If John Lennon hadn’t died four decades ago

WOULD THE BEATLES HAVE REFORMED? WOULD HE HAVE CHANGED HIS POLITICS? AND WHAT ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH YOKO ONO? BEATLES EXPERT KEN McNAB EXAMINES WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

IN THE soft glow of a cinema, the moment arrived without warning and unleashed a tsunami of the senses. I could feel it building in the pit of my stomach, gathering pace with an almost overwhelming force. The last time I experienced this kind of emotional overload was watching my daughter being born. Glancing to my left, I saw a man in his fifties shifting uncomfortably in his seat, dabbing his eyes.

Others around me had let out an audible gasp at the sight of the old man whose weathered features filled the big screen; standing at the door of an isolated cottage beside the sea, long hair flowing, those familiar glasses covering an imperious stare and that aquiline, almost aristocratic, nose. Here was the incredible sight of John Lennon brought impossibly back to life by the magic of a movie.

“Are you John?” asks the film’s main character Jack. “Yes,” answers the figure at the door in mild Scouse. “From Liverpool?” Again, the answer is yes.

As the conversation unwinds, Jack discovers Lennon is 78. “Fantastic,” he joyously declares. “You made it to 78.” The final scenes of Yesterday, Danny Boyle’s dreamy 2019 rom-com that imagined a world where only a handful of people were aware of the Beatles and their legacy, provided a portal to an alternative reality that posed this tantalising question:

What if Lennon had somehow survived the assassin’s bullets that brutally snuffed out his life on December 8, 1980, outside the gothic New York home he shared with his wife Yoko Ono and their five-year-old son Sean?

Or simply had a sliding-doors moment that enabled him to avoid this fate.

What path might his life had taken in the four decades since his murder?

Would he have continued to pick up the threads of the musical comeback he was embarking on that winter with the release of Double Fantasy, the seventh album he had released following the omni-shambles of the Beatles’ split?

Might he have resurrected the activism that forced Richard Nixon to wage a shameful war of harassment to try and hound him out of the US?

How would this mass communicator have embraced the internet? Would he have sanded down the hard edges of his relationship with “his old, estranged fiancé” Paul McCartney?

And might they have tried to rekindle that profound Beatle chemistry by regrouping with George Harrison and Ringo Starr?

Or would he, in fact, have once again stepped back from fame’s bitter-sweet allure? Lennon was once asked if he had a vision of himself when he was 64? He did. With his marriage to Ono rebuilt after a shaky 1970s, he replied: “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland, looking at our scrapbook of madness.” Lennon’s cinematic cameo – a lost future resurrected by an uncredited Robert Carlyle – was clearly a cosmic conundrum that brought back painful memories for Boyle when he first read Richard Curtis’s script for Yesterday.

“It was an absolute aberration in time,” said Boyle of the musician’s death.