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An intimate yet unsparing biography of one of the greatest and most mythologised musicians of the twentieth century.

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What was it like to be John Lennon? What was it like to be the cast-off child, the clown at school, and the middle-class suburban boy who pretended to be a working-class hero? How did it feel to have one of the most recognisable singing voices in the world, but to dislike it so much he always wanted to disguise it? How must it have felt, when he saw the melodies of his younger song writing partner praised so highly, and his own songs, in his eyes, undervalued? And what was it like to become trapped inside a four-headed deity knowing that it would become increasingly impossible to keep feeding the desires of its worshippers? Being John Lennon is not about the whitewashed Prince of Peace of ´Imagine´ legend, because that was only a small part of him. The John Lennon depicted in these pages is a much more kaleidoscopic figure, sometimes almost a collision of different characters.

He was funny, often very funny. But, above everything, he had ´attitude´, his impudent, plain speaking somehow personifying the aspirations of his generation to answer back to authority. Rank and status didn´t unnerve him. He could, and would, say the unsayable. Perhaps sometimes he shouldn´t, and he would excuse himself later by saying, ´Oh, that was only me mouth talking.´

Though there were more glamorous rock stars around, even in the Beatles, it was John Lennon´s attitude which caught, and then defined, the moment best.

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Connolly, the author of Being Elvis, takes a sensible route down the path dividing the saint and the monster in
this careful, thoughtful biography. It´s a well-told story, but Connolly has a substantial advantage: as a journalist for the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times, he came to know Lennon well enough to be invited repeatedly to his Berkshire house, Tittenhurst Park ... Yet Connolly wears his acquaintance lightly, never forcing himself into the narrative or sinking into the hideous mateyness that can blight rock biographies ... For Connolly, it is Lennon´s insecurities that are ultimately most revealing, rooted in an unsettled childhood in Liverpool´s postwar suburbs ... Connolly does all this with quiet expertise, an understated writer who collates all the details into a vivid whole ... [N]either hatchet job nor hagiography, Being John Lennon swerves dead-hero worship. What survives is the complicated, enduringly fascinating man
Victoria Segal Sunday Times 20181007

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Connolly, Ray
Ray Connolly is a journalist, novelist and award-winning screenwriter who has also written television series, films and documentaries as well as several radio plays and short stories. The author of BEING ELVIS: A LONELY LIFE, he contributes regularly to the DAILY MAIL, having also written for the London EVENING STANDARD, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER and the DAILY TELEGRAPH. He is married, has three children and lives in London.

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