John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBEwas an English singer and songwriter who co-founded the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. With fellow member Paul McCartney, he formed a lucrative songwriting partnership...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth9 October 1940
nice thinking class
I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.
artist hierarchy lucky
If you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio - it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again.
sex class people
To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul [McCartney] is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'.
kids views tvs
I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely.
brother trying wake-up
It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again.
mistake revolution sound
I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.
stupid mean class
I mean we [The Beatles] had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell .
children reality people
I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.
not-sure realising oppressed
I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.
people together able
All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state.
goal daddy reason
The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummy-daddy, will you love me?'
kids rocks break-through
When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids.
song europe scotland
Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of [Bob] Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.
sex pain singing
Before many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.