Forty years since John Lennon died
2020 will see the 40th anniversary of ‘the first rock and roll murder’ and the loss of a superstar. In the first in a series on milestones in the coming year, produced with Huddersfield University, David Behrens recalls the day the music died.
ANNIVERSARY: Had he lived, John Lennon would have turned 80 in the coming year.
Instead, the world will mourn the 40th anniversary of his assassination.
He was shot in New York and his death shocked many. It started a wave of mourning not seen since the killings of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s.
HAD HE lived, John Lennon would have turned 80 in the coming year. Instead, the world will mourn the 40th anniversary of his assassination.
As death came, on a winter’s morning on a New York sidewalk and the world woke up to what it had lost, it was swept by a wave of mourning on a scale not seen since the killings of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s.
Lennon had been largely out of the public eye for a decade, but his life, it seemed, had touched everyone.
“There was an enormous realisation after his death, when Imagine became a big hit again. Up to that point, everybody always thought The Beatles would get back together at some point,” said Rupert Till, a professor of music at Huddersfield University.
The tragedy had come at a time when, for some, The Beatles represented the music of yesterday. Lennon had retreated into family life with Yoko Ono and their new son, and Paul McCartney had poured his energies into a new band, Wings.
“Nobody was driving The Beatles’ back catalogue and no one was pushing to keep them in the public eye,” Prof Till said.
“There was a reclusiveness about Lennon, and before he died there was a sense that to some extent people had forgotten about him.”
The shock of his killing on December 8, 1980, and the senseless nature of it at the hands of a lone gunman who considered himself a fan brought the bout of temporary amnesia to an abrupt end.
“There are not many figures in the world whose death everyone remembers,” said Prof Till.
“But Lennon was such an important name. He came to represent the whole Sixties culture of peace and love and he spoke for that generation.” The ironies surrounding his death were profound. Not only was he beginning to resume his solo career, having just released an album, but the man most synonymous with the psychedelic era of love and harmony had been the victim of the first rock ’n’ roll murder.
His new LP, Double Fantasy, had met only a lukewarm reception three weeks earlier. But upon his death it went to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Its stand-out track, Starting Over, topped the singles charts and his classics from a decade earlier, Imagine and Merry Christmas (War Is Over) made the top 10.
However, in perhaps the most off-message Christmas chart of all time, just three weeks after the shooting all were usurped by the St Winifred’s School Choir from Stockport singing There’s No One Quite Like Grandma. But Lennon’s place among the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century – and not just for his music – was never in doubt.
“He became as much a political figure as a musical one and in the counterculture of the anti-war protests in America he was really very important. People had enormous respect for him,” said Prof Till.
It had not always been so. In the 1960s, Lennon had been reviled in the USA for suggesting The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. It wasn’t a boast, he explained, just a statement of fact.
His views on Vietnam were also not universally well received and hindered Lennon’s attempt to secure the Green Card he needed to remain with his family in New York. The pragmatist in him may have influenced his decision to take a step back from the spotlight, Prof Till believes.
“You always wonder whether his Green Card was one of the reasons why he became less vocal about politics in the end,” he said.
“There must have been huge pressure on him to stop doing that sort of thing if he wanted to have a kind of reasonable family life.”