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
dream pain memories
When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.
children eye mind
When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.
sex people realising
How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.
world firsts rays
The first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC.
pain growing-up parent
All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.
thinking difficult workers
Of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather anyway.
song real singing
There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.
waiting police green
I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.
revolutionary communist shouting
I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it.
games class russia
As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.
song rock-and-roll america
Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.
morning stars reading
I keep on reading the Morning Star newspaper to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.
views order should-have
After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.
football america giving
I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing 'All together now' - that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up 'Give peace a chance' because I had written it with that in mind really.