The story of John Lennon

A Liverpool boy

John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on the ninth of October 1940, in the middle of the Second World War. His parents gave him his grandfather's first name and, as a middle name, the name of the prime minister, Winston Churchill. His father Alfred, known as Freddie, was a merchant seaman who was hardly ever home, and the money he sent stopped during the war when he went absent without leave. His mother Julia was lively, funny and musical, but she was soon expecting a child by another man. In 1945 she had a daughter, Victoria, who was given up for adoption to a Norwegian couple under pressure from her family. After Julia's older sister Mimi complained twice to Liverpool's social services, Julia handed John over to Mimi and her husband George.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1946 Freddie took his five year old son to Blackpool, secretly planning to emigrate with him to New Zealand. Julia followed them there, and after a row the boy went home with his mother, though the details of that day are still argued over. Within weeks he was back with Mimi, and he would have almost no contact with his father for close to twenty years. He grew up at Mendips, a semi detached house on Menlove Avenue in Woolton, in the tiny bedroom over the front door. Mimi bought him books of stories, and Uncle George, a dairyman, did crosswords with him and gave him a mouth organ. George died suddenly in June 1955, at fifty two. John later said that five strong sisters were his real family.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At school John was bright, funny and difficult. He passed the eleven plus, which he later called the only exam he ever passed, and went to Quarry Bank High School in 1952. He was placed in the top stream and soon dropped down, fought, disrupted lessons and got a name as a bully. He filled an exercise book he called the Daily Howl with cartoons, poems and wordplay. He was also badly short sighted and hated wearing glasses. Meanwhile Julia, living nearby with her partner Bobby Dykins, taught him banjo chords and played him Elvis Presley records. In 1956 she lent him the money for his first guitar, a cheap Gallotone Champion, on condition it was delivered to her house rather than Mimi's.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the event that marked him for life. On the evening of the fifteenth of July 1958, Julia had been visiting Mimi and was crossing Menlove Avenue to catch a bus home. She was struck and killed by a car driven by Eric Clague, an off duty policeman who was still a learner driver. She was forty four. Clague was cleared of all charges, and Mimi called him a murderer. John was seventeen. For the next two years he drank heavily and got into fights, lost in what he called a blind rage. Having failed his O levels, he had got into the Liverpool College of Art only after Mimi and his headmaster stepped in. There he dressed as a Teddy Boy and was threatened with expulsion. Years later his mother's memory would shape some of his most personal songs.[1] [2]

The Beatle years, in brief

The Beatles have a dossier of their own, so here is the short version from John's side. In 1956 he formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen, and on the sixth of July 1957 he met Paul McCartney at a church fete in Woolton. Paul brought in his young friend George Harrison, and John's art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe joined on bass. By 1960 they were the Beatles, playing long overnight sets in Hamburg, where John, like the others, took the stimulant Preludin to stay awake. Paul later said the others looked up to John as their own little Elvis, the oldest, the quickest wit and the leader. In 1963 their first album, Please Please Me, was recorded in a single day, with John tearing his voice apart on the last song, Twist and Shout.[1]

At art college John met Cynthia Powell. He was jealous and possessive, and in her 2005 memoir she wrote that he once hit her after seeing her dance with Stuart Sutcliffe. She left him, then took him back after he apologised. In later interviews John admitted that as a young man he had hit women, and said that was part of the reason he talked so much about peace. When Cynthia became pregnant in 1962, he said they would have to get married. The wedding took place on the twenty third of August 1962 at a Liverpool register office, with Brian Epstein as best man, and John played a gig that night. Epstein asked them to keep the marriage secret. Their son Julian was born on the eighth of April 1963, while John was on tour.[1] [2] [3]

Beatlemania swept Britain in 1963, and in February 1964 the band conquered America on the Ed Sullivan Show. There was a dark side to John's temper. At Paul's twenty first birthday party in June 1963, a drunk John beat up the Cavern Club compere Bob Wooler, who had joked about the holiday John had just taken in Spain with Brian Epstein. John also became a published author. In His Own Write came out in 1964 and A Spaniard in the Works in 1965, both full of nonsense stories and drawings, and they were reviewed far more seriously than he expected. In 1965 all four Beatles were made MBEs. That same year a dentist secretly put LSD in the coffee of John, George and their partners at a dinner party.[1] [2]

In March 1966 John told the London journalist Maureen Cleave that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In Britain almost nobody noticed. Five months later, when an American magazine reprinted the remark, there were record burnings, threats and Ku Klux Klan protests, and it helped push the band to stop touring after the twenty ninth of August 1966. John then took his only acting role outside the Beatles, in the anti war comedy How I Won the War. His LSD use grew heavy in 1967, the year of Strawberry Fields Forever, Sergeant Pepper and All You Need Is Love. When Brian Epstein died in August 1967, John later said he knew straight away that the band was in trouble. By 1968 the Beatles were in India, then setting up their company, Apple.[1] [2]

