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Wed 21 January 2026 18:58, UK
When talking about the greatest guitarists of all time, John Lennon doesn’t tend to make it all that high on most people’s lists.
He may have been the rock-solid foundation for The Beatles, but his strong suit was always in songwriting first and foremost, and there was no way that he was going to play the kind of licks that put him in the same conversation as Eric Clapton or anything. His technique worked perfectly for the music he played, but it’s not like Lennon couldn’t understand what a legend at work sounded like.
That’s not to say that he didn’t have any chops as a guitar genius. A lot of what Lennon did behind the band made them bounce in the perfect way whenever they started making their hits, and when looking at what he does in the background of a song like ‘All My Loving’, it takes a lot of practice and endurance for anyone to match those fast triplets that he was doing every single time they performed live.
That kind of discipline came from years of him listening to records, but for someone who was known to be one of the greatest poets of the Fab Four, Lennon was always more aware of what the guitar was supposed to be underneath everything. No one writes a song like ‘Day Tripper’ without thinking of what a great lick is supposed to sound like, and when he came up with the basis for ‘I Feel Fine’, he was already listening closely to what his favourite artists like Bobby Parker were doing whenever they played.
Their heroes were more rooted in blues, but there was a much different sound whenever Harrison played those licks. The jangle of his electric 12-string made them one of the most recognisable bands of their time when A Hard Day’s Night came out, and while Lennon loved hearing what people like The Byrds could do whenever they performed, the pop market was also getting in on the action when Jackie DeShannon started coming out with some of her tunes a few years before.
She didn’t really need to be taking tricks from the rock world if she didn’t want to, but Lennon was blown away by DeShannon’s ‘When You Walk In The Room’. It may have predated some of the Fab Four’s greatest hits, but the minute that Lennon heard that, he knew that he wanted every one of his songs to sound like that.
And when Michael McDonald sat down with DeShannon to work on a few of her songs, he remembered being told that ‘When You Walk Into My Room’ was one of Lennon’s all-time favourites, saying, “It had this great guitar lick. John Lennon loved that record and you can almost hear his affectation on a song like ‘Every Little Thing’. [Jackie] said, ‘When I was on the 707 making my way down the aisle, all of a sudden, John would pop out with his guitar. He’d play the lick and say, ‘the greatest fucking guitar lick ever written.’”
When looking at all the other tracks out at the time, it’s no surprise Lennon would go towards something jangly. His ears were always attuned to sounds that were off the beaten path, and since the rest of the world was still playing the same basic rock and roll chords, hearing a tune like that was only the beginning of him starting to incorporate some different sounds into the band’s repertoire.
That mentality might have been the snowball effect that brought us to songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Revolution’, but Lennon didn’t see ‘When You Walk Into My Room’ as a standalone classic, either. He just wanted to make music that was different, and if DeShannon could get her foot in the door with a song like that, who’s to say that The Beatles couldn’t make something like that too?
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