they didn’t like The Beatles.
Didn’t then, don’t now.
One of Lennon’s very best songs actually comes from the Double Fantasy period, although it wasn’t released until 1984, on the posthumous Milk And Honey album. “Grow Old With Me” was recorded by Lennon as a demo while in Bermuda in 1980 and was later briefly considered as a possible follow-up (along with another Lennon demo, “Now And Then”) to “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love”, the reunion singles from the Beatles Anthology (both of which were also written by Lennon).
“For John, ‘Grow Old With Me’ was one that would be a standard,” said Yoko Ono, “the kind that they would play in church every time a couple gets married. It was horns and symphony time.” Like “Hey Jude”, Lennon imagined it as the sort of song people would sing around campfires. “[It] was a song John made several cassettes of, as we discussed the arrangements for it,” said Yoko. “Everybody knew how important those cassettes were. They were in safekeeping… All of them disappeared except the one on the end of the record. It may be that it was meant to be this way, since the version that was left was John’s last recording… recorded together in our bedroom with a piano and a rhythm box.”
The Lennons identified closely with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and “Grow Old With Me” is a response to Ono’s own song “Let Me Count The Ways” (based on Barrett and Browning’s Sonnets From The Portuguese), reflecting Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (“Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be”). Although unfinished and unpolished, the songs on Milk And Honey, in the words of Lennon expert Paul Du Noyer, “diarise his hopes and fears with compelling honesty”. “Grow Old With Me” was no different, an emotive plea that sounds not dissimilar to the bootleg demo of “Free As A Bird” – over-reaching vocals and faltering keyboards. It would be ten years before the song was turned into Lennon’s last mini classic.
Having had it rejected by the remaining Beatles for the third Anthology record, in 1996 Yoko asked Martin to overhaul the song for inclusion on the four-CD Lennon Anthology and he did it with ease. Martin liked the song more than any other Lennon demo he had heard since his death and used his considerable skills to give it the gravitas it needed. Its arrangement is unassuming, even business-like: the strings swell and the flutes trill in all the right places, leaving Lennon’s plaintive, occasionally maudlin voice to carry the song to its inevitable conclusion. Martin’s judgement is perfect, letting the song sing for itself. With its stately “Imagine” feel and the same vamping piano, “Grow Old With Me” is one of Lennon’s less flinty songs (when he chose to, Lennon was capable of mining even deeper seams of sentimentality than McCartney), almost a hymn.
If you feel the need to wallow, play this; a cathartic lump in the throat will appear. You can also hear it on the single CD of his Anthology highlights, Wonsaponatime, along with similarly moving versions of “Imagine”, “I’m Losing You” and “How Do You Sleep”. (Try placing it right at the end of the White Album, right after – or instead of – “Good Night” and see how well it fits.)
The Beatles should have persevered with “Grow Old With Me”. As a last hurrah it would have been a more than fitting denouement. And – unlike “Free As A Bird” – it wouldn’t have sounded anything like ELO.
Twenty-five years ago, I was invited by Yoko Ono to the seventh-floor apartment in the Dakota, the huge gothic block on New York’s Central Park West, which she once shared with her husband. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was John Lennon’s white baby grand, the celestial piano on which he wrote so many of his songs. Though it had been home to Ono since the couple bought it in 1973, to a visitor the gigantic nine-room apartment felt somewhat like a private chapel. I was asked to remove my shoes and the slightly religious sensation was intensified as the afternoon sun caught the piano’s white keys and the silver picture frames on top of it.
I just couldn’t stop staring. It wasn’t just the Beatles-related artefacts that appeared to be strewn, haphazardly, around the flat, it was the more prosaic realisation that, OMG, John Lennon had sat on that sofa, John Lennon had probably drunk from that mug and the same John Lennon had spent the best part of the 1970s looking out of his Dakota windows at Central Park. Look, I thought to myself, I’m doing it too! It was a weird sensation, briefly imagining yourself as John Lennon, a man who was as mythical as he was legendary, a man who could be as humdrum as he was remarkable.
Lennon was everywhere: staring down at me from the Warhol painting in the “black” room, in the photographs on the walls in the kitchen and in dozens of those silver picture frames on top of his piano (John with Yoko, John with Sean, John with Julian, John with Paul… but mainly John with Yoko). Apartment 72 was something of a museum too, because as well as the acres of Egyptian antiques and dozens of Ono’s own installation pieces, it was littered with paintings, lithographs and famous silk screens: a de Lempicka here, a de Chirico there.
This wasn’t Graceland, this was a living apartment.
It was here on 72nd Street that John and Yoko spent their five years of role reversal. While Yoko spent her days in their office on the ground floor, John would be upstairs, attending to Sean and “watching the trees change colour” in Central Park.
“This is where John used to bake bread,” said Ono as she showed me into the kitchen, with its spice jars, chopping boards and the unremarkable detritus of domesticity. “Every day he’d get up and make Sean’s breakfast while Sean played on the floor. Then he’d get up and make bread while I went to work downstairs. Often, I’d work at the kitchen table just to be near them. We were a family and this was our home, Sean’s home, and because of that I’ll never leave.”
Ono has had more than her fair share of bad press in the years since she first met Lennon. With his death, her press initially appeared to actually get worse, as if we somehow couldn’t bear the thought that she was still alive while he wasn’t (before I met her, one of Yoko’s American publicists even asked if I had any deep-rooted animosity towards her, as though it were a given; she seemed surprised when I said I thought she had actually been treated unfairly, although I can’t have been the first person to say it). This vilification is a cross she’ll probably have to bear until she dies, much like Linda McCartney, who until her death was also, rather disgustingly, considered to be Paul’s undoing, at least creatively.
In person, Ono certainly didn’t seem like a business barracuda, but then it was obvious from the way in which her underlings scattered from the apartment with the wave of her hand that she is probably a formidable boss. Tiny, dressed entirely in black, she was extremely birdlike, talking in short, staccato sentences. She seemed endearingly dotty rather than demonstrative, often repeating herself or misunderstanding questions. I’m sure she’s acutely responsible when studying the bottom line, but then, as the custodian of John Lennon’s estate, she ought to be.
The office on the ground floor of the Dakota was as fascinating as the apartment, being crammed with all sorts of valuable Beatles memorabilia and was where Yoko sat with her assistants, approving advertising artwork and plotting her husband’s online future. In her private office next door, fluffy white clouds floated across the sky-blue ceiling. There was a bronze sculpture of an apple with two bites out of it and, on her desk, a framed blank cheque, made out to Yoko and signed by John; I’m sure to certain cynics it would be an apposite approximation of their relationship.
“There are those who will never forgive me,” said Yoko, as I left the Dakota building that day. “They called me a professional widow, called me a dragon lady, called me lots of things, but you have to take strength from that. I can’t change the way people feel, I just have to deal with it in my own way.”
Nevertheless, the domestic bliss espoused by Double Fantasy would endure longer than some of Lennon’s other records – ironically, the magnificent “I’m Losing You”, which acknowledges the fragility of his and Yoko’s relationship, is the one song on the album that doesn’t sound as though it belongs there. When Paul McCartney appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1982, he included “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” (Lennon’s lullaby for his son Sean) and has since claimed it’s his favourite song by his ex-partner. It certainly contains one of his most famous lyrics, an aphorism that became instantly famous and continues to live on via the meme-sodden platforms of social media: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
Ain’t it just.
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