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Mon 11 August 2025 21:30, UK
Every artist has to have those moments where they wonder how long they can stay at the top. Anyone can manage to get in the right place at the right time and find their way onto the charts, but when people start living the good life with multiple hits under their belt, there’s nowhere else to go but down. But no career is that linear, and John Lennon made it his mission always to make the kind of music he wanted to hear out of himself.
Looking through The Beatles’ discography, Lennon always wanted to disrupt the traditional means of making music. He revelled in finding strange sounds, and while he eventually pulled back on his love for the Fab Four’s greatest moments, there’s a reason why songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ are still considered landmarks of the time. No one was thinking along these lines, but Lennon wanted to make sure he could shake off his legendary status when he could.
And nothing says ‘career switch-up’ more than getting naked in public. Although Two Virgins was met with either confusion or disgust by anyone who listened to it or saw the cover, Lennon was determined to carve out his own path. The Beatles were a license to print money, so the next best thing was for him to test the limits of where he could go, and once the band broke up, he had a lot more wiggle room.
Suddenly, he was free to be as political and cutthroat as he wanted, and while that didn’t always make for great sales, he was happy to be making a difference in whatever way he could. Some Time in New York City is probably the most uneven album that he ever made, but despite the headache he had to go through with the FBI tapping his phone, the fact that they went to great lengths to monitor him really showed the kind of sway that he had as a public figure.
He had the clout to be an artist in every sense of the word, and if Lennon had it his way, he never wanted to end up having the career that Charlie Chaplin did in the back half of his career, saying, “I know, that’s what I don’t want to happen to me, I’d hate that. They’d wheel me on at 60 and give me a plaque for ‘Yesterday’ when Paul wrote it. I mean, I can just see it, y’know. I don’t want that.”
For Lennon, it was nicer to live in the moment, but that also probably put the brakes on any potential Beatles reunion. Lennon knew that it was better to move on and leave his past glory in the past, and no matter how hard the fans might have screamed back in the day, there was no royalty check big enough for him to consider going on another tour with his old mates, even if it would have been fun.
While Yoko Ono did eventually give The Beatles her blessing to use some of Lennon’s last songs for The Beatles Anthology, what they did with it was probably the most respectful way of honouring Lennon’s legacy. He wasn’t one for nostalgia all the time, so hearing The Threetles take the reins where he couldn’t and make a brand new song out of the deal was exactly what he meant by creating something new.
And when looking at what they’ve done since then on albums like Love or the final official Beatles single, ‘Now and Then’, none of the band members ever forgot about that mantra that Lennon had to deal with. He always embraced the opportunity to do something new, so if some of his tracks were to have been dug up, he would rather it have been for creating something entirely new.
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