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John Lennon
English musician and activist (1940–1980)
John Winston Ono Lennon was an English musician, songwriter and activist. He gained global fame as the founder of the Beatles, in which he was the co-lead vocalist and played rhythm guitar, later adopting lead and bass guitar, keyboards and other instruments.
Lennon's songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
labels: Apple Records, Atco Records, Capitol Records, Parlophone, EMI, Geffen Records, Polydor Records
genres: rock music, blues rock, experimental music, pop music, pop rock, art rock, psychedelic rock, rock and roll
awards: Member of the Order of the British Empire, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Academy Award for Best Original Score, star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
member of: The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, The Quarrymen, The Beat Brothers, Lennon-McCartney, John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Facts from Wikidata and Discogs, free to use.
rockpopexperimentalbritishsinger-songwriterclassic rock
The Airwaves CourierExtra
Early years: 1940–1956
John Winston Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, the only child of Alfred and Julia Lennon (née Stanley). Alfred was a merchant seaman of Irish descent who was away at the time of his son's birth, and Lennon had Welsh ancestry on his mother's side. His parents named him John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother; the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia, by then pregnant with another man's...
At the age of 15, Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by Lennon in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half skiffle and half rock and roll. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, which was held in Woolton on 6 July at the St Peter's Church garden fête. Lennon then asked McCartney to join the band.
Lennon's vocal style was heavily influenced by Little Richard, Larry Williams and Little Willie John; the British music writer Ian MacDonald noted that "no white singer" had been able to imitate them successfully before Lennon and McCartney. MacDonald contrasted Lennon's singing voice, a "brassy northern roar flecked with bluesy moans", with the "conventionally glamorous" voices of earlier artists such as Elvis Presley, Dean Martin and Cliff Richard. The British critic Nik Cohn observed of Lennon, "He owned one of the best pop voices ever, rasped and smashed and brooding, always fierce." Cohn wrote that Lennon, performing "Twist and Shout", would "rant his way into total incoherence, half rupture himself". When the Beatles recorded the...
Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s. They said that the Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionised the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers". On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC conducted a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric and announced "Imagine" as the winner.
