He's been called hero, genius, icon, legend. He's also been called, fallen hero, wife beater, difficult and not a very nice, a man in turmoil. Well it's hardly surprising given his bizarre childhood, handed to his aunt Mimi by his mother Julia so she could go off with some other man. Not the best of starts. However. Right now there are all sorts of people talking about John Lennon. One guy trying to debunk his mythology saying how awful he was - phooey to that as it has only minor relevance to the man and his talent - and others trying to preserve his legend and legend it is.

The fact is when we were young - I was 17 in '67 - it was the Beatles and the Stones and the Kinks etc. Great bands putting out fantastic evocative, innovative, fab rebellious music. We couldn't get enough of it and no matter whether you were a school boy, a school girl, a teenager from an estate, a terrace or a mansion or a dope head it didn't matter. The music levelled us all. You'd play it and listen and get wildly excited. We were the "Now" generation. There was never a better time to be young. Alright, that's not true, being young is the best time to be young, no matter when that is. At least it should be. Only to be young then was something special though we probably only realised that with hindsight. But what a time it was. These guys were heroic leading the way. We all wanted to be them. Their success took us by surprise. It was all so new then. Mary Quant was busy doing her thing with fashion, there was Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, David Bailey the photographer and many others, there were new way-out clothes and way out happenings. There was excitement and it didn't have half the sophistication of today but it was more fun because it was cutting edge and something so totally new after the austerity and utility of the post war years. Suddenly we were breaking out, flouting conventions and doing our own thing, or if not, getting swept up in others doing their thing. There was a constant buzz of excitement.
Cool hadn't been properly invented. Gradually that started to happen. Once the Beatles dropped their blue suits and loveable mop tops in favour of psychedelia and long hair it began to show through and John Lennon was one of the coolest. He wore the clothes but his attitude was "So what". In fact the Beatles carried off the new look well but Lennon and Harrison seemed less interested in themselves than they did in the world around them and what they could do to change it which made them all the more cool. Paul seemed more image conscious and Ringo just coasted being... well just Ringo. The Stones were all cool of course. I always thought Bill Wyman was the coolest just quietly upstage, plucking his base with little or no movement and not a glimmer of a smile and focus off somewhere else.
The thing about Beatles music is you can nearly always tell which was written by Lennon and which by McCartney - Harrison's was easily identifiable by its mystic qualities. Lennon's work was gritty and angry. Paul's could be cutesy and nice. Not that his music didn't strike chords, it did. But Lennon seemed much more the artist in residence, trying to shock or make a point. That was achieved particularly after the Beatles split with his inspired Imagine.
Now just the other day I heard this detractor of Lennon going on about the pointlessness of some of Lennon's stunts, the Bed Peace thing for one. Yeah okay buddy so it didn't bring about world peace but it made people conscious and aware and got them thinking about it and the fact that we are talking about it still means it worked. It's stayed in the public consciousness. Everyone remembers it and it still makes you think. World peace is impossible, we know that now but is it wrong to at least try for it?
Look I'm not going to say he was a genius, even though that was how he described himself, so he probably was but it has to be said that he was probably the most charismatic youth icon at the height of his fame. Who knows what he would be today. We'll never know thanks a lunatic with a gun who doesn't even warrant naming here.