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It Was 40 Years Ago Today

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Most played record on the radio today?
It’ll probably be Imagine, but there are better songs in his catalogue

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  5. Was literally about to post this with exactly the same headline! I heard the news first thing iTthat morning (the 9th in the UK) when one of my flatmates burst into my room to tell me. She was pale with shock at the news, and I remember going through the whole day in a daze, simply not able, or not wanting, to believe it. Still the death outside friends and family that has shocked me more than any other at the time of its happening.

  6. I was 10 years old and had no idea who John Lennon or The Beatles were (sheltered childhood?).
    By the end of day (after watching Nationwide) I knew Lennon was a bloke with a bushy beard who had a funny coloured Rolls Royce and he used to be in a band with that bloke who sang Mull Of Kintyre.
    The voyage of discovery started here …

  8. 18 years old, living in Liverpool, 7.30 am news on Radio 1 let me know (on the 9th), had an exam that day, didn’t go too well.

    This song got to me then, still does now (Beautiful Boy is harder)

  9. Strangely subdued anniversary for once.

    Arguably JL’s last truly great song, Wheels took on a strange poignancy after the unimaginably awful thing that Chapman did.

  11. Question for those who were around in 1980. Was it the manner of his death that shocked, or his age, or the (perhaps sudden) realisation that even The Beatles weren’t immortal?

    • A bit of all of that, I think.

      I was 19 in ’80, and he was a peripheral figure to me musically at the time, more my elder brother’s cup of tea, but of course I appreciated who he was and what he’d done. I wasn’t particularly fond of what I’d heard of the Double Fantasy album, but I was pleased he was back.

      For me, the very sudden, unnecessary and violent nature of his death was the most shocking thing.

    • The manner of his death was unbelievably shocking. And I think it was much more upsetting because he had just returned to music after a 5 year absence and seemed to be looking forward to the future with some optimism. There are debates about this, but, from the outside, he seemed to be the happiest he had ever been in his short difficult life.

    • Agree with Slug and dai – it was all of those, exacerbated, as dai says, by the fact that he had just released an album after years of silence. The nature of the death was profoundly shocking of course, but I think that the death however it happened of a Beatle – especially Lennon and McCartney- would have still had a similar effect. To me, as 23 year old when he died, it felt like they had been around forever. They went through a period of being almost viewed as passé- certainly they weren’t the top listens for most teenagers in the mid and late seventies. But for all that they still cast a long shadow, and the feeling that they might one day get together again never quite went away. Not until December 1980 that is.

      • Interesting that you say The Beatles were considered passé. During one of his interviews (possibly for the Nothing is Real Podcast, though I can’t be sure) Lewisohn told a brief story about how during the first few Beatles conventions, there were about seven of them. After Lennon’s death, they just got bigger and bigger.

        In my lifetime they’ve always been huge. The thought of only seven out-of-touch people, clinging onto their past, whilst everyone is listening to Bowie or Punk, Disco, New Wave (etc) amazes me.

        • I wonder if it’s a case that your generation, having all the music available to them and, therefore, approaching it all with equal interest is different to how we were back then. I got into music in the early seventies and it was all about Top Of The Pops and THE CHARTS. Hence my comment on another thread about laughing at the rock and roll revival. And, yes, by 1975 I thought of The Beatles as naff music for Dads. (Mind, we didn’t have pop radio in Ireland so when they did throw us a bone it was always the Daddest Fabs songs – Yesterday, Let It Be, Long And Winding Road, Hey Jude etc – so I built up a powerful resistance at a young age..)

        • I was 16 living in South Wales. The Beatles were certainly not passé in my school. Copies of Sgt Pepper, etc were circulating around the school before John Lennon’s death. Admittedly some had got into the White Album after a TV documentary about Charles Manson.

  12. Better Imagine than all the terrible covers of it on pan-pipes or whatever. Without the saving grace of JWL’s voice it really has become the epitome of naff, an aural Hallmark.

    I have never once heard Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out, presumably because the final line, “Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground” are a bit too Banquo’s Ghost.

    Great song though but.

