“I don’t want to be another John Lennon anymore. I want to be myself’

You’ll just be the son of an adored pop star. Always the uncertainty that you only get attention and work because you are the son of. And then they always compare your albums with your father’s. You see them thinking: ‘Less’.

British pop singer Julian Lennon had had enough. The son of Beatles leader John Lennon opted for the flight forward: he named his new album Jude. A clear reference to the Beatles hit “Hey Jude”. On the cover you see him as a child.

Julian (Liverpool, 1963) is a child from Lennon’s first marriage, born in the early Beatlemania. His father was not at his birth due to Beatles commitments, and was rarely home after that. When his parents divorced in 1968, and Lennon disappeared from Julian’s life, his colleague Paul McCartney wrote the song ‘Hey Jude’ for the abandoned son, to encourage him.

Since then, for Julian, Lennon was mostly an absent father, who hardly paid any attention to him. Lennon moved to New York with his new wife Yoko Ono, estranged from his British friends and family. The attention he denied his first son, he put into his second son Sean, whom he cared for for the first five years. Just before Lennon was murdered before his New York home in 1980, he said in an interview that Julian was born “from a whiskey bottle.” In other words: in a drunken stupor, unplanned, unwanted. After his death, Julian said bitterly: “Daddy was a hypocrite. To the world he spoke of peace and love, but he could not show it to his wife and child.”

When Julian released his first album in 1984, Valotte, almost all critics wrote that his voice was so similar to that of his father. Initially Julian was successful with his soft rock, including the hit ‘Too Late for Goodbyes’but after the hit ‘saltwater‘ (1991) that became less and less. Until he completely stopped his music career in 2011, and focused on documentaries and photography.

I see ‘Hey Jude’ as the beginning of my musical journey

Why the title ‘Jude’?

“I did that on purpose so that you would ask this question. I wanted to reclaim the name ‘Jude’. Until now, it’s always been the name others framed me as the boy that song was about.

“I’ve always felt a bit lost, I’ve had my share of depression and anxiety attacks. The corona crisis, when I was almost alone at home for two years, forced me to take a good look in the mirror. Who am I? Am I happy? Am I gloomy? If so, how can I fix that? I wanted to finally get myself together and fill the gaps in my life.

“In my passport my name was ‘John Charles Julian Lennon’. That means I was always told at customs, “Hey, you’re John Lennon. Witty.’ [Vermoeid:] fuck off! Every time that confrontation. I already had a panic attack on my way to the airport. I didn’t want to be another John Lennon anymore. I wanted to be myself. That’s why two years ago I had my name changed to: Julian Charles John Lennon. I put myself, Julian, first. It’s like shedding the old skin. I want to do it on my own terms from now on, I want to become a happier and more positive person.”

Wouldn’t you rather break free from the eternal association with your father and the Beatles?

“I can’t run from it, I can’t hide from it, so I better respect and accept that legacy. Paul wrote “Hey Jude” for me when I was five, and the lyrics remained appropriate for the rest of my life. ‘Take a sad song and make it better‘. I see ‘Hey Jude’ as the beginning of my musical journey. I’ve answered literally every possible question about the Beatles and my father in my life. Now I want to continue.”

The Beatles have often crossed Julian’s path lately. To raise money for his charitable fund, he held an NFT auction of Beatles memorabilia, including the handwritten lyrics to “Hey Jude.” In the spring of this year he sang for the first time ‘imagine‘, his father’s best-known solo hit, for a Ukraine benefit. He also watched the new documentary with his half-brother Sean Lennon Get Backabout the recordings of the LP let it be. In pop magazine mojo he said: “It reminded me of what my father was like when we were together: so crazy, smart, funny and idiotic. I loved him so much again.”

Why did you return to music?

“I had to self-publish my last two albums, without the support of a record company. I couldn’t exactly pay the bills from the sale. So I tried other careers, documentaries, photography, and it worked out really well. So I proved to myself that I could do more than sing songs. That was a relief.

“Then a former financial advisor, who retired, gave me a few boxes from his basement. Most contained financial papers, but one contained demos, in all possible formats. Some I had recorded thirty years ago. I listened to them and thought some of them were quite good. So I started tinkering with it, initially with the idea of ​​extracting a few singles or an EP. But gradually it became an album. I was able to do it at my own pace without further pressure. That made it feel very different from the previous albums.”

“My oldest friend, guitarist Justin Clayton, helped me. My memory is a cheese hole, but he remembered exactly which guitar we had used from every demo, and that I was wearing a black T-shirt then and then. I used a lot of the original vocals. Those demos were all recorded with a drum machine, because that was fashionable at the time. So I dubbed real instruments over it. Four songs are really new: ‘Freedom’, ‘Gaia’, ‘Breathe’, and ‘Lucky Ones’. Sound engineer Spike Stent has mixed the album in such a way that it still sounds like one unit. He did a Nigel – he turned the album to eleven, just like in the movie This Spinal Tap.”

Why the cover photo of yourself as a child?

“I found the look in my eyes striking. That photo was taken by May Pang, we were at Disney World with Dad. Someone said the photo is reminiscent of the cover of With the Beatles: with the face so half in the shade.”

Christmas vacation 1974, eleven-year-old Julian went to Disney World in Florida with his father. The photo may mark the last time he saw his father. In an earlier interview, Julian said: “For me at the time, the big question was: how long is this going to take? Is he going to leave me again?”

At the time, Lennon was temporarily separated from Yoko Ono. His girlfriend May Pang tried to mend Lennon’s older relationships, including those with McCartney, and those with his ex-wife and son Julian. So during the year and a half that Lennon was with Pang, Julian saw his father more often. When Lennon went back to Yoko Ono after this, he broke those contacts again. The ones he left out in the cold, Pang, Cyntia, and Julian, kept in touch.

That Christmas break at Disney World is also significant in the history of the Beatles. There and then Lennon signed the papers officially ending the band, more than five years after the four members were last together.

What did you see in the child’s eyes?

“A lost soul, I think. But also determination. He knew he would survive, and that it would propel him to better things.”