John lennon’s talents, contradictions and self-inventions

Author: Ray Connolly

WHY another biography of John Lennon? Surely, almost 40 years after his death, there can be nothing left to say about this legend?

Veteran British music journalist Ray Connolly thinks there is, and so

Being John Lennon: A Restless Life saw the light – a likable, workmanlike but hardly revelatory book.

The bare bones are well known: the Liverpool boyhood, absent father; the accidental friendship with Paul McCartney; the Beatles; superstardom. The band’s breakup in 1970 is hardly less well-documented. So what does Connolly add?

Connolly met Lennon while working as a music writer for the London Evening Standard, and they apparently had a warm relationship; Connolly had plans to travel to New York on the eve of Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980, for a BBC series. He writes: “I cancelled my flight… I had an obituary to write.”

Connolly occasionally relays personal conversations that prove legitimately new and interesting. He recalls, for example, Lennon saying that his youthful ambition was “to write Alice in Wonderland and be Elvis Presley” – a prophetic a description.

Connolly traverses Lennon’s life with authority. He is correct, I think, in identifying Rubber Soul

(1965), as the band’s creative zenith and questions if Sgt Pepper’s Lonely

Hearts Club Band truly “deserves the highest praise”. Connolly also brings gravitas and nuance to his analysis of Lennon’s relationship with Yoko Ono, 85. Despite the book’s many fine qualities, there remains a nagging sense that it doesn’t really add anything profound.

Connolly’s account of Lennon – “a labyrinth of contradictions”, emphasises his sardonic, rebellious, self-inventing qualities

– traits self-evident in virtually everything he ever sang, said or did.