Enter Yoko

On the ninth of November 1966, John walked into the Indica Gallery in London, where a Japanese artist called Yoko Ono was preparing an exhibition. The gallery owner, John Dunbar, introduced them. One piece invited visitors to hammer a nail into a board, and John wanted to try it before the show had opened. Ono said no, until Dunbar reminded her that this was a millionaire who might buy something. By John's account, she agreed if he paid five shillings, and he offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer in an imaginary nail. Ono later said he also took a bite out of an apple that was part of her work, which made her furious. She began calling and visiting, and John told Cynthia it was only about money for Yoko's art.[1] [2]

In May 1968, with Cynthia on holiday in Greece, John invited Yoko to his house in Weybridge. They spent the night making experimental recordings, tape loops, funny voices and electronic noise, and by dawn they were lovers. That night became the album Two Virgins. When Cynthia came home early, she found them sitting together in robes. A few weeks later John sought a divorce on the grounds of Cynthia's alleged adultery with an Italian hotelier, which she denied. In the end he let her divorce him instead, and in November 1968 she received one hundred thousand pounds and custody of Julian. Yoko was now at John's side in the studio for the White Album, breaking the Beatles' old rule about wives and girlfriends.[1] [2] [3]

Two Virgins came out in November 1968 with a cover photograph of John and Yoko fully naked, taken by John with a delayed shutter. EMI refused to distribute it, so it was sold in a brown paper bag, and thirty thousand copies were seized in New Jersey. John later joked that people were shocked less by the nudity than by two slightly overweight former junkies. The joke had truth in it. The couple were also using heroin around this time, and in 1968 John was convicted in London for possession of cannabis, a conviction that would haunt him in America. On the twenty first of November 1968, a few weeks after John's divorce came through, Yoko miscarried a baby boy. By then Lennon and Ono were inseparable, and many around the Beatles resented it.[1] [2] [3]

John and Yoko married in Gibraltar on the twentieth of March 1969. Knowing the wedding would draw the world's press, they turned their honeymoon into a protest. For a week at the end of March they sat in bed in room seven hundred and two of the Amsterdam Hilton, in pyjamas, receiving reporters from nine in the morning to nine at night and talking about peace. Many journalists mocked them, and John said being laughed at was part of the plan. They flew to Vienna for a press conference in a bag, sent acorns to world leaders to plant for peace, and told the whole story in the Beatles single The Ballad of John and Yoko. On the twenty second of April 1969, on the roof of the Apple building, John changed his middle name to Ono.[1] [2] [3]

A second bed in was planned for New York, but John's drug conviction kept him out of the United States. They tried the Bahamas, found it too hot, and settled on the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. When a reporter asked what he hoped to achieve by staying in bed, John answered that they were simply asking for peace to be given a chance, and turned the phrase into a song. On the first of June 1969, in room seventeen forty two, a local studio owner named André Perry recorded Give Peace a Chance on a four track machine, with Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, Allen Ginsberg and Petula Clark among those joining in. It was credited to Lennon and McCartney. That November a vast crowd sang it at the anti war Moratorium in Washington.[1] [2] [3]

Goodbye to the Beatles

In September 1969 John was offered a spot at a rock and roll revival festival in Toronto and put together the Plastic Ono Band in a hurry, with Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Alan White on drums. They had barely rehearsed. At the show on the thirteenth of September, John read the words of a brand new song, Cold Turkey, off a clipboard. The song was about coming off heroin, and the shivering and sweating that go with it. He had offered it to the Beatles, who turned it down, and it became the first song he released under his name alone. Its sleeve used an X ray of his skull, taken after he crashed a car on a remote road in the Scottish Highlands that July.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twentieth of September 1969 John told the other Beatles he was leaving. He agreed to keep quiet while their new recording deal was negotiated. That autumn he sent his MBE back to the Queen, in protest at British involvement in the war in Nigeria and Biafra and at support for America in Vietnam, and, he added jokingly, because Cold Turkey was slipping down the charts. His note was signed John Lennon of Bag. In December he and Yoko paid for billboards in major cities around the world announcing that the war was over, if you wanted it. That same month the Plastic Ono Band played a charity show in London with George Harrison and Keith Moon, while Yoko spent part of the set inside a white bag onstage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twentieth of January 1970 John and Yoko cut off their long hair, and later traded it to the Black Power activist Michael X for a pair of Muhammad Ali's bloodstained boxing shorts. A week later, on the twenty seventh, John woke up with a song in his head, finished it in about an hour, and called the producer Phil Spector, telling him to hurry to Apple because he had written a monster. They recorded Instant Karma that same evening at Abbey Road with George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Alan White and Billy Preston. Backing singers were rounded up from a nearby nightclub. The single was in British shops on the sixth of February, and John boasted that he wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch and released it for dinner.[1] [2]

Instant Karma reached the top five in Britain and America and became the first single by a solo Beatle to sell a million copies in the United States. Then, in April 1970, Paul McCartney announced his own departure while promoting his first solo album, and the world treated it as the end of the Beatles. John was furious that Paul got the credit. He later said he had started the band and he had ended it. From the first of April that year he and Yoko went through primal therapy with the American psychologist Arthur Janov, first in England and then in Los Angeles, reliving the pain of childhood. Their visas ran out in September, and Janov later complained that they had opened John up and had no time to put him back together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Primal scream and Imagine

