ON TUESDAY, December 9, 1980, the people of Britain woke up to the devastating news that the Beatle, John Lennon, had been assassinated – shot four times in the back, at point-blank range, by Mark Chapman.
Chapman was a real ‘nowhere man’ who believed that murdering Lennon would turn him into a somebody. And as his name quickly spread to every corner of the globe, the deranged misfit from Hawaii had, indeed, achieved his wish.
Nearly 20 years earlier I’d watched John Lennon, with the other three Beatles, performing live on TV. They appeared regularly on the current-affairs programme, ‘Scene At 6:30’ – the forerunner of YTV’s ‘Calendar’.
Back then, in 1962, as an eight-year- old, I thought the Beatles looked and sounded corny. I would close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears while my sister, Pauline, would pinch her nose and pull down on an imaginary toilet chain – as we always did when demonstrating our disapproval.
Then suddenly, the music revolution exploded and shook the earth like a snow-globe. Its onset began when the Beatles hit the radio airwaves with ‘Please, Please Me’.
“Who sings this, Pauline?”
“Don’t know but I love it?”
Soon the song took hold of me like no other, and when I heard it was by the Beatles, I didn’t believe it.
My sister said, “You better believe it – and they write their own stuff an’ all.”
On the following Saturday, I asked my mam to buy me the record in town, and as soon as she returned I began to play it on our old Dansette record player, over and over - each time louder and louder.
“Turn down that bloody row!” shouted my dad. But in no time he was saying, “Hmmm, not bad that. Turn it up a bit. No, a bit more.”
Next evening there was a piece on the BBC evening news that “Beatle-mania was driving the girls of Merseyside into a stupor,” and it showed teenagers screaming and swooning outside the Cavern Club. The implication was that the young girls were simply acting bizarrely, but I was shouting at the screen:
“Those girls aren’t crazy. They’re screaming because this song is special! Can’t you hear it? Are your lugholes painted on?”
As ‘Please, Please Me’ gained popularity, the Beatles were interviewed and even this was so different to anything we’d witnessed before. For a start, like most of us, they had broad accents that we’d been taught were inferior. In addition, these ordinary Liverpool guys were cocky and witty. When interviewed they often made the Oxbridge presenters look like bewildered dinosaurs.
Stuffed-shirts, snobby journalists and some old fashioned teachers, still tried to convince us that the ‘Fab-Four’ were one-hit wonders and their compositions were of such low quality, they wouldn’t last beyond the end of the year. But it was obvious to us that what our masters really feared was... change.
Without realising it we were in the midst of a massive power struggle: young versus old, freedom versus control, progression versus tradition.
If these four working-class ‘boys’, from Merseyside, could be so uppity, who knows where it will end? Youngsters might insist on growing their hair long, wearing risque clothes, having the temerity to fight injustice, or eating their own babies!
The winds of change were blowing and you could almost hear the beetroot-faced army colonels raging in their private, gentlemen-only, clubs in Mayfair.
In the US, in 1964, the Beatles even made an audacious stand against racism when they refused, outright, to perform to segregated audiences.
And month after month, year after year, Lennon and McCartney’s compositions continued to give great pleasure, and enrich our cultural landscape.
However, the Beatles’ individual views began to diverge when their experiments with meditation and recreational drugs didn’t bring the fulfilment they desired. So, instead, John decided he would throw himself into campaigns to change the glaring faults of the world. This meant railing against an unfair class system and challenging the bloody war in Vietnam.
Today, on my 72nd trip around the sun, I feel that we few, we happy few, we band of ‘60s brothers and sisters, were extremely lucky. We lived through the greatest decade in history and witnessed in real time, a ‘Working Class Hero’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Just ‘Imagine’ that.
Lennon is dead but his rich legacy, and that of the Beatles, will live forever.
