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!