  13. I was somewhat uninterested in him at that time. I didn’t feel anything particularly although I remember where I was when I heard and how others reacted, which was more strongly than me. Clearly it was a big story and shocking in it’s nature but in those days there was less going on about such things, as I recall anyway, but then there wasn’t the same platforms for pontificating and agonising, which was more healthy really. It’s grown as an event in my thoughts as time has past and I’ve got more immersed in the old band, what with books and podcasts and the like. I don’t have a sense that there were these great possibilities for a reunion or fantastic new music but I can at least wish the poor guy had had a reasonably long life.

    I would say some of those late songs are pretty great, like Watching the Wheels and I’m Losing You but none of the ex-Beatles were coming up (!) with anything terribly challenging, indeed it was all a bit middle of the road and soft so a reunion didn’t fill me with much of a thrill, more a sense that they would disappoint. Live Aid and the like could have been rather a travesty.

    • You’re right about the media coverage although of course it was the lead story everywhere for a few days. I remember being in London that day Christmas shopping and desperately buying the Evening Standard to get my first update since the morning radio news. No relentless news feed in those days.

      I also remember, presumably the next morning, John Peel being interviewed about Lennon on the Today programme, I think by John Humphreys. When he, or whoever the interviewer was, commented that Lennon’s new album was a return to his best, Peel, bless him, demurred and made clear that he didn’t actually think much of it. Can’t imagine that happening now.

      • That was very much the case; Double Fantasy was notable at the time solely because it was the first music from him for five years, but content wise, I don’t recall anyone on its release thinking it was up to his past efforts. It was generally considered to be disappointing, and I actively disliked the first single from it, Just Like Starting Over. It wasn’t till after his death that the ‘return to form’ remarks started.

      • Peel was with Andy Peebles, who also played extracts from that final BBC interview for the first time. The interview was turned into a six-part series early in 1981. I wonder what the original broadcast plans were for that.

        Peel described DF as “sentimental” and also said that he and Sheila had missed seeing John and Yoko since they moved to New York.

  14. When he died, Lennon was most particularly to be found on the radio or, even more so, in the pop chart (a real pop chart where people went out to buy records), but as late as 1980 I don’t think the mainstream media knew the first thing about pop music and, the very early Record Collectors aside, there really wasn’t really a music press beyond the inkies … and they were as useful as a pot of silver polish at White Hart Lane.

    So, I remember the coverage, certainly after the first week, to have been rather slight.

    If (let’s assume “when”) Paul dies, I think the reverse will be true.
    The “One Show” will show a couple of songs, we will be told millions have been streamed or “Hey Jude” has “dropped” at No. 1 or some such tosh, but it’ll largely be commemorated, in public at least, with words and analysis.

    • I remember differently. This was the biggest news story regarding a single person’s death since the death of JFK. Saturated coverage for at least a week in the newspapers. They would have not have had a music critic in those days working for them, but there was NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror to dedicate special issues to his life, career, death and legacy. No 24 hr news channels but the BBC gave over it’s whole evening to Beatles/Lennon related viewing. Would that happen now? I don’t think so.

      • You said it yourself, “at least a week.”
        After that the heavy load was taken up by record sales and a weekly appearance on TOTP (if you include Roxy Music) for about 4 months.
        The subject was pretty much off limits again until “Nobody Told Me,” the Beatles’ CDs and, finally, after another 14 years (what were they thinking?), new Beatles’ product … although by that time the huge industry in books, not really there in 1980, had well and truly started.
        I seem to remember the “Every Man Needs a Woman” 45 and “Menlove Avenue” album barely selling a bean just five years later.

        • They started re-releasing every Beatles single exactly 20 years after initial release in 1982, that went on until 1990 naturally. George’s tribute to him appeared in 81, Macca’s in 82, did Ringo do one? Beatles compilations Reel Music and 20 Greatest Hits appeared in 82. then all the CDs, as you say, came out in 1987 and 88, a very big deal INDEED.

          And Double Fantasy sold millions in 1981, as did The John Lennon Collection in 82.

