John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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       3 THE OUTLAWS

      I’d say I had a happy childhood…

      I was always having a laugh.

      Thanks in largest part to his minstrel grandfather and his would-be minstrel father, but also to numerous others on both sides of his family, John could be fairly said to have had music in his bones. Yet in his early years the odds seemed weighted against his becoming a musician at all, let alone the one he finally did.

      In early-fifties Britain, music was something most people got along without. The technology for listening to it in the home consisted of gramophones with manually cranked turntables, and thick wax 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) discs the size of car hubcaps, which came in plain brown paper covers and broke when dropped. Rare was the household whose record collections numbered more than about a dozen of these sepia-wrapped, dust-attracting monsters.

      Back then, one did not hear music playing incessantly in shops, office buildings, airports, station concourses, doctors’ surgeries or lifts, as a background to news bulletins or from the earpieces of telephones. Portable radios were hulking battery-powered objects designed to look like small suitcases. Tape recorders for private use were almost unknown. Sound came in mono only and did not travel. In public places like parks or beaches, the only noise would be human hubbub. Most residential areas passed their days and nights in the same unbroken silence.

      Television was still a fabulously expensive novelty, enjoyed in only a few thousand homes and served by a solitary BBC channel offering a scanty Programme in the afternoon and early evening. Radio, likewise the BBC’s monopoly and better known as the wireless, broadcast music largely as a public duty, to keep the factories running and the food queues quiet. So afraid was the corporation’s Light Programme of overexciting its listeners that records with the faintest sexual frisson were banned from the airwaves, and continuity announcers forbidden to use such inflammatory terms as hot jazz. Professional musicians were a tiny faction who had mastered their complex craft only after years of study, possessed little personality outside their playing, and in general projected an aura that was at once middle-aged, irritable and foreign.

      For Mimi Smith, nothing more clearly defined the Alf Lennon world from which she had rescued John than people enjoying raucous-accented singsongs in their front parlours or—worse still—in the pubs wrapped around a thousand and one inner-Liverpool street corners. The only music Mimi cared for was the classical kind, as played by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester’s revered Hallé, and BBC radio’s cathedral-solemn Third Programme (whose announcers wore dinner jackets even though visible to none but their own studio staff). Between classical and popular music in this era there was no possible meeting point. Pop lovers regarded classical as impossibly difficult and highfalutin; classics lovers regarded pop as just so much horrible noise.

      In John’s family as now constituted, there was only one person of any musical ability. His mother Julia, though otherwise not noted for consistency, still kept up the banjo and piano accordion she had learned as a girl. She was a natural entertainer, liable at the slightest encouragement to break into impromptu performance. ‘Judy [the children’s name for her] played the banjo and accordion really well,’ her niece Liela remembers. ‘She had a lovely singing voice that I can only compare to Vera Lynn’s. And she was a wonderfully witty and entertaining person to be with. She could keep going for hours at a time, singing, telling jokes, doing impersonations, and you’d never get tired of it.’

      From John’s earliest childhood, his response to music was instant and visceral. In 1946, just before his sixth birthday, the BBC Light Programme started the nightly 15-minute adventures of Dick Barton, Special Agent, an Austerity forerunner to James Bond, introduced by a melodramatic theme tune called ‘The Devil’s Gallop’. Mimi remembered how deathly white John’s face always went each evening at 6:45 as its frantic strains echoed through the house.

      Under the Stanley sisters’ mutual support system, he would spend a long holiday in Scotland each summer with his Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert. The high point of his stay was the Edinburgh Tattoo, an extravagant military band display with the city’s medieval castle as its dramatic backdrop. Among the red-coated phalanxes playing ‘Annie Laurie’ or ‘Scotland the Brave’, there would sometimes be an American Air Force band in the Glenn Miller mould that—as John later recalled—‘swung like shit’. He never forgot his emotion during the Tattoo’s closing ritual, when all the lights went out and a lone set of bagpipes wheezed and wailed its valediction for another year.

      Mendips, of course, boasted nothing so newfangled and showy as a television set. The only wireless stood on the morning-room sideboard: an imposing artefact with a lacquered wood cabinet, gold knobs and a dial that could theoretically find European stations like Limoges and Hilversum. Kindly Uncle George wired it to an extension speaker in John’s room so he could listen while lying in bed. But that was mainly to the comedy shows that came after his 7.30 lightsout—Take It from Here, Variety Bandbox, Much-Binding in the Marsh, or Stand Easy. His favourite was Life with the Lyons, a sitcom about an American family in London, featuring the thirties’ screen stars Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon with their real-life children Barbara and Richard.

      Aged seven or eight, he took up the mouth organ, just as both his parents—not to mention several of his uncles—had done at roughly similar ages. The epiphany occurred when a medical student who was boarding at Mendips casually took one of the little silver oblongs from his pocket and blew a few notes on it, to John’s huge fascination. The student offered to buy him a mouth organ of his own, provided he learned to play a tune on this one by the next morning. John disappeared with it and in no time had learned to play two.

      The mouth organ revealed that he had a natural musical ear just like his mother’s, his father’s and most of those unknown Lennon uncles. He soon outgrew his first cheap little instrument, graduating to a chromatic model—with a sliding bar for changing key—and buying a teach-yourself manual, The Right Way to Play Chromatic Harmonica by Captain James Reilly. With Captain Reilly’s help, he mastered dozens of tunes, from old English airs like ‘Greensleeves’ to film music like the theme from Moulin Rouge. Travelling by Ribble Company bus from Liverpool up to Mater’s in Edinburgh, he sometimes would hardly stop playing for the whole six-hour ride. On one of these journeys, the driver offered to give him a mouth organ that had been left behind by a previous passenger if he would come to the Edinburgh bus depot next day to collect it. John kept the appointment, chaperoned by his cousin Stanley, and duly received a magnificent top-of-the-line chromatic Hohner. ‘I believe it was the same mouth organ he played on his records,’ Stanley says.

      He quickly progressed to tinkering on any piano he encountered, at school or in friends’ houses, discovering the same instant facility in his fingers as on his lips. But Mimi, so indulgent in every other way, refused his plea to have his own piano at Mendips. ‘I wouldn’t have it,’ she remembered. ‘ “We’re not going down that road, John,” I told him. “None of that common sing-song stuff in here.”’

      In the house overlooking Mendips’ back garden lived Ivan Vaughan, a Dovedale СКАЧАТЬ