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Sat 24 January 2026 19:00, UK
By the time John Lennon reached the end of the 1960s, chances are he would have rather been anywhere else than playing with The Beatles.
Despite everyone saying that Yoko Ono is to blame for pitting the Fab Four against each other and stealing Lennon away from his mates, he was simply moving in a different direction, and that was completely fine considering how long they had been on the same creative page. They were allowed to flex their muscles when they wanted to, but Lennon felt that one of the final straws was when he found some of his songs coming under fire from the rest of his mates.
Because you have to remember how much Lennon was the leader of the group. No matter how much he and Paul McCartney worked together as a team, Lennon was the one who helped put the whole thing together, and even if they put a united front most of the time, nothing was going to find its way onto a record if Lennon didn’t think it was right. But his vision of the band was a little bit warped than what the average pop audience wanted most of the time.
There was no way that a song like ‘Revolution 9’ was going to be a big radio hit, but even if Macca didn’t like the idea of it taking up so much space on The White Album, Lennon still managed to get it through the door. That may have been a bunch of noise as far as everyone else was concerned, but the single version of ‘Revolution’ made more than a few alarm bells go off when Lennon started speaking his mind.
He was tired of mincing his words, and now that he was engaging in peaceful protests around the world, it was only a matter of time before those gory details made it into his music. It certainly wasn’t a terrible idea for the band to make songs with messages, but after undergoing withdrawal from heroin, ‘Cold Turkey’ became one of the most caustic rock songs that Lennon had ever attempted.
‘The Intellectual Beatle’ was no stranger to balls-to-the-wall rock and roll, but if McCartney started heavy metal with ‘Helter Skelter’, ‘Cold Turkey’ was its disturbed younger brother. With Eric Clapton on guitar, Lennon was crying out in pain after going through the worst kind of pain that any addict ever had to face, and yet when he brought it to the rest of the band, he was shot down for the first time in his career.
He was already disappointed about ‘Revolution’ not becoming a lead single in favour of ‘Hey Jude’, but this kind of rejection is what made Lennon leave his old mates behind, saying, “When I wrote it, I went to the other three Beatles and said, ‘Hey, lads, I think I’ve written a new single.’ But they all said, ‘Ummm…arrr…welll,’ because it was going to be my project, and so I thought, ‘Bugger you, I’ll put it out myself.’”
Considering the music that everyone else was making, though, it makes sense why it wouldn’t have worked with the rest of their catalogue. It was still a great song, but had the band been able to make one more album, the thought of this song sharing space next to ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’ was either going to be a work of mad genius or one of the most schizophrenic listening experiences that the band had ever laid down.
But Lennon was no longer concerned with what fit The Beatles’ mould anymore. He wasn’t the same kid in a suit playing on the Ed Sullivan Show anymore, and he was going to do everything he could to remind the world of the brilliant songwriter and revolutionary he could be whenever he got a guitar in his hand.
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