Back in England, life kept testing him. Soon after they returned, Yoko miscarried again, at close to eight months pregnant. Then Freddie Lennon, newly remarried with a baby son, got back in touch, and John invited him to Tittenhurst Park, his estate in Berkshire, on his thirtieth birthday. It went badly. John launched into a furious tirade about being abandoned, and according to the account Freddie later left with his solicitor, John threatened to kill him. That same autumn, from late September 1970, John recorded his first real solo album at Abbey Road, with Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass. Ringo later recalled John bursting into tears or screaming in the middle of takes. Voormann said the old John was gone.[1] [2]

John Lennon slash Plastic Ono Band came out on the eleventh of December 1970. It was raw, stripped down and painfully personal, dealing with his mother, his class, his rage and his loss of faith in every idol, the Beatles included. John called it his best work so far. Critics were split, and some stations banned Working Class Hero for its swearing. It reached number six in America and number eight in Britain, well behind George Harrison's triple album All Things Must Pass, which hurt John. To promote it he gave a long, bitter interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, published as Lennon Remembers, in which he tore down the Beatles myth. Today the album is often ranked among the greatest ever made.[1] [2] [3]

In 1971 John moved further left. After an interview with the radical Tariq Ali, he wrote Power to the People straight away, though he later disowned it as a song written out of guilt. He and Yoko marched in support of Oz, an underground magazine prosecuted for obscenity in London. At home in the new studio at Tittenhurst Park, John finished a gentle piano song one morning, sitting at a Steinway in the bedroom while Yoko watched. Much of its idea came from Yoko's 1964 book of instruction poems, Grapefruit, and John later admitted he should have credited her. The song was Imagine. It was recorded on the twenty seventh of May 1971, and the second of three takes was the one the world knows.[1] [2] [3]

The Imagine album, released in the autumn of 1971, was the commercial hit John wanted. It topped the British chart and became the best loved record of his solo career. He described the title song as the same message as Working Class Hero with sugar on it. The album also carried a much less gentle track, How Do You Sleep?, a direct attack on Paul McCartney, who had aimed some digs at John and Yoko on his album Ram. George Harrison played guitar on the album, and in gratitude for George's help, John agreed to appear at the Concert for Bangladesh in New York in August 1971, but when George would not let Yoko take part, the couple argued and John pulled out.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine has since become one of the most played songs of the twentieth century. It was a number three hit in America in 1971, was not released as a British single until 1975, and went to number one in Britain after John's death. It has been sung at Olympic ceremonies, after terror attacks and at state funerals, and since 2005 it has been played in Times Square in the last minutes before the New Year ball drops. Critics have always argued about it, pointing out that a millionaire in a mansion was asking listeners to picture a world without property. In 2017, following John's own wish, Yoko Ono was formally added as its co writer, and in 2023 the Library of Congress chose it for the National Recording Registry.[1] [2]

New York radical

In August 1971 John and Yoko moved to New York, first to a flat on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. He never lived in Britain again. They quickly fell in with the Yippie activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. In December they flew to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a rally for John Sinclair, a poet serving ten years in prison for two joints of marijuana. John sang a song demanding his release to fifteen thousand people, and within days Sinclair was freed on appeal. That month they also released the Christmas single Happy Xmas, subtitled War Is Over, recorded with the Harlem Community Choir. It grew out of their billboard campaign, and it has returned to the charts again and again since.[1] [2] [3]

After British soldiers shot civil rights marchers in Derry on Bloody Sunday, in January 1972, John said that given the choice between the British army and the IRA he would side with the IRA. He wrote two songs about Northern Ireland for Some Time in New York City, a double album with Yoko and the local band Elephant's Memory, released in June 1972. It was pure protest, about prisons, feminism, race and Ireland, and its lead single used a racial slur in its title, so many radio stations refused to play it. The cover, laid out like a newspaper, showed a doctored picture of Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong dancing naked. Critics savaged it, the NME called John a pathetic, ageing revolutionary, and in America it stalled at number forty eight.[1] [2]

John was being watched. In February 1972 Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a memo that deporting him would be a strategic counter measure against his anti war influence, because Richard Nixon believed John's anti war campaigning could cost him re election. The next month the immigration service began proceedings, citing his 1968 cannabis conviction in London. The FBI followed him and, John believed, tapped his phone. In March 1973 he was ordered to leave within sixty days. On the first of April 1973 he and Yoko announced a new country called Nutopia, with no land and no borders, and waved its flag, which was made of white handkerchiefs. Bob Dylan wrote to the authorities asking that John and Yoko be allowed to stay.[1] [2]

