John Lennon: beneath the surface of a flawed hero

John Lennon in New York CREDIT: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES

by Gillian Reynolds RADIO CRITIC

6 OCTOBER 2015 • 6:45AM

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If John Lennon had lived he would have been 75 on Friday, October 9, 2015. Instead, he was shot in 1980, outside the apartment building in New York where he had lived for nine years. Radio 2 has marked the anniversary with a two-part Monday-night series, John Lennon: the New York Years. Radio 4 devoted its Archive on 4 hour on Saturday to John Lennon Verbatim. All three programmes were made by Des Shaw for independents Ten Alps. There were thus bound to be common uses of source material, overlaps in the narrative but differences in style.

The Radio 2 series had film star Susan Sarandon as narrator, and drew on reminiscences from journalists, photographers and friends. Part one traced the rise of The Beatles’ fame in the US, from their first Ed Sullivan shows to after they split and Lennon, having fallen in love with Yoko Ono and out of love with Britain (lack of privacy, constant press intrusion), moved to New York, where he could go out for a chocolate milkshake in peace. Part two last night looked at the later years, how his music changed, why he loved the city so. Colourful, fast moving, it was hard to know who was talking because Sarandon breathed their names so softly.

Radio 4’s programme had no narrator but started further back, with what The Beatles wanted (to be bigger than Elvis) and ended with Lennon being happy, having come back to Ono (after an interlude with May Pang, one of the contributors to the Radio 2 shows) and able to write songs again. There was a real wealth here of Lennon being frank (about booze making him aggressive, for instance) and very funny (on the effects of taking LSD by accident in London) and equally open about how the Maharishi episode had left him destroyed.

But to whom was he talking, and when? This was clearly a conversation. Murmurs of encouragement were audible, sounding female but never identified. Why does it matter? Because what we say, whether in interview or casual conversation, depends on who is listening. Good historians always attribute sources and give their date. I wished for that here.