John Lennon: The Dreamer Who Changed the World

It is hard to overstate John Lennon, because the thing he helped build — The Beatles — changed not just music but the texture of modern life. He was the sharp, restless, witty heart of the most important band that ever existed, half of the greatest songwriting partnership in history, and, on his own, the author of a song so simple and so vast that it has become a kind of secular hymn. He was complicated, often difficult, sometimes cruel and sometimes extraordinarily tender — and he was taken at forty by a stranger with a gun. The world has never quite stopped grieving.

Liverpool

John Winston Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 in wartime Liverpool. His childhood was unsettled — largely raised by his Aunt Mimi, his father absent, his mother Julia loving but intermittent until she was killed by a car when John was seventeen. That early loss became one of the deep wells of his songwriting. As a teenager he formed a skiffle group, The Quarrymen, and met a younger boy named Paul McCartney. The most consequential partnership in pop music had begun.

The Beatles

What The Beatles did between 1962 and 1970 still seems impossible: from the joyous rush of She Loves You to the studio revolutions of Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, they compressed a lifetime of artistic growth into a few short years and dragged the whole culture along with them. Lennon and McCartney pushed and sharpened each other; John's contributions — caustic, surreal, searching — gave the band its edge. By the mid-sixties they were, by their own half-joking estimate, more famous than almost anything on Earth.

Imagine

When the band fractured in 1970, Lennon, now with the artist Yoko Ono, made some of the most naked music of his life. Plastic Ono Band was raw therapy set to music; Imagine, in 1971, was its opposite — gentle, utopian, almost unbearably simple, a one-finger piano melody carrying a dream of a world without division. Whatever you make of its politics, it remains one of the most recognised and most sung songs ever written.

The Activist and the Househusband

Lennon spent the early seventies as a peace activist — the bed-ins, Give Peace a Chance, a running battle with a U.S. government that wanted him deported. Then, after a chaotic "lost weekend," he largely withdrew from music to raise his son Sean, becoming a househusband in the Dakota building in New York. It was a deliberate, contented retreat by a man who had been famous since he was twenty-two.

The Dakota

In 1980 he returned, newly happy, with the album Double Fantasy. On the night of 8 December 1980, outside the Dakota, he was shot and killed by a man who had asked him for an autograph hours earlier. He was forty years old. The grief was instant and global; vigils filled city squares; and Imagine became, permanently, the song the world reaches for in mourning.

The Legacy

Lennon's influence is simply too large to measure — in songwriting, in the idea of the pop star as artist and provocateur, in the very notion that popular music could carry serious weight. The Beatles remain the best-selling band in history, and his solo work gave the world an anthem it still cannot do without. He dreamed out loud, and the dream outlived him.

Lennon at Skeleton House

John Lennon runs through both of our tribute albums. On Legends Reborn he is the one singing — Ziggy — a tribute to the glam prophet Marc Bolan. And on the companion record Dead Reckoning, the roles reverse: he becomes the one being sung to, on Dreams for John, where Dolores O'Riordan reaches across to him. There's more on the whole project in the Legends Reborn and Dead Reckoning announcements.

Watch the Legends Reborn visual album →

He asked us to imagine. Forty-odd years on, we still are.