restlearn.blogg.se

He was similarly idle at art school, interested only in girls and the nascent Beatles, into which he inducted his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, a talented painter but no musician. Despite his intelligence and a middle-class home, teenage John was a troublemaker at school, and lazy with it, leaving without qualifications. When considering Lennon’s “enormous personality” – obsessive, cruel, kind, conceited yet oddly gullible – nature and nurture prove hard to disentangle. At 17 came the trauma of his mother Julia’s death after she was run over by an off-duty policeman close to Mimi’s house – she and John had recently become close. He subsumed his personality into hersĬonnolly is hardly the first to trace Lennon’s mixture of aggression, ambition and vulnerability to a fractured childhood that saw him abandoned by a ne’er-do-well father and a good-time-girl mother to be raised by his aunt Mimi, a prim, suburban snob. John was not merely in love with Yoko, but mesmerised. “You’re the journalist, Connolly,” fires back Lennon. “But you said not to tell anyone,” he complains to John after McCartney had beaten Lennon to the punch.

He’s well qualified, having struck up a camaraderie with Lennon over the late 1960s/early 70s a major regret is not announcing the Beatles’ imminent split after Lennon had tipped him off. What’s left to add?Ī veteran journalist and screenwriter ( That’ll Be the Day, Stardust), Ray Connolly lays no claim to fresh revelations about the life of the group’s self-styled leader, instead offering insights into Lennon’s complex, contradictory character.

In addition come scores of memoirs by friends, associates and exes, and explorations of every episode and facet you care to name – the Beatles and religion, when the Beatles met Elvis, the FBI and John Lennon – and even the odd critique of their music. The first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s projected trilogy on the Fabs alone runs to more than 900 pages. There are several “definitive” biographies of John Lennon, and even more tomes claiming to provide the ultimate lowdown on the Beatles’ well-documented career.