Choosing Lennon Over McCartney

When did John Lennon first enter your life? Well, it was 1963 when they had a hit. I was 15, I was right in the target area for that kind of thing, for pop music aimed at fairly young teenagers. That was The Beatles’ music in the first place. It was a big part of my experience listening to music in the first place, but I have to say, I was already listening to blues and harder rock music in the south of London, where I come from, so I thought, “You know, The Beatles are good, but they’re a pop band and I sort of like the blues and stuff like that.” I became a singer and a bass player in a blues band when I was 16 and continued on with that.

But I always liked commercial pop music. I never had a snobbish attitude about it like some of the other hardcore musos did. I always liked it, and I always admired the songwriting of Lennon and McCartney, but I also read in the papers every day about the stuff that John Lennon was doing. however, I never had any intention of doing any shows or anything. I was never a particular fan, you know? I never had any posters on my wall of anything, actually - there were just things I liked and things I didn’t like.

I realised after Lennon had been shot that he personally had left more of an impression on me than I first thought, because it was such a stunning and horribly senseless thing and it really took the wind out of the sails, particularly of people in the music business. It seemed really, totally ridiculous. And then, of course, it was 12 years later and I was trying to think of an idea for a show for myself and I thought, “Well, nobody’s done anything about John Lennon! Why Don’t I do that?” And this was it.

How did you go about developing the idea? How did the initial concept differ from what finally wound up on the stage? I had a concept in my head. I wanted to do a show that was just me and music and perhaps one other person - and I already had Stewart D’Arrietta in mind, because we were already friends and we’d been working together in music. I thought, if I’m going to do something about John Lennon, I’d like to not really directly impersonate him. I don’t want it to be a cover act, I just want it to be a performance piece where Lennon just sort of comes out of me. 

And the songs of his are very autobiographical - the songs tell the story. I thought, “now, this can’t be a play, this can’t be a boring history, it’s gotta be just bits and pieces”. So I thought, as he’s facing a man across the street from his apartment building in New York and he’s 40 years old and he’s just making a comeback with music and he’s happy and the guy pulls a gun on him and shoots him, I imagined as those bullets left the muzzle of the gun, if you were to really slow time down like a million times, it would be like how a drowning man is supposed to see his life flash before his eyes while he’s dying. I thought, what would be in his mind? Little highlights of his life - the good things, the bad things, a few crazy things, a few quirky things, and I’ll just toss them all up in the air and pout them down as they fall.

What was your research process like? I had very little research time to go out and search and trawl through libraries and buy books, but I had a couple of books and I did go specifically to a music shop and a book shop. At the music shop I got a book where I could have all the lyrics, because of course I needed very much to do that. And another book was kind of interesting - an interview with Lennon not long before he died. It was him with a full, complete life behind him - or as complete as it can be at the age of 40 - and it gave me clues as to the way I should go about writing the show. But I didn’t lift passages from anything - I wanted it to be filtered through me, but I wanted to control the monologue. It’s very much an interpretation by me of Lennon, rather than me saying this is the definitive version of John Lennon - because it obviously isn’t.

Why do you think his legend, his mythology, stands so apart from that of The Beatles? It is an interesting question. Look, no matter what Paul McCartney may say - brilliant man though Paul McCartney is - and no matter his followers may say, they may like him better, think he’s a better songwriter, fair enough, everybody’s got their own opinion, but The Beatles was John Lennon’s band. One of the key things to me about his personality is that, for all this talk about who was the boss of The Beatles, was it Paul, was it John - you only had to be around for five minutes: it was John. It was very obviously John. 

But he didn’t do that in an egotistical way; it was just very much his band. He had this great egalitarian working relationship with McCartney so that, no matter what songs they wrote, together or separately, they would always be called Lennon and McCartney songs, and that was an agreement between two mates aged 16, I think, and it was carried through into all the publishing contracts that they had. So you can’t say he was doing that in any egotistical way. But certainly, I think that his personality shaped The Beatles. 

After doing this show for so long, what keeps you engaged with the material? Well, I do love doing these songs, and I do love the feeling I get from the show. I’ve been lucky enough to come up for a piece for to do that involves actually talking and singing directly to an audience in a very personal way, and they get held spellbound. I can tell that I’ve got them right there in the palm of my hand. It’s a very powerful feeling, and it’s not a feeling that just anything you do on the stage will give you. And I love it. 

Originally published in X-Press Magazine