Being John Lennon by Ray Connolly

Being John Lennon by Ray Connolly

What was it like to be John Lennon? What was it like to be the castoff child, the clown at school, and the middle-class suburban boy who pretended to be a working-class hero? How did it feel to have one of the most recognizable singing voices in the world, but to dislike it so much he always wanted to disguise it?

Being John Lennon is not about the whitewashed Prince of Peace of Imagine legend--because that was only a small part of him. The John Lennon depicted in these pages is a much more kaleidoscopic figure, sometimes almost a collision of different characters.

He was, of course, funny, often very funny. But above everything, he had attitude--his impudent style somehow personifying the aspirations of his generation to question authority. He could, and would, say the unsayable. Though there were more glamorous rock stars in rock history, even within the Beatles, it was John Lennon's attitude which caught, and then defined, his era in the most memorable way.

Born in 1941, Connolly was brought up in Lancashire and attended the London School of Economics, where he read social anthropology, and where Mick Jagger was a fellow student. He then interviewed sixties pop stars for the London Evening Standard. He has written numerous newspaper articles for the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer.

Connolly has written several novels, including Sunday Morning and Shadows on a Wall, the movies That'll Be the Day and Stardust, the television series Lytton's Diary and Perfect Scoundrels and a biography of John Lennon. He also worked with record producer Sir George Martin on the television series The Rhythm of Life, and has written TV plays, films and documentaries, radio plays, short stories and much journalism.