John Lennon

The Noise That Shook Liverpool

John Winston Lennon was born at the maternity hospital on Oxford Street while German aircraft were bombing Liverpool in 1940. His childhood was anything but idyllic (his father disappeared early on, and his mother was run over and killed by an off-duty police officer). He grew up with his aunt Mimi at a house called Mendips, where she kept telling him that the guitar was fine as a hobby but that he would never make a living from it.

Mimi was wrong about almost everything.

In 1957, he met Paul McCartney at a church fair in Woolton. Lennon led a skiffle group called The Quarrymen and was looking for someone who knew how to tune an instrument. The chemistry between them was immediate because they shared the loss of a mother and an ambition that didn't fit on the Mersey docks. So they started writing songs together in the living room of the McCartney house.

The band was an internal combustion engine.

In 1962, they signed with Brian Epstein and recorded Love Me Do. The band went from playing dive bars in Hamburg to filling stadiums in the United States in less than two years. Lennon was the intellectual leader (the sarcastic one who told the posh seats to rattle their jewelry instead of clapping). But the touring schedule eventually wore him down, and in 1966 they decided to stop playing live and lock themselves in the studio.

Cameras, Sand and Desert

In 1967, Lennon traveled to Almería to shoot the film How I Won the War under the direction of Richard Lester. It was a strange project that aimed to satirize traditional war movies. During the weeks of filming in the Spanish desert, he started wearing the round glasses from the British National Health Service that would become his most recognizable physical trademark. The shoot was slow and tedious.

And it was during those downtime moments that the melody of Strawberry Fields Forever was born.

His relationship with film was always strained. In 1964 he starred in A Hard Day's Night, and a year later in Help!, but he never felt comfortable playing a sugarcoated version of himself. He preferred experimental cinema and the conceptual films he made with Yoko Ono in the late 1960s. In 1969, the couple married in Gibraltar and turned their honeymoon into a political protest from a hotel bed in Amsterdam.

Lennon officially left The Beatles in September 1969, although the announcement was not made public until months later. He needed to purge his past, and he did so with the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in 1970. It was an exercise in primal therapy, where he screamed out his childhood traumas over a bare piano and drums. It sold less than his former band's records, but it earned the critical respect that he had been obsessed with.

The Pavement of New York

He moved to Manhattan in 1971, seeking to escape the scrutiny of the British press and the conservatism of his homeland. There, he settled in the Dakota building facing Central Park. The Richard Nixon administration tried to deport him for years because of his activism against the Vietnam War, since they saw him as a threat to the president's reelection. Lennon spent a fortune on lawyers until he secured permanent residency in 1976.

After the birth of his son Sean, he decided to step away from public life. For five years he baked bread and took care of his family in their New York apartment while the rest of the music industry was transformed by punk and disco. He did not record anything professionally between 1975 and 1980.

His comeback came with the album Double Fantasy, recorded at the Hit Factory studios in New York during the summer of 1980. The record explored maturity and domestic life with a clean production that moved away from his earlier experiments. The production cost thousands of dollars, and critics were not especially kind to the initial result.

On December 8, 1980, Mark Chapman fired five shots at him at the entrance of the Dakota building. Four bullets hit his back, and a police officer rushed him in the back seat of a patrol car to Roosevelt Hospital. Doctors attempted emergency CPR by opening his chest, but the damage to the major blood vessels was irreversible. The official death report was signed at 23:07.