On the thirtieth of August 1972, John and Yoko played two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden for the residents of Willowbrook State School, a New York institution for people with intellectual disabilities, at the request of their friend, the reporter Geraldo Rivera. The shows, called One to One, were John's last full length concerts. Two months later came an ugly night. After Nixon's landslide re election that November, the couple went to a gathering at Jerry Rubin's home. John, depressed and very drunk, had sex with a woman at the party, leaving Yoko, who was there too, humiliated. She later wrote a song about that night. Their marriage was badly strained, and Some Time in New York City's failure left John unwilling to record for almost a year.[1] [2]

The deportation fight dragged on for years. It finally ended on the eighth of October 1975, when a federal appeals court ruled that the courts would not tolerate selective deportation for secret political reasons, and in 1976 John received his green card. The full scale of the surveillance only came out after his death. Historian Jon Wiener sued the FBI in 1983 for its file on John and fought for fourteen years to get most of it released. The last ten pages, held back for decades on grounds of national security, were released in December 2006. They turned out to report little more than that John had talked about funding a left wing bookshop in London. Tariq Ali, who had pitched that bookshop, confirmed the story and joked about it.[1] [2]

The lost weekend

By mid 1973 John and Yoko were barely getting along. He booked musicians and wrote the songs for Mind Games in a burst, and it came out that November, a softer record than Some Time in New York City. Then Yoko made an extraordinary suggestion. She went to their twenty two year old assistant, May Pang, told her that she and John were drifting apart and that he would start seeing other women, and said May should become his companion. May protested that he was her married employer. Yoko said she would arrange it. John and May soon left for Los Angeles, beginning an eighteen month separation from Yoko that John later nicknamed his lost weekend, after the film of the same name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Los Angeles John decided to make an album of the old rock and roll songs he grew up on, and he handed full control to Phil Spector. The sessions at A and M Studios from October 1973 were chaos, with dozens of musicians and plenty of alcohol. Spector carried guns, and one night a shot was fired inside the studio. A bottle of whiskey spilled over the mixing desk and the studio banned them. Then Spector vanished with the tapes, calling John once to hint that he had them, and in March 1974 a car crash left Spector in a coma. The album was stuck. John, meanwhile, was drinking hard, and the rock papers were full of his late nights out.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1974 John made headlines twice at the Troubadour club in West Hollywood. First he stuck a sanitary towel on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress, and two weeks later he and his drinking partner Harry Nilsson were thrown out for heckling the Smothers Brothers. To prove they could work, John offered to produce Nilsson's next album, Pussy Cats, and May rented a beach house in Santa Monica for John, Harry, Ringo Starr and Keith Moon. During a late night jam, Nilsson ruptured a vocal cord and hid it, fearing John would stop the project. There were bright spots too. John played music with Paul McCartney for the first time in years, and with May's encouragement he rebuilt his bond with Julian.[1] [2] [3]

In June 1974 John and May moved back to New York, to a penthouse on East Fifty Second Street, and he stopped drinking to concentrate on work. The result was Walls and Bridges, released in September 1974. One track, Whatever Gets You thru the Night, featured Elton John on piano and harmony. Elton bet John it would reach number one, and John, who doubted it, promised to join him on stage if it did. In November 1974 it topped the American chart, his only solo number one single in his lifetime, and the album hit number one as well. On the twenty eighth of November John kept his word at Madison Square Garden, singing three songs with Elton. It turned out to be his last major concert.[1] [2] [3]

The rock and roll album brought one more fight. Years earlier, the publisher Morris Levy had sued John because a line in the Beatles song Come Together echoed a Chuck Berry lyric he owned, and they had settled on John recording three Levy songs. John gave Levy a rough tape, Levy pressed and sold it as an album called Roots, and then sued John for forty two million dollars. After two trials, John was awarded more in damages than Levy. The official Rock 'n' Roll album was rushed out in February 1975. That January, John had also played on Elton's hit cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and co written Fame with David Bowie. By early February, the lost weekend was over. He went home to Yoko.[1] [2] [3]

The househusband years

Yoko soon became pregnant again, after three miscarriages. On the ninth of October 1975, John's thirty fifth birthday, their son Sean was born. The day before, the appeals court had blocked his deportation. Yoko later said she had agreed to continue the pregnancy on condition that John take on the role of househusband, and he did. For five years he largely disappeared from music. He got up early to plan Sean's meals, had him photographed every day of his first year and made him countless drawings. He liked to tell people he baked bread and looked after the baby. His last professional recording session for four years was playing on a song he wrote for Ringo in 1976. His father Freddie died in Brighton that April.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He was not completely silent. In October 1977, at a press conference at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo, he formally announced that he was stepping back to raise his son. In May 1979 he and Yoko took out a full page open letter in The New York Times, explaining their quiet life to anyone who was wondering. At home in the Dakota building overlooking Central Park, he kept writing, sketching and making demos on a cassette recorder at the piano, songs including Free as a Bird, Real Love and Now and Then. He still followed Paul McCartney closely, and when Paul released Coming Up in 1980, John joked that he could not get it out of his head.[1] [2]

