Though Norman does not pick up on it, it’s the word ‘presumably’ that intrigues here. ‘I was wondering if I should do anything else,’ he mused later in a bout of post-therapy soul-baring. Likewise, it would seem, the heightened moment in his adolescence when he lay down beside her and accidentally touched her breast. Her death in a car accident, when John was 17, was to haunt him for the rest of his life. The book’s other big revelation, this time culled from a 1979 audio confession, is that, when he was a hormonally charged 14-year-old, Lennon harboured incestuous desires for his mother Julia. He concludes that Lennon’s ‘gay tendency’ was aesthetic rather than carnal, and ‘based on the principle that bohemians should try everything’. Norman refutes the oft-repeated rumour that the two slept together during a holiday in Spain in the summer of 1963. There has been much conjecture about Lennon’s sexuality in the past, most of it centred on his intense love-hate relationship with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. ‘I slept with him a million times.’ Lest there be any doubt about their laddishness, he added that had Lennon had ‘a little gay tendency’, he would ‘have caught him out’. ‘John never tried anything on,’ he said recently. Imagine! Macca, though, is having none of it. The tabloids have already provided some invaluable pre-publicity for Norman’s book by homing in on the ‘revelation’ that John may have harboured secret homosexual longings for Paul. He has also made good use of the notebooks the singer filled with his often scabrous musings and the cassettes on to which Lennon fitfully recorded his random thoughts, opinions and memories. Norman is the first Lennon biographer to be granted access to the private papers of Lennon’s celebrated Aunt Mimi, who took the troubled youngster in when his parents’ ill-fated marriage finally imploded. Freddie has long been caricatured as a feckless drifter but here emerges as a more complex man who deeply regretted abandoning his young son and who craved, but never received, John’s forgiveness. He vividly recreates Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool, and his often tumultuous family environment, providing in the process what is the most rounded portrait to date of Lennon’s wayward father, Alfred ‘Freddie’ Lennon. Norman is brilliant at evoking the postwar world from which the Beatles emerged and to which their unprecedented global success signalled the end. Norman has also tracked down several long-lost childhood friends and ex-girlfriends, all of who testify to the young Lennon’s rebellious but essentially vulnerable temperament.įor me, the most fascinating section is the first third, which recounts Lennon’s pre-stardom life in Liverpool and Hamburg. Other key sources include George Martin, the Beatles’ producer Arthur Janov, the primal therapist who treated Lennon for a time in the Seventies and Jimmy Tarbuck, the Scouse comedian and erstwhile teddy boy who attended Dovedale Primary School with him.
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