(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 8 March 2026 17:30, UK
John Lennon was a much different person by the time he reached the late 1960s.
The rise of Beatlemania was bound to do a number on every member of the Fab Four, but when Lennon started to be treated like some sort of prophet of music, he was the first to take down all the veils and tell everyone that he was human. He was simply someone who wanted to create great art in all its forms, and you could tell that he was moving in a different direction before The Beatles had even fractured.
But while a lot of the credit or the blame behind the band’s breakup comes down to Yoko Ono, things don’t always work out that cleanly. There were certainly some “villains” in the story of their final days, but a lot of that came from Allen Klein pitting them against each other, rather than everyone getting pissed off at one of their girlfriends showing up to practice. And after all, Lennon was ready to break up the band months before Paul McCartney came out with a press release about it.
He was the one who said he wanted a divorce from the group, and even as far back as The White Album, none of them was on the same page anymore. The death of Brian Epstein cast a dark shadow over the rest of their career, and while they tried to stop the skid by unveiling Apple Records, it only seemed to cause more headaches when they started going back and forth about what they should and shouldn’t be doing.
Then again, Lennon was going to be whatever the hell he wanted once the band came off of Sgt Pepper. The Summer of Love was a completely new world for the rest of the band, and while all of them wanted to talk about the importance of peace and love, Lennon was the one reminding everybody of why he fought for that on songs like ‘Revolution’ and ‘Give Peace A Chance’. The latter may have been his first official solo single, but the artsiness behind some of his Beatles tracks had become a bit too much to ignore.
Lennon was always keen to try anything to make his songs sound weird, but even by the metric of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Revolution 9’ was a bit strange for people to stomach. Placing an eight-minute avant-garde piece on a record would have been unheard of at the time, but if you look at Two Virgins, Lennon was used to working in the world of musique concrete.
And while the cover was a massive shock seeing a Beatle and his wife completely nude, Lennon felt that it stood as one of the greatest statements he could have ever made, saying, “I thought maybe somebody out there will say something, but I was making a statement. It was as good as a song, it was better, you couldn’t say it better – pictures speak louder than words. There it was: beautiful statement.”
That might sound insane looking back on it, but when you get past the shock, you can hear what Lennon was getting at. The whole mystique about The Beatles had been too much for him to take, so when he literally laid everything out as bare as possible, it’s not like there was any pretension anymore. He was letting down his guard in lots of ways, but that was only the first sneak peek of what he was going to do.
The next few avant-garde albums would be even weirder, and his pop-flavoured records like Some Time in New York City had more than a few awkward moments, but Lennon wasn’t looking to become an avant-garde artist all of a sudden. All he wanted was a different space to play in, and Two Virgins practically granted him the freedom to go in a million different directions once the band split.