The Lady 6.12.10
It’s early December, short days, Christmas lights, and the radio is playing Beatle records. Do you get the feeling we’ve been here before? We have, every December since the night a mad fan ended John Lennon’s life with five bullets, and, in so doing, turned the witty, provocative and sometimes wilful musician into a martyred saint. That was thirty years ago, which makes this year a special anniversary.
The shooting happened at just before eleven at night on December 7, 1980 in New York, which was already nearly four in the morning on December 8 if you were in Britain. Nearly everyone who was old enough to realise who John Lennon was can tell you exactly where they were when they heard the news.
I was asleep in bed in Wimbledon when the phone woke me at 4.30. In the darkness I thought it must be someone calling to tell me that I’d overslept and the taxi to take me to Heathrow was waiting outside my house.
I was, you see, due to fly to New York that morning to interview…John Lennon. I’d had a phone call from Yoko Ono the previous afternoon wondering why I wasn’t already in New York, so had arranged to fly over on the first plane the next day.
Before I’d gone to bed at midnight I’d called John, only to be told by a secretary that he’d gone to the recording studio, but had left a message saying he was looking forward to seeing me again and that I should go straight to the Dakota when I got in. Four hours later on returning home he was murdered.
I didn’t catch the plane to New York. Instead I did what the journalist who woke me with the news expected me to do. I wrote about John Lennon; and on TV and radio I talked about him, as I’ve done at the beginning of December several times since.
Something has struck me this year, though, that I seem to have overlooked before. It’s that, even before the murder, there was always something very pre-Christmassy about the Beatles. From their eruption in 1963 to the beginnings of their dissolution in 1969 their music dominated almost every Christmas, with an album and a single released at exactly this moment, just in time to be bought as presents and played at parties.
So iTunes’ recent issuing of the entire Beatles’ canon for downloading to our MP3s was following in a well-worn tradition. Whether they get the Beatle Christmas number ones they were hoping, we’ll have to see. Does the magic still linger?
Actually there’s something ironic about the way Lennon’s own magic has been reshaped since his death. He used to say he didn’t “believe in dead idols, like Elvis and James Dean,” but he’s now the biggest dead idol of them all.
Not only that. He wasn’t averse to using his fame for what he believed to be worthwhile causes, but I can’t imagine he ever expected his image to be used to sell Citroen cars, as happened this year.
Always the first to make a joke against himself, he’d no doubt have laughed it off, as he probably would have when his Imagine lyric about there being no heaven, “above us only sky”, was used as the motto for Liverpool John Lennon Airport. Helping sell charter flight seats to Benidorm wasn’t actually what Imagine was about.
Of course, if he was wrong and there is a heaven, this year’s biopic about his teenage years, Nowhere Boy, must have had him scratching his head lugubriously. “I never knew I was so unfunny,” I can almost hear him saying of the wrong-footed movie.
Cynthia Lennon, his art college girl friend and first wife, put it another way: “So, who was that about?” is said to have been her reaction after seeing the film, puzzled, no doubt, that her large part in Lennon’s young life had been written out of history.
Without Mark Chapman, John could have expected to have had his seventieth birthday a few weeks ago. How, we wonder, might he have spent the thirty years he was denied? Paul McCartney has recently been in Brazil with the world’s best Beatle tribute band, but Paul always liked performing more than John.
My guess is that Lennon, always the dilettante, would have been more of a writer. He liked words, enjoying letter writing. I received some very funny ones. So he would have loved email and Twitter, turning up on chat shows occasionally, jokingly blunt as ever, always ready to call a spade as spade…even when it was just as likely to be a wheelbarrow.