In June 1980 John set sail from Newport, Rhode Island, for Bermuda on a forty three foot schooner called the Megan Jaye. On the way they hit a severe storm. The crew of five were exhausted and seasick, and John ended up taking the helm alone for about six hours. It left him shaken and exhilarated. He said afterwards that he felt so centred that songs just poured out. He then spent three weeks in Bermuda with four year old Sean, calling Yoko and playing her new songs down the phone, and wrote around thirty songs. In the Bermuda Botanical Gardens he spotted a freesia called Double Fantasy, and decided it described his marriage perfectly.[1] [2] [3]

Back in New York, John and Yoko began recording at the Hit Factory on the seventh of August 1980 with producer Jack Douglas. The sessions were kept secret, partly because John was unsure he could still compete, and they paid for them out of their own pocket. When word leaked, every major label called. The couple chose David Geffen's new label because Geffen spoke to Yoko first and treated her songs as equal to John's, signing them before hearing a note. The single Just Like Starting Over came out in October, and Double Fantasy, alternating John's songs with Yoko's, arrived on the seventeenth of November 1980. Sales were slow, and many critics sneered at its cosy picture of married life. John gave long promotional interviews, including one to David Sheff for Playboy.[1] [2]

The eighth of December

Mark David Chapman was a twenty five year old former security guard from Honolulu and an obsessive Beatles fan. He had become fixated on the novel The Catcher in the Rye and its hatred of phonies, and had convinced himself that John was a hypocrite. On the twenty seventh of October 1980 he bought a Charter Arms thirty eight revolver in Honolulu and flew to New York. On the morning of the eighth of December he waited outside the Dakota. He even met Sean coming back from a walk with his nanny, and shook the little boy's hand. Upstairs, the photographer Annie Leibovitz was shooting a Rolling Stone cover, and John, naked, curled up around a fully clothed Yoko. Then John gave what would be his last interview, to a team from RKO Radio.[1] [2] [3]

At around five in the afternoon John and Yoko left the building for the Record Plant studio, to work on Yoko's song Walking on Thin Ice. On the pavement Chapman held out a copy of Double Fantasy for an autograph. John signed it and asked if there was anything else he wanted. An amateur photographer and fan named Paul Goresh took a picture of the moment, the killer and his victim side by side. Chapman later said that John had been kind and patient with him. The couple spent the evening in the studio. They came back to the Dakota at about ten fifty that night. John wanted to say goodnight to Sean before they went out to eat.[1] [2]

They stepped out of the limousine on West Seventy Second Street, rather than driving into the building's safer courtyard, and walked toward the archway. As they passed, Chapman fired five hollow point bullets from a few yards away. Four hit John in the back and shoulder. He staggered up the steps into the lobby and collapsed. The doorman, José Perdomo, knocked the gun out of Chapman's hand and kicked it away. Chapman took off his coat to show he had no other weapon, and when police arrived moments later they found him calmly reading The Catcher in the Rye. He made no attempt to run. Officers judged John too badly hurt to wait for an ambulance, laid him in the back of a patrol car and raced to Roosevelt Hospital.[1] [2]

At the hospital John had no pulse and was not breathing. Doctors opened his chest and massaged his heart while nurses poured in blood, but the bullets had torn apart the major blood vessels around his heart. John Lennon was pronounced dead at eleven fifteen that night. He was forty years old. Yoko asked the hospital to hold back the news until she could tell Sean herself. But a TV news producer who was being treated in the same emergency room phoned his station, and the word reached ABC's Monday Night Football. Frank Gifford urged Howard Cosell to announce it, and Cosell, who had once interviewed John on the same programme, told millions of viewers in the closing seconds of a game.[1] [2] [3]

There was no funeral. John was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, and Yoko asked the world for ten minutes of silence on the fourteenth of December. More than a hundred thousand people gathered in Central Park, and thirty thousand in Liverpool. George Harrison called the killing an outrage. Paul McCartney, doorstepped by reporters that day, could only mutter that it was a drag, and later explained that shock had left him unable to find the words. Just Like Starting Over and Double Fantasy went to number one in America and Britain, followed in Britain by Imagine and then Woman. In 1982 Double Fantasy won the Grammy for Album of the Year.[1] [2] [3]

Chapman's lawyers prepared an insanity defence, but in June 1981 he told the court God wanted him to plead guilty to second degree murder, and he did. In August 1981 he was sentenced to twenty years to life, and at his sentencing he read aloud from The Catcher in the Rye. He later admitted he had considered other famous targets and chose John because he was famous and convenient. Since he first became eligible in 2000, he has been refused parole at every hearing. In 2020 he told the board the killing was despicable and done purely for self glory. Yoko Ono repeatedly asked that he never be freed, saying he could strike again. As of 2026 he remains in a New York state prison.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After John

