John Lennon on ‘The Circus That Had To End’ (Radio Times, May 1972)
(This interview is a transcription of a phone from John Lennon who was then living in New York.)

            “It’s so much easier to be in the audience. Being up there on the stage is just pain and torture. There you are like Aunt Sally waiting to get things thrown at you. I mean, how often did the Beatles enjoy a show? Maybe one show in 30 would give us any kind of satisfaction – and we’d have to go through all kinds of hell for that. All this talk about the glamour of clubs and gigs is just a dream. I was just a performing flea for a group of people. I know it was of my own choice – but all the same that’s what I was. I suppose I was just setting myself up to get knocked down again, in a way – rather like the way you do when you perform for your parents. It’s still the same now when I make a record. I mean, why do I make records? Not for money, and certainly not for fun. It’s bloody hard work.
            “And there’s the loneliness, too; what I mean is that I’m lonely in the universal sense. When I have toothache I’m alone. But not socially. How can I be lonely when I have Yoko? I know we haven’t got many friends, but I never did have. We have each other and there are no outside desires. The Beatles used to be my friends, but they were also the people I worked with. We were friends and we had a function. But the function ended and the relationship had nothing to last on except memory, and it broke down. I see Ringo and George – they’re my friends, but I have no time sense, so although I may not see them for six months it only seems like yesterday to me.
            “I went through a period of trying to encourage Paul by writing and saying things that I thought would spur him on. But I think they were misunderstood. That’s how “How Do You Sleep?” (on the “Imagine” album) was intended. Although I suppose it was a bit hard on him. But that was just how I felt when I wrote and recorded it. Paul and Linda came to see us in New York a few months ago, and it was great to see how affectionate they were with each other. Just like Yoko and me. Of course there’s still some disagreement over the business side of things.
            “I know a lot of people were upset when the Beatles finished, but every circus has to an end. The Beatles were a monument and had to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens they were scrapped. Now when I go out and do live shows again – and I want to get on the road with the new band I’m working with, Elephants Memory, as soon as I can – it won’t be like four gods on a stage. That’s gone for ever.
            “Basically we were four individuals who eventually recovered their own individualities after being submerged in a myth. Really all we were was a band that got very, very big.  Our best days were in fact before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House,” and we’d do it and make it last about ten minutes, singing the same verse over and over again.
            “Some people like Mick Jagger have said that we weren’t such a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. By the time we’d begun going on tour we’d got to the stage of cutting our act down to about half-an-hour or something like that. We were the best bloody band there was. We’d play for hours. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of these I’ve written.
            “At first Paul and I would write a lot together – although not all the time, like everyone thought. But it got to be less and less. Paul is inclined to create people in his songs and write about situations, where I began to write more and more about me – nearly always in the first person. When my first solo album came out it was criticised for being so personal, but if the idiots who were criticising it had listened to my earlier songs they would have known that I’d been writing from inside myself for ages. The same idiots then praised “Imagine” because they said it was less “whining” – but it was just as personal. All we did was to add a few strings and things to make it a bit less harsh. It’s laughable to read all the bullshit written about our records … you know, all that intellectual stuff …
            “Basically I’m just a rocker. And that’s the way I’ve always been. The other week we had Chuck Berry on some American television show that we did. And it was just great … I mean really great for me to be playing with Chuck Berry.”

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