The Complex And Tortured Genius Who Imagined A Better World
I never met John Lennon. I came to the party a little too late. I was only just out of college and working for Chrysalis Records in London when the news broke that John had been killed. The ground floor of our West End building housed the production offices of AIR Studios, Beatles producer George Martin’s recording business. The entire staff gathered in shock to mark the moment. I will never forget the look on George’s face.
George had weathered with dignity, throughout the 1970s, endless public vitriol from his former charge. Lennon belittled George’s ‘influence’ and input, and denied him credit, while McCartney, Harrison and Starr, George revealed, ‘were always sweet.’ Implacably loyal, George was of course distressed by the news of John’s murder. There would not even be a funeral at which to pay his final respects. In the end, he fled to Montserrat, where he had opened his dream residential studio the previous year. He sat for hours, staring at the ocean, he later told me, while listening to Lennon in his head. The recording complex, indeed the whole island, would be flattened by Hurricane Hugo within the decade.
Only after John’s death did I begin to cross paths with others who had shared John’s life, and who shaped my understanding of him. Paul, George and Ringo. Maureen Starkey, Ringo’s first wife, who became a good friend. Linda McCartney, with whom I collaborated briefly on ‘Mac the Wife’, a memoir which never progressed. Cynthia Lennon, who invited me to discuss a new book. Her first, ‘A Twist of Lennon’, published in 1978, had left a bitter taste. She had been so frustrated at not being able to communicate with John after he left her that she had written the book as a ‘long, open letter to him, pouring it all out.’ With hindsight, she said, she would have done it differently. Now that the dust had settled on John’s death, she was keen to have another go. But she became immersed in a doomed restaurant venture, and the project was shelved. Years later, in 2005, she published ‘John’, a second memoir, which was much bolder and more confessional than her first.
By: Leslie-Ann Jones
Source: The Wire