John's voice kept coming back. In 1984 Yoko released Milk and Honey, built from the Double Fantasy sessions, which led to a lawsuit in which producer Jack Douglas won millions in unpaid royalties from her. From 1988 to 1992, a weekly radio series called The Lost Lennon Tapes played his home recordings across more than two hundred hour long episodes to around seven million listeners a week. In 1994 Yoko gave Paul McCartney a cassette of demos, and the surviving Beatles finished Free as a Bird and Real Love for the Anthology project. A third, Now and Then, was shelved after, by Paul's account, George called the sound rubbish. In 2023, after machine learning software separated John's voice from the hum of his old tape, it was released as the last Beatles song and went to number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Memorials appeared around the world. In 1985 New York dedicated a part of Central Park opposite the Dakota as Strawberry Fields, with an Imagine mosaic donated by the city of Naples. In Prague, a wall covered in Lennon graffiti became a place of protest against the communist government. Liverpool renamed its airport after him in 2002, and in 2007 Yoko switched on the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, a column of light shone into the sky every year from his birthday to the anniversary of his death. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 1994, and in 2002 the British public voted him eighth in a poll of the greatest Britons.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His family carried on in their own ways. Cynthia Lennon died of cancer at her home in Mallorca on the first of April 2015, aged seventy five, with Julian by her side. Julian, who had hit the top ten in the eighties with Valotte and Too Late for Goodbyes, became a photographer and campaigner, and in 2020 he legally reversed his names so that Julian came first, saying he needed to be heard as himself rather than as John's son. In 2022 he sang Imagine publicly for the first time, for Ukraine. Sean became a musician and producer. As of 2026 he has guided lavish reissues of his father's work, calling the 2024 Mind Games box a love letter to his parents.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

John's legend has only grown since 1980. The Lennon and McCartney partnership is still counted the most successful in popular music, and John had a hand in twenty five American number one singles as a performer or writer. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth greatest singer of all time. He also left an awkward, honest record of his own failings, from the way he treated Cynthia and Julian to his drug use, and admitted most of it himself. In 2025 his politically charged early seventies music was gathered into a huge box set, Power to the People, overseen by Sean. And as of 2026, Sam Mendes is making four Beatles films due in 2028, with Harris Dickinson cast as John.[1] [2] [3]

The people around John Lennon

John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They met at the Indica Gallery in 1966, became lovers in 1968 and married in Gibraltar in March 1969. Ono was his artistic partner in bed ins, experimental albums, films and Double Fantasy, and he later said much of Imagine came from her. Many Beatles fans blamed her for the split. They separated from 1973 to 1975, reunited, and had Sean. She was beside him when he was shot, and she has guarded his legacy ever since.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Cynthia Lennon. John met Cynthia Powell at Liverpool art college in 1957. By her account he was jealous and once hit her early on. They married in 1962 when she was pregnant with Julian, and Brian Epstein kept the marriage quiet. After she found Yoko at their home in 1968, John sought a divorce, accusing her of adultery she denied. She wrote two memoirs, stayed close to Julian, and died of cancer in Mallorca in 2015.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The partnership that began at a church fete in 1957 ended in public bitterness. John was furious when Paul announced the split in 1970, attacked him in the song How Do You Sleep?, and argued with him in the press for years. They mended things in the mid seventies, even jamming together in 1974. Three days before he died, John said the only two people he had ever chosen to work with were Paul and Yoko, and that was not bad picking.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and May Pang. May Pang was John and Yoko's assistant when Yoko suggested, in 1973, that she become John's companion. Their eighteen month relationship produced Walls and Bridges, the song Surprise Surprise written for her, and her whispered voice on Number Nine Dream. She encouraged him to reconnect with Julian and with Paul. After John returned to Yoko in 1975, Pang said they kept seeing each other secretly for a time. She later married the producer Tony Visconti.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Julian Lennon. Julian was born in 1963 while his father was on tour, and John was distant for most of his childhood. After the move to New York they did not meet for two years, until May Pang arranged visits in 1973 and 1974. John bought him a guitar and put him on drums on Walls and Bridges. In 1980 John admitted Julian had not been planned, and after his death he left Julian very little in his will. Julian later reversed his names to be seen as his own man.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Lennon and Sean Ono Lennon. Sean was born on John's thirty fifth birthday in 1975, and his arrival turned John into a full time father for five years. John proudly said that although he had not given birth, he had made Sean's bones through every meal he cooked. Sean was five when his father was killed. As an adult he became a musician and producer, and he has overseen lavish reissues of John's albums, calling one a love letter to his parents.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Julia Lennon. John's mother gave him up to her sister Mimi when he was small, but in his teens she became his fun, musical ally, teaching him banjo chords and buying his first guitar. Her death in 1958, hit by a car driven by an off duty policeman, devastated him. She haunted his writing afterwards, most rawly on the Plastic Ono Band album, and the biographer Ian MacDonald called her, to a great extent, her son's muse.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Mimi Smith. Aunt Mimi raised John at Mendips in Woolton from early childhood. She was strict, doubted his music and famously told him the guitar would never earn him a living, and his misbehaviour caused long rows between them. Yet he stayed devoted. In 1965 he bought her a bungalow by the sea in Poole, Dorset, and he telephoned her every week until he died. She outlived him by eleven years, dying in 1991.[1] [2]

