Years and Years - interviews with a Beatle, 1998

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Everyone seems to have something to say about John Lennon. From his days as a neerdowell Teddy Boy to his rancorous days as a rocker child in Berlin to multi-million selling rock n' roll icon, his life seems to be rich in stories, a biographers daydream. And he hasn't been especially guarded with his personal history. Especially as he journeyed inwards in the late 70's, Lennon was all to nonplussed when discussing how his mother and father all but abandoned him.

But that was then, and these stories have been told. It is now 1998. England has successfully clawed its way out from under Thatcherism and welcomed in Tony Blair's New style of Labour. Angry young kids from council estates, called Asbos, roam the streets. Bands like NSYNC and The Spice Girls have replaced the Fabs on the airwaves as the dominating force of youthful pop. In his modern flat in West Hampstead, Lennon spits on them all. To the now fifty-eight year old musician, it's more of the same. He's seen more than enough uptight short sided narrow minded hypocrites in his time.

"There was a time where I said I didn't believe in Beatles," he confesses. "But you look at what they're doing with music now and I take it back. You name me another group who had what The Beatles had. We came at the right time. We wrote some pretty good stuff, our own material. We didn't have writers. Now it all rolls out of this big factory like luncheon and I can't bloody stand it." he pauses, his train of thought catching up with him, as he looks out the window on to the street below. A pair of children punt a soccer ball worryingly near to his poppies.

"I voted for the Greens last election, did you lot remember that?" We did. Since the turn of the decade, Lennon has doubled down on his political buoyancy, taking to writing rambling op-eds in the Sunday Mirror when the biographical spirit takes him. "I mean, I would've voted for Georgie Galloway if he wasn't such a dingbat." he pauses again, his falcon eyes darting each time the ball threatens his garden. "Fat load of cobblers it'd do against Blair, tho."

By way of a wayward kick, the ball impacts the front-lawn flower bed. Lennon raps the window with a boney fist and tells the kids to shove off. One of them sneers, the other flips him the forks, before both bolt. A more youthful Lennon would have inevitably barreled out the door after them, using all manner of creative insults he has stored in his artillery. But that would've been before Woodstock. Before he lost Yoko. Before the Brighton Bombing. He turns.

"So did you want a cuppa before we start the inquisition?"​
 
Returning to his living room, Lennon sets two ceramic cups down on the coffee table. One, ours, is your bog standard British milky tea, with the bag left in. The other, his, is half-full of a thick, murky brown syrup. As he is on a macrobiotic diet, the singer-songwriter can only get his caffeine fix through rice grain coffee. He takes a sip, winces at the taste, then lights a Peter Stuyvesant. Cigarettes are in no way part of the macrobiotic philosophy, but it's too late to stop the smoke billowing, enveloping him like a shaman about to divulge cosmic secrets. Shrouded in a mist, this is the Lennon we all want to believe in, hiding away in his dwelling bathing in the all-knowing expanse. Poetic exaggeration aside, the smoke does sift softly in the midday sun shining through the windows, and a somewhat frail old man, aging well for his age, sits across from us in a comfortable sweater with a dress shirt underneath, both in his signature egg white. He sits back in his recliner. "Fire when ready, corporal. Show limey no mercy."

We don't. We ask about his brood.​

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above: Julian Powell

The eldest scion of the Beatle children, young Julian always seemed to be in the spotlight one way or another. These days he has found media attention without the addition of his biological father, gaining notable notoriety with his band, the Mums (guitarist Steve Turner, drummer Jason Finn and bassist Jeff Ament, with all Freudian psychoanalysis notwithstanding), at time of writing halfway through their sophomore tour of the European circuit. Lennon has actually been called into the studio a few times, his son wishing for the musical advice on one of the biggest musicians to ever grace the charts in a gaudy grey collarless suit. Understandably, seeing as how he disintegrated his first marriage and acted uncaring as he jumped into a new partnership with Ono, their relationship has been slightly fraught.

Lennon: "I wasn't the best father to Jules. I never was. I don't think I'll ever be, especially after the shit I pulled with his mother. He says he gets it, but does he really? I'd come home from touring for months and there'd be this boy, this child who I wouldn't recognize in the slightest. Every time I'd stop touring it was like having a new kid to deal with. Of course now he's older, so we can relate to more things like the music he's doing and the girlfriends he's wooing, but it was still tough to build that back up. It honestly broke my poor we heart when he insisted on taking his mothers name. Cynth [Cynthia Powell] and I talk on the phone, of course, but there's still that air of mistakes being made. And I'm not denying I didn't make the mistakes. I just don't think I can say anything to make it magically repaired. Its long and arduous but it's what I needed to do, after everything."​

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above: Kyoko Chan Cox
Kyoko was the firstborn child of Yoko Ono and former producer Anthony Cox, who is currently serving time in a minimum security prison somewhere in South Gate, California, for spreading E Coli to various Oregon salad bars on orders of the Rajneeshpuram. While there are a handful of black-and-white photos of a young Kyoko being paraded and coddled with her mother and new father, she hasn't spoken to Lennon in years, having moved away to regions unknown. All attempts to reach out to her for the purposes of interview were unsuccessful. It seems she's now living the quiet life.

Lennon: "Try as hard as I might, Kyoko is her mother's daughter, not mine. I might have legal custody but she has her autonomy and I respect that. Of course I'd prefer her off being her own person than having anything to do with that cultist scab. We were all into our peace back in the 60's but Christ, there's a finesse to it. Back during the custody battle he actually tried to abduct her. If he did I bet you we would've never heard anything from them again. He seems like the type. If I caught a whiff of something bad with the Maharishi, you damn well know I'd steer clear of Osho, or whatever he calls himself."
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above: Emi Ono-Lennon

Out of the three, Emi is the only one born from both Lennon and Yoko, brought into the world in late 1968. From the outset she seemed to have the entire world against her, as her being began to partition the attention of her father away from his band. Whether or not the Beatles were already at each other's throats by the end of the sixties was a nonstarter. She seems to be an understandably peculiar blend of both aspects of her parentage - she displays the same world-weariness and intensity as her mother (who, it's worth noting, she has become a mirror image of), as well as the inherent musical talent and razor-sharp lit of her dear old dad, of whom she learned at the knee of ever since the tragic car accident that took Ono's life in 1969. Like her half brother, she performs in her own band, the Rubber Bands (lead guitarist Nick Valensi, rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti, a group of New Yorkians in the Beatle mold), who were noted for how quickly they were snatched up by Domino records, which is where, matter of factually, she met her current flame, Alex Turner. Ironically enough, she seems to be taking a path very similar to that of her mothers when it comes to seasoning with a notorious front-man of an increasingly popular band several years her junior.

Lennon: "Emi was always going to be special. It's a miracle she wasn't miscarried after all the smack we were doing, and the stress of the raids and our age difference. And then after that she managed to live through the crash. It was baffling how well-lived she turned out to be. Give her time, she'll end up being a better musician than me. Not to mention she came in at the best time. All that screaming you lot gave Yoko crap for started being popular once the 80's ticked over. I always knew she would be clever like that."​
 
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I'm glad to see that this TL is chugging along. Always interesting to read more Beatles TLs although I'd like to see the American rockers get more love--if anyone remembers them!
 
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