Being John Lennon

An intimate yet unsparing biography of one of the greatest and most mythologised musicians of the twentieth century.

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What was it like to be John Lennon? What was it like to be the cast-off child, the clown at school, and the middle-class suburban boy who pretended to be a working-class hero? How did it feel to have one of the most recognisable singing voices in the world, but to dislike it so much he always wanted to disguise it? How must it have felt, when he saw the melodies of his younger song writing partner praised so highly, and his own songs, in his eyes, undervalued? And what was it like to become trapped inside a four-headed deity knowing that it would become increasingly impossible to keep feeding the desires of its worshippers?

Being John Lennon is not about the whitewashed Prince of Peace of 'Imagine' legend, because that was only a small part of him. The John Lennon depicted in these pages is a much more kaleidoscopic figure, sometimes almost a collision of different characters.

He was funny, often very funny. But, above everything, he had 'attitude', his impudent, plain speaking somehow personifying the aspirations of his generation to answer back to authority. Rank and status didn't unnerve him. He could, and would, say the unsayable. Perhaps sometimes he shouldn't, and he would excuse himself later by saying, 'Oh, that was only me mouth talking.'

Though there were more glamorous rock stars around, even in the Beatles, it was John Lennon's attitude which caught, and then defined, the moment best.