John Lennon and Alfred Lennon. Freddie Lennon, a merchant seaman, largely vanished from his son's life in 1946. He reappeared at the height of Beatlemania, working as a kitchen porter, and in 1965 even released his own single, which embarrassed John. For a while they kept in touch. But on John's thirtieth birthday in 1970, fresh from primal therapy, John exploded at him, and by Freddie's account threatened to kill him. Freddie died in Brighton in 1976.[1] [2]

John Lennon and Harry Nilsson. In 1968 John named Nilsson as his favourite American artist. The two became drinking partners during the lost weekend in Los Angeles, and were thrown out of the Troubadour together in 1974. John produced Nilsson's album Pussy Cats that year and helped keep him on his record label. After John's murder, Nilsson became an outspoken campaigner for gun control and gave royalties to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. He died in 1994.[1] [2]

John Lennon and Elton John. Elton dropped into the Walls and Bridges sessions in 1974 and added piano and harmony to Whatever Gets You thru the Night. He bet John it would top the charts, and when it did, John joined him on stage at Madison Square Garden that November. John also played on Elton's number one cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, credited as Dr Winston O'Boogie. Elton played Imagine at his 1980 Central Park concert, just blocks from the Dakota.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Phil Spector. Spector produced Instant Karma in a single night in 1970, then co produced John's first solo albums, including Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. John liked his speed and his wall of sound. In 1973 the partnership fell apart during the chaotic Rock 'n' Roll sessions, when Spector brandished guns, fired a shot in the studio and then disappeared with the master tapes for months. John finished the album without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about John Lennon

