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Born Apr 08, 1963

Julian Lennon

Photo: From https://monacolife.net/interview-julian-lennon-on-living-the-dream/

Last updated on August 17, 2024

From Wikipedia:

Julian Charles John Lennon (born John Charles Julian Lennon; 8 April 1963) is an English musician, photographer, author, and philanthropist. He is the son of Beatles member John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia, and he is named after his paternal grandmother, Julia Lennon. Julian inspired three Beatles songs: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967), “Hey Jude” (1968), and “Good Night” (1968). His parents divorced in 1968 after his father had an affair with Yoko Ono.

Lennon started a music career in 1984 with the album Valotte, best known for its lead single “Too Late for Goodbyes”, and has since released six more albums. He has held exhibitions of his fine-art photography and has written several children’s books. In 2006, Lennon produced the environmental documentary film Whaledreamers, which won eight international awards. In 2007, he founded The White Feather Foundation (TWFF), whose stated mission goal is to address “environmental and humanitarian issues”.

In 2020, Lennon was executive producer of the Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground about regenerative agriculture and the follow-up film Common Ground. In 2022, Lennon was executive producer of the documentary film Women of the White Buffalo, which chronicles the lives of women living on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Early life

Julian Lennon was born John Charles Julian Lennon on 8 April 1963 at Sefton General Hospital in Liverpool, to John Lennon and Cynthia Powell. He was named after his paternal grandmother, Julia Lennon, who died five years before his birth. The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, was his godfather. Lennon was educated firstly at Kingsmead School, Hoylake during 1974–1975; then, when his mother remarried, he moved to Wales and attended at Ruthin School, a boarding private school in the town of Ruthin, Denbighshire in North Wales.

Lennon inspired one of his father’s most famous songs, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“, whose lyrics describe a picture the boy had drawn, a watercolour painting of his friend, Lucy O’Donnell, from nursery school, surrounded by stars. Another composition of his father inspired by him was the lullaby “Good Night“, the closing song of The Beatles (also known as The White Album). In 1967, at the age of four, he attended the set of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour.

When Julian was five years old, in 1968, his parents divorced, following his father’s infidelity with Japanese multimedia artist Yoko Ono. John Lennon married Ono on 20 March 1969. Julian would later have a younger half-brother, Sean Lennon.

Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” to console him over the divorce; originally called “Hey Jules”, McCartney changed the name because he thought that “Jude” was an easier name to sing. After his parents’ divorce, Julian had almost no contact with his father until the early 1970s when, at the request of his father’s then-girlfriend, May Pang (Yoko Ono and Lennon had temporarily separated), he began to visit his father regularly. John Lennon bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and a drum machine for Christmas 1973 and encouraged his interest in music by showing him some chords.

Relationship with his father

Following his father’s murder on 8 December 1980, Julian Lennon voiced anger and resentment toward him, saying, “I’ve never really wanted to know the truth about how dad was with me. There was some very negative stuff talked about me … like when he said I’d come out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night. Stuff like that. You think, where’s the love in that? Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit … more than Dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seems to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and my dad”.

Julian chafed at hearing his father’s ‘peace and love’ stance perpetually celebrated. He told The Daily Telegraph, “I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces—no communication, adultery, divorce? You can’t do it, not if you’re being true and honest with yourself.” Julian added, “Mum was more about love than Dad. He sang about it, he spoke about, but he never really gave it, at least not to me as his son. The darker side definitely comes from Dad. Whenever I get too aggressive, which comes from Dad’s side, I try to calm myself down, be more positive.”

Recalling his renewed contact with his father in the mid-1970s, Julian said in 2009, “Dad and I got on a great deal better then. We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general when he was with May Pang. My memories of that time with Dad and May are very clear—they were the happiest time I can remember with him”.

Julian was excluded from his father’s will. However, a trust of £100,000 was created by his father to be shared between Julian and his half-brother, Sean. Julian sued his father’s estate and in 1996 reached a settlement agreement, authorised by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, reportedly worth £20 million.

In an interview with CBS News in 2009, Julian stated, “I realized if I continued to feel that anger and bitterness towards my dad, I would have a constant cloud hanging over my head my whole life. After recording the song ‘Lucy,’ almost by nature, it felt right to fulfill the circle, forgive Dad, put the pain, anger and bitterness in the past, and focus and appreciate the good things. Writing is therapy for me and, for the first time in my life, I’m actually feeling it and believing it. It also has allowed me to actually embrace Dad and the Beatles.”

