Our Cargo Party: Flavia

Our Cargo Party: Flavia: If you cook with gas, turn the flame up, make sure there’s a blast, face like a stone, it’s the way you love, beat...

Our Cargo Party: Flavia

Our Cargo Party: Flavia: If you cook with gas, turn the flame up, make sure there’s a blast, face like a stone, it’s the way you love, beat...

Robert

Tell me, tell me why, they treat you like a seer, my lips dance in delight, you command such lovely air, bells ring out the night, candle scent and myrrh, if we each die , there’s no call for stolen tears, it demands we have to try, a disco ball of flair, the proud call out their fears, our joys held in tight, I walk like a man gone by, through the city's streets, so hot they seem to fry, every little lair, bring songs to all its ears, as if we have no care, our ship is full of iron, they love orators here, in darkness comes a lullaby, souls rise up to share..

Challenge

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, the author, Francis Kenny is uniquely placed to challenge orthodox versions of the ‘Lennon Story’. The Making of 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. As ever, it all starts in Liverpool.

Author

The Making of 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 and hurl him towards a self-contradictory persona; a series of domineering patterns of behaviour in his relationships that would ultimately feed into the breakup of The Beatles.

John’s life is too often airbrushed. Some views have been distorted with a view to making the Lennon ‘story’ acceptable to the reader; a saintly, refined version of John at which he would have balked. The Making of 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 Matthew 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 his 1974 Rock ‘n Roll album, the ‘greaser’ look head was removed and replaced by the more acceptable ‘mop top’ image. 

Big Gob

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 Indian mystic aficionado and Paul as self-assured musical hall performer, John is introduced as Frankenstein’s monster!

Identity

As a teenager, John’s character and musical creativity were strongly influenced by his attempts to gain access and acceptance within a culture of rock ‘n roll, set within a largely blue collar teenage population in Liverpool’s inner city.  He was determined to shed a background in the leafy boulevards and manicured parks of Woolton by adopting a smokescreen of rebelliousness, sarcastic wit and belligerence. He desperately needed to have a grounding to support his vulnerable self-esteem. It was in rock ‘n roll that he found an identity which was to be crucial and life-saving. John’s life support of music and writing was also to be supplemented by the cultural impact of the city and port of Liverpool. John desperately needed and wanted the raucousness, spontaneous humour and vibrancy that could be found in Liverpool’s blue collar life.

In these teenage years, 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.