      • BBC2 held an impromptu discussion that evening on Lennon and his legacy. Tony Wilson chaired IIRC. Famously McCartney phoned in on behalf of Yoko to thank the fans for the messages of condolence.

  15. Awful to be killed so young and when he was getting his life together. But Lennon’s “Imagine” is now beyond parody; a “kumbaya” for the Woodstock generation. And “Double Fantasy” is, with respect, also mediocre dreck. The “Shaved Fish” compilation (minus “Imagine”) is, however, excellent. The shock of Lennon dying was that a Boomer’s Elvis had been killed. Mark Chapman had previously targeted Todd Rundgren (who I personally think has a far better canon than John Lennon) but after there was a nasty break-in to Rundgren’s home in new York, Runt sensibly departed for Hawaii. When Macca goes, it’s going to be HUGE. Ringo? Not so much.

  16. FWIIW, my memory of his murder.

    The ship I was serving on had deployed the previous day & we were due to be away until late April.

    I heard about it on the Tuesday morning. On the Friday we arrived in Gibraltar (excellent watering hole btw), and I rang home to speak to my then girlfriend (who become my beloved wife/late wife).

    She was in tears saying “I can’t believe I won’t see you until after Easter” while I was saying “I can’t believe that John Lennon has been murdered”.

    Priorities eh…

    Again, FWIIW, I don’t go much on double fantasy.

  17. Shock. He was gunned down by (excuse me, ladies) a fucking nutcase. There was some chin-stroking about reaping what he sowed with the bigger-than-Jesus thing, but nobody was expecting him to get shot. Shock; that’s what I remember.

  18. I never listened to the radio in the morning, and drove to work at midday (mixtape) so I completely missed it all. I had lunch that day in Knightsbridge with a literary agent (I know, I know), and I finally found out what had happened when I saw an Evening Standard headline as we left the restaurant. ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ she said. ‘I thought we had more important things to talk about.’ JFC…Nowadays of course I’d have known within nanoseconds.

  19. I vividly remember being on a London bus in the late afternoon with a Swedish friend, having just seen the Evening Standard headline.

    I was completely gutted and was exchanging words with complete strangers.

    My friend just didn’t understand. “He was a musician, You Brits are all talking as though you have lost a personal friend.”

    And even if at that point, I was not as mega a fan as I had been, his murder did come as a terrible shock. I’d grown up with the Beatles and they were still a very big part of me.

    At a slight tangent, I learnt yesterday that this single by Simone has been the most popular Xmas song in Brazil for many years.

    • I was a complete Beatles-fanatic growing up, so when I woke up to the news about his murder I was shocked and horrified. I found an old black shirt left behind by my dad and cut off one cuff, which I wore around my wrist for months, like some sort of punk-y mourning band. At school people I barely knew came up to me and asked if I had heard the news about Lennon – apparently I must have been pretty loud and proud about being a Beatles fan…but I was surprised that it seemed to be such common knowledge!

  20. I was 14 and I had just arrived for the school day. My soon-to-be best pal was quietly stunned and uncommunicative at the back of the class. This was unlike him as he had established himself by then as a birrova laugh and always up for a chat. That’s how I found out because he wasn’t speaking to anyone. Ignorant arseholes were taking the piss.

    He’s a bit arty and his school stuff was already adorned with very well done Beatles-related images, mostly in tippex. Probably not on that day but certainly not long after we had long talks about the Fabs and it’s fair to say his knowledge was considerably deeper than mine. I seemed to pass muster with him because I had picked up snippets due to reading a lot and also older brothers having the records and me secretly playing them when they were out.

    In 1980 school tribalism was divided between punks, mods, metal and casuals. I was more inclined towards punk but I developed friendships with the darker “gothier” types largely due to Siouxsie, Joy Division, Bowie and Gary Numan. That last one was mine, really.

    My Beatles-loving friend is still me besht mate. I think it would have happened without John Lennon being murdered but it certainly helped establish a very important bond. Although in time he gravitated towards the metal crowd – who as a group were far more friendly than the other factions – we found common ground in Talking Heads in those early conversations.

    He still regards Depeche Mode as a load of old rubbish but I don’t hold that against him. Much.

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