CareerMusic career

Aside from The Beatles, Lennon was influenced by David Bowie, Keith Jarrett, Steely Dan, and AC/DC.

Lennon made his musical debut at age 11 on his father’s album Walls and Bridges playing drums on “Ya-Ya”, later saying, “Dad, had I known you were going to put it on the album, I would’ve played much better!” In the sleeve notes in the album the song is credited to Julian Lennon “starring on drums” with “dad on piano”.

Lennon enjoyed immediate success with his debut album, Valotte, released in 1984. Produced by Phil Ramone, it spawned two top 10 hits, (the title track and “Too Late for Goodbyes”) and earned Lennon a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1985. Music videos for the two hits were made by film director Sam Peckinpah and producer Martin Lewis. After the album’s release, Paul McCartney sent Lennon a telegram wishing him good luck.

His second album, 1986’s The Secret Value of Daydreaming, was panned by critics. However, it reached number 32 on the Billboard 200 chart and produced the single “Stick Around”, which was Lennon’s first number-one single on the US Album Rock Tracks chart. He recorded the song “Because”, previously recorded by The Dave Clark Five, in the UK for Clark’s 1986 musical Time.

On 1 April 1987, Julian Lennon appeared as the Baker in Mike Batt’s musical The Hunting of the Snark (based on Lewis Carroll’s poem). The all-star lineup included Roger Daltrey, Justin Hayward and Billy Connolly, with John Hurt as the narrator. The performance, a musical benefit at London’s Royal Albert Hall in aid of the deaf, was attended by the Duchess of York. In October the same year he performed with Chuck Berry. Although Lennon never achieved the same level of success in the US as he had enjoyed with Valotte, his 1989 single “Now You’re in Heaven” peaked at number 5 in Australia and gave him his second number 1 hit on the Album Rock Tracks chart in the US.

In 1991, George Harrison sent some ideas for Lennon’s album Help Yourself, although he did not play or receive any credits. The single “Saltwater” reached number 6 in the UK and topped the Australian singles charts for four weeks. During this time, Lennon contributed a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” to the soundtrack of the television series The Wonder Years.

Lennon left the music business for several years in the 1990s to focus on philanthropy after his encounter with elders from the Mirning people of Australia. After he began his performing career, there was occasionally unfounded media speculation that Lennon would undertake performances with McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr. In the Beatles Anthology series in 1995, the three surviving Beatles confirmed there was never an idea of having Julian sit in for his father as part of a Beatles reunion, with McCartney saying, “Why would we want to subject him to all of this?”

In May 1998, Lennon released the album Photograph Smile on his own record label. Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the album as “well-crafted and melodic”, and concluded by saying that it was “the kind of music that would receive greater praise if it weren’t made by the son of a Beatle”. In 2002, he recorded a version of “When I’m Sixty-Four“, from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, for an Allstate Insurance commercial.

In 2006, he ventured into Internet businesses, including MyStore.com with Todd Meagher and Bebo founder Michael Birch. In 2009, Lennon created a new partnership with Meagher and Birch called theRevolution, LLC. Through this company, Lennon released a tribute song and EP, “Lucy”, honouring the memory of Lucy Vodden (née O’Donnell), the little girl who inspired the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, with 50 per cent of the proceeds going to fund Lupus research.

In October 2011, Lennon released the album Everything Changes. In 2012 he worked with music film director Dick Carruthers on the feature-length video documentary Through the Picture Window, which followed Lennon’s journey in the making of Everything Changes and includes interviews with Steven Tyler, Bono, Gregory Darling, Mark Spiro and Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile. Through the Picture Window was also released as an app in all formats with bespoke videos for all 14 tracks from the album.

On September 9, 2022, Lennon’s album Jude was released on BMG. It included the singles “Freedom” and “Every Little Moment”. Goldmine wrote about the release, “With his new album, the first in 11 years, Julian advances his body of work that has always simultaneously explored personal and global themes, but for the first time in his life, he’s embracing his inner status as someone’s son…[an] introspective masterwork from a diversely talented artist.” The title is a reference to the Beatles song “Hey Jude“, which Paul McCartney wrote in 1968 to give Julian Lennon hope for the future. Lennon said about his album title, “Calling it Jude was very coming of age for me in that regard because it was very much facing up to who I am…The content came from over three decades of songwriting. The themes and issues mostly being the same, generally about the wars within and the wars without.”

