Imagine John Lennon at 80

It is said that John Lennon was conceived on the kitchen floor in January 1940 in the Penny Lane area of Liverpool while his father, Freddie Lennon, a merchant seaman, was on leave during the early years of World War 2. Whether that’s true or not, today would have been Lennon’s 80th birthday. He died 40 years ago after being shot by Mark Chapman outside the gate of his apartment in the middle of New York.

The world that John Lennon grew up in and which he sang and remonstrated about has changed almost beyond recognition. Music has moved far beyond the Beatles or the songs Lennon wrote and performed solo in the 10 years between 1970 and 1980 when he worked with the Plastic Ono Band and an eclectic range of other musicians.

Yet Lennon is still considered one of the most popular musicians of all time. His totemic song Imagine is listed by Rolling Stone magazine as the third-greatest song of all time, known by billions of people, sung most recently by groups of mourners on the steps of the US Supreme Court honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Five of the Beatles’ albums, mostly written by Lennon and Paul McCartney, feature in the top 50 of the Rolling Stone’s 2020 top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Forty years have passed since his death, but many of his songs are as relevant and scathing of the world aka 2020 as they were of the world circa 1970. Their enduring nature suggests that although technology, communication and politics may change the world’s surfaces, there are universal underlying themes that will never go away and play out in every era — and that Lennon had the knack of bottling them in his music.

For example, imagining a world “with nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too” is probably what we should all be doing in the post Covid-19 wastelands. But think also of songs like Gimme Some Truth, Freda People (Bring On The Lucie) and Working Class Hero, to name but a few.

But it’s important to remember that Lennon did not primarily sing about politics. His political songs seemed to come out of exasperation: “You say you want a revolution … but if you’ve got money for people with minds that hate, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyway,” he sang to the left in 1969. 

During the Beatles years and afterwards, he wrote a lot about love and youth; he experimented, he played with words and sounds and concepts, constantly shifting boundaries of his music.

John Lennon and his wife of a week Yoko Ono in their bed in the Presidential Suite of the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, in 1969. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The world that John Lennon grew up in and which he sang and remonstrated about has changed almost beyond recognition.(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)