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.

Art

It was at Mendips that the apprenticeship of his creativity was to be found in the self-defence mechanism of isolation, of story writing, books and poetry. All were to nurture a personal declaration of his art, and later, the studio was to provide a platform for others to support his genius. In many ways, John Lennon falls into history’s category of the tortured artist. As he himself declared:

All art is pain expressing itself. I think all life is, everything we do, but particularly artists – that's why they're always vilified. They’re always persecuted because they show pain, they can't help it. They express it in art and the way they live, and people don't like to see that reality that they're suffering.{1}

As a musician and artist he displayed a fierce independence and marched to the beat of his own drum, but at the same time he was dogged by insecurity, pessimism and depression. For all his musical and artistic success, John was forever haunted by fears, living most of his life shadowed by doubt. On meeting John, Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline was to comment that ‘John’s whole history speaks to a desperate kind of nurturing’.{2}

Home

As a child, John Lennon’s mind was a fog of confusion, ‘rejected’ by both parents and forced to accept life under an Aunt who was, by all accounts, a dictatorial head of household. This left him isolated and constrained. For the young John, the restrictive and critical atmosphere during his time being brought up at his Aunt’s Mendips home fashioned emotional scars that never fully healed. 

From almost the time of his separation from his mother, Julia, John began to develop defensive, hostile and aggressive behaviours. Even with the long-awaited success of The Beatles, he still couldn’t shake off the dread of being unloved that he carried with him in his early years. 

Although he was known to wear his emotions on his sleeve, shown with brutal transparency in songs such as Help and Nowhere Man, to a large extent his childhood memories were so painful that most of the bruises remained on the inside. He may have remained forever hostage to his childhood, but it was during this time that the young John learned to use his talent as a barrier against the intermittent periods of despondency. 

The Pool; making of John Lennon

Introduction

John Lennon was one of the most radical and controversial musical icons of the 1960s: even after his death over 30 years ago he  still remains celebrated around the world as a figure of musical genius, and one of deep contradictions. Despite his global fame, John’s ‘real identity’ has been notoriously difficult to pin down, but  a major, and accepted, aspect of his challenging and confrontational attitude has been cited within his early years in his home town of Liverpool. John’s life began, and was tragically cut short, in port cities – Liverpool and New York – each facing each other across the Atlantic Ocean; each on the edge of their own countries. Ports whose histories were defined by the contradictory cultural norms of their home country: Edgy Cities, Sister Cities, held in communion and bonded through an intertwining cultural conduit set out by a Trans-Atlantic trade route and an Irish Diaspora.