[…]

Personal life

After living with his parents at Kenwood in Weybridge outside London from 1964 to 1968, Lennon moved with his mother to a number of British locales, eventually settling in The Wirral near Liverpool and then to a farm in North Wales. Lennon’s first step-father, Roberto Bassanini, whom his mother married in 1970, was Italian. Lennon moved to the United States in the early 1980s where he resided in New York City and then Los Angeles. In 1991, Lennon moved to Europe, and resided mainly in Italy where Bassanini had lived (Lennon dedicated Photograph Smile to Bassanini in 1998). Lennon then moved to Monaco where he currently resides, and he is a friend to Albert II, Prince of Monaco.

Lennon has been quoted as having a reasonably “cordial” relationship with Ono, following the financial settlement against his late father’s estate. He remains close to her son, Sean, his half-brother. Julian saw Sean perform live for the first time in Paris on 12 November 2006 at La Boule Noire, and he and Sean spent time together on Sean’s tour in 2007.

Lennon has no children, revealing in 2011 that his difficult relationship with his father had discouraged him from doing so.

In commemoration of John Lennon’s 70th birthday and as a statement for peace, Lennon and his mother, Cynthia, unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in his home town of Liverpool, on 9 October 2010.

Lennon remains friends with his father’s former bandmate Paul McCartney, though they experienced a brief public falling out in 2011 when Lennon was not invited to McCartney’s wedding to Nancy Shevell. According to Lennon, McCartney later assured him that “someone obviously made a huge mistake” and the snub had not been intentional. McCartney provided the handwritten “Jude” motif for Lennon’s 2022 album. He also remains friends with May Pang who provided the cover photo for “Jude“. He shared his memories of her and his father in Pang’s 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story.

In 2020, he legally changed his name from John Charles Julian Lennon to Julian Charles John Lennon to reflect the name by which he has always been known.

Discography

Filmography

Films

Television appearances

References

External links

The musician, photographer and son of late Beatles icon John Lennon sat down with talk show host and self-proclaimed “Beatlephile” Bill Maher for a recent episode of Club Random Podcast, and he revealed mixed feelings over the Fab Four’s hit “Hey Jude.” […]

“I have a love-hate [relationship] with it, I have to say,” Lennon explained. “I’ve probably heard that song and heard renditions of it more than most people alive. And even my dear friends send me babies in nappies playing guitars [and] singing, ‘Hey Jude’, which I really don’t need.”

Lennon continued that he was thankful for the well-intentioned song, “but the other real thing is that people don’t really understand that it’s a stark and dark reminder of actually what happened.”

“The fact that Dad walked out, walked away — left Mum and I. That was a point of complete change and complete disruption and complete darkness and sadness. I mean, I was only 3, but I recognized that something was up, you know? But for Mum, it was heartbreaking. So it’s a reminder of that time and that place. So I get both sides of it, but a lot of people don’t necessarily understand there’s a dark, yin and yang of that song.”

From Julian Lennon reveals his ‘love-hate’ relationship with ‘Hey Jude,’ which Paul McCartney wrote for him (yahoo.com), September 22, 2023
From Paul McCartney on his lyrics – The Times – McCartney with Julian Lennon, Weybridge, 1968 © PAUL MCCARTNEY/PHOTOGRAPHER: LINDA MCCARTNEY
From Wondering Wanderer (tumblr.com) – Paul McCartney and Julian Lennon, circa 1984
From Julian Lennon on Facebook – November 12, 2022 – It’s Amazing who you run into in an airport Lounge! None other than Uncle Paul…. So, so lovely, and what are the chances… Thankful….
From Julian Lennon on Facebook – November 12, 2022 – It’s Amazing who you run into in an airport Lounge! None other than Uncle Paul…. So, so lovely, and what are the chances… Thankful….
From Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) / Twitter, June 27, 2023 – Last night, Paul hosted family and friends at @NPGLondon to celebrate the opening of his new exhibition ‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: #EyesOfTheStorm’. The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until 1 October, 2023.

Albums, EPs & singles which Julian Lennon contributed to

Paul McCartney writing

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