• John's harmonica came from an Edinburgh bus driver. As a boy John played a toy mouth organ on a bus trip to visit his cousin in Scotland. The impressed driver told him to come to the depot in Edinburgh the next day, where he gave him a proper harmonica a passenger had left behind.[1]
• Producer Jack Douglas claimed John tuned one guitar string slightly flat so Aunt Mimi could pick him out. According to Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas, since his Beatle days John habitually tuned his D string a little flat. The reason, Douglas said, was so that Mimi could tell which guitar was his on the records.[1]
• John was one of the first British musicians to own a Mellotron, in 1964. He acquired the early sampling keyboard in 1964, but it was not heard on a Beatles record until Strawberry Fields Forever in 1967.[1]
• He had a half sister in Norway he searched for but never found. His mother's daughter Victoria, born in 1945, was adopted by a Norwegian Salvation Army captain and his wife. John learned of her in 1964, placed an advert and hired detectives, but he died without ever meeting her.[1]
• John's father was once jailed for dancing in the street with a shop mannequin. In 1949 Freddie Lennon, drunk late at night, smashed a wedding shop window, took out a mannequin in a wedding dress and danced with it until he was arrested. He was sentenced to six months, which ended his career at sea.[1]
• Freddie Lennon released his own single in 1965, to his son's embarrassment. At the end of 1965 John's long absent father put out a record called That's My Life. John asked Brian Epstein to do whatever he could to stop it becoming a hit.[1]
• His old school hid his desk away when he became famous. Quarry Bank's headteacher had Lennon's desk unscrewed and locked in storage during Beatlemania, as the school saw him as a poor role model. It was rediscovered and went on display at a Liverpool Beatles museum in 2025.[1] [2]
• Instant Karma went from idea to record shops in ten days. John woke with the song on the twenty seventh of January 1970, recorded it that night, and it was in British shops on the sixth of February. Apple's adverts boasted it was written, recorded and remixed on the same day.[1]
• Instant Karma gave Stephen King the title of The Shining. King took the title of his 1977 novel from a line in the song's chorus. He had planned to call it The Shine, then realised the word had been used as a racial slur.[1]
• Lennon traded his and Yoko's cut hair for Muhammad Ali's bloodstained boxing shorts. In February 1970, at a publicity event in north London, the couple handed a bag of their shorn hair to the activist Michael X and received a pair of Ali's bloodstained shorts in return. The press turned up but barely reported it.[1]
• The Cold Turkey single sleeve is an X ray of John's own skull. The photographer David Nutter made the image from an X ray of John's head taken after a family car crash in the Scottish Highlands in July 1969, and placed John's round glasses over the eyes.[1]
• Cold Turkey was the first song John released under his name alone. Even Give Peace a Chance had come out credited to Lennon and McCartney. Cold Turkey, turned down by the Beatles, was the first Lennon composition to carry his sole credit.[1] [2]
• Give Peace a Chance was recorded in hotel room seventeen forty two in Montreal. The local studio owner André Perry brought four microphones and a four track machine to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on the first of June 1969, and later added extra voices to clean up the noisy room.[1]
• John and Yoko sent acorns to world leaders in 1969. As part of their peace campaign, the couple mailed acorns to heads of state around the world, hoping each would plant them as a symbol of peace. The episode even made it into The Ballad of John and Yoko.[1]
• Police raided John's erotic lithograph exhibition a day after it opened. His Bag One lithographs, drawn around his wedding and honeymoon, opened at the London Arts Gallery on the fifteenth of January 1970. Twenty four hours later police confiscated eight of the fourteen prints as indecent.[1]
• Allen Klein bought a spot in Billboard to tell Phil Spector that John was ready. When nobody could reach Spector before the Plastic Ono Band sessions in 1970, Klein took out an advertisement in Billboard that simply told Phil that John was ready that weekend.[1]
• In Japan, the Plastic Ono Band album was titled John's Soul. The raw 1970 album, heavily shaped by primal therapy, was released in Japan as John no Tamashii, which means John's Soul. Its back cover showed a school photo of the young John.[1]
• A Walls and Bridges drawing shows a goal from the 1952 FA Cup Final. The sleeve used John's childhood drawings, including George Robledo's goal for Newcastle United. John had lived at nine Newcastle Road as a baby and was fascinated by the number nine all his life.[1]
• The Walls and Bridges booklet claims John saw a UFO. On the evening of the twenty third of August 1974, John and May Pang said they watched a circular object float silently past their New York penthouse terrace. He noted the sighting in the album's booklet.[1] [2]
• Eleven year old Julian played drums on his father's album. The last track on Walls and Bridges, a cover of Ya Ya, features Julian on drums with John credited as Dad. Julian said that if he had known it would be released, he would have played better.[1]
• John recorded as Dr Winston O'Boogie and many other aliases. His credits on Walls and Bridges included names like Kaptain Kundalini, Dwarf McDougal and Mel Torment, and he played on Elton John's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as Dr Winston O'Boogie.[1] [2]
• John produced a Mick Jagger song in 1974 that stayed unreleased for over thirty years. Too Many Cooks was recorded in April 1974 with Lennon producing, but contractual problems kept it on the shelf. May Pang supplied the tape for its release on a 2007 Jagger compilation.[1]
• I'm the Greatest was the only session to unite three former Beatles before John's death. John wrote the song for Ringo's 1973 album Ringo, and George Harrison joined them in the studio, the only time three ex Beatles recorded together between the split and 1980.[1]
• His final stage appearance was a TV tribute to Lew Grade, with his band wearing masks on the backs of their heads. Recorded on the eighteenth of April 1975, it was a dig at Grade, whom John considered two faced. The masked backing band was called Etc.[1]
• The Rock 'n' Roll cover photo was taken in Hamburg years earlier. Jürgen Vollmer shot it in a Hamburg doorway, with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe as blurred figures walking past John. May Pang found Vollmer selling prints at a Beatles convention in 1974.[1]
• The Rock 'n' Roll album's working title was Oldies But Mouldies. The name only changed when John saw the neon sign mocked up for the cover, spelling out his name above the words Rock 'n' Roll, and decided it worked as the title.[1]
• Apple's Tony King dressed as the Queen to waltz with John in a Mind Games advert. King, a vice president at Apple Records, persuaded John to promote the 1973 album and appeared in drag as the Queen in the television commercial, and again as her voice in radio spots.[1]
• Double Fantasy was named after a flower John saw in Bermuda. While staying on the island in the summer of 1980, John spotted a freesia called Double Fantasy in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens and felt its name described his marriage.[1] [2]
• David Geffen signed John and Yoko without hearing a single track. Every major label chased the couple in 1980. Geffen won by insisting on speaking to Yoko first and treating her songs as equal to John's, and signed them on the twenty second of September.[1]
• The last Lennon cover of Rolling Stone was shot hours before his death. Annie Leibovitz photographed a naked John curled around a clothed Yoko on the eighth of December 1980. In 2005 American magazine editors voted it the best magazine cover of the previous forty years.[1]
• Howard Cosell had interviewed John on Monday Night Football six years before announcing his death on it. John appeared on the ABC broadcast with Cosell in 1974. On the eighth of December 1980, Frank Gifford persuaded a hesitant Cosell to break the news of the murder live during the game.[1] [2]
• Chapman was wearing a Todd Rundgren promotional T shirt under his coat. When he took off his coat to show police he had no other weapon, Chapman was wearing a shirt promoting Rundgren's album Hermit of Mink Hollow.[1]
• Keith Richards claimed he went looking for John's killer with a gun. In a 1995 NME interview Richards said he was only a few miles from the Dakota that night, got hold of a firearm and searched the streets for the gunman.[1]
• Rolling Stone's very first cover featured John. When Jann Wenner needed an image for the first issue in November 1967, he used a publicity still of John in the film How I Won the War, because it was the best thing to hand before the deadline.[1]
• Yoko once filmed critics watching a film of John's anatomy. At a 1969 press screening of Self Portrait, a forty minute close up of John's penis, Ono set up a camera to record the critics' reactions for a split screen work. It recorded nothing.[1] [2]
• A crater on Mercury is named after him. In December 2013 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the planet Mercury after John Lennon.[1]
• A long lost Lennon guitar found in an attic sold for about two point nine million dollars. The guitar, long thought lost, turned up in an attic and was auctioned by Julien's Auctions in 2024 for roughly two point nine million dollars.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.