(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Mon 9 March 2026 19:00, UK
Out of all the members of The Beatles, John Lennon could be more than a little bit of a music snob behind the scenes.
As much as he loved the idea of playing any kind of music that he wanted to when he first started, there were certain bridges that he didn’t really want to cross whenever Paul McCartney came up with some of his granny songs back in the day. He needed a little bit more gruffness behind his tunes, and it only took the right song to take him right back to being a kid in Liverpool trying to become like his heroes that he heard on the radio.
Because for any kid growing up in Liverpool around that time, rock and roll felt like some sort of sonic salvation. No one would have imagined that they could have made it playing music, but after cutting their teeth playing in Hamburg and in their hometown, it only took the right people to help turn the Fab Four into legends. Brian Epstein was the one pulling the strings when getting them a record deal, but it all came back to the way that Lennon and McCartney wrote their songs.
Even during the days when they weren’t communicating very much, seeing them go back and forth during the Get Back sessions is proof enough of how much they inspired one another. They could finish each other’s sentences at the best of times, and even when some of their songs didn’t knock it out of the park like they should have, you could at least tell that they were on their way to bigger and better things once they landed on tracks like ‘From Me To You’ and ‘She Loves You’.
But for all the great moments that they had together, you could definitely tell when one of their tunes was predominantly written by one of them. Macca might get dragged through the mud a little too much for being one of the cornier balladeers to come out of the 1960s, but it’s harder to deny the kind of sonic sheen that he put on a lot of his greatest records, whether it was the clangor of ‘Helter Skelter’ or the unadulterated cool behind ‘Got to Get You into My Life’.
He had a healthy diet of rock and roll, but Lennon seemed to internalise those songs a lot mor when he first heard them. Plastic Ono Band was miles away from anything that he had been doing when he was copying the likes of Chuck Berry, but even when he was working on his final album Double Fantasy, you could hear him still shouting the praises of people like Elvis Presley when he was referencing his starting point.
The songs might have had a few decades on them by that point, but Lennon could still feel that same energy every time they came on, saying, “‘Be Bop a Lu La’ I can listen to over and over again. Every time it comes on, I switch up the thing. And I have the record still. And when I hear Elvis, I heard him singing ‘I Want You I Need You I Love You’ the other day, and I was just in heaven. Of course, I was going back to my youth and remembering what was going on when I heard that record.”
And for an album that led off with the single ‘Just Like Starting Over’, most people wouldn’t have had it any other way. Get Back was their excuse to make an album that embraced old-school rock and roll, but this time Lennon seemed to have a far more impressive sheen on everything, to the point where some of the songs could have been sung by Presley or even Roy Orbison had he given the tunes to them.
This era of Lennon’s career didn’t deserve to be so criminally short, but even after years of running away from his rock and roll past, there was no way that he could ever scrub it completely clean. Those songs were part of his DNA, and by the time his life ended, he was happy to be known as one of the missionaries of the genre that turned his world upside down all those years ago.