It would have been John Lennon’s 85th birthday tomorrow and to mark the occasion, a recently discovered interview with the ex-Beatle is to air on Boom Radio.
The interviewer was the ex-Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne, who spoke to Lennon in his Dakota apartment in 1975, shortly before he took a five-year break from the music business.
And the interview contains some interesting revelations, not least that Lennon didn’t think much of his most recent album, 1974’s Walls and Bridges, and had to be persuaded to release it.
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Lennon told Horne that he “couldn’t stand to listen” to the studio tapes at first, and thought to “just throw this away”. He then played them to friends “and they said: ‘Hey, it’s all right.’ So I said: ‘It’s all right. Oh it’s not bad at all. I quite like some of it myself. OK, let’s put it out.’”
Walls And Bridges is something of an underrated gem in Lennon’s discography, and is probably best known for the two singles it spawned – Number 9 Dream and the effervescent Elton John collab, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, a US Number One that inexplicably flopped in his home country.
WHATEVER GETS YOU THRU THE NIGHT. (Ultimate Mix, 2020) – John Lennon (official music video HD) – YouTube
It should be said, of course, that Lennon was never a great judge of his own work and old interviews regularly saw him disparaging huge swathes of his work with the Beatles.
During the interview, Lennon also talked about his battles to stay in the US with the Nixon administration. He told Horne that he knew that his phone was being tapped: “I know the difference between the phone being normal when I pick it up and when every time I pick it up, there’s a lot of noises.”
“(The administration was) coming for me one way or the other; I mean, they were harassing me. And I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in a car and they’d be following me in a car and not hiding.”
Lennon also said that he wasn’t the only rock star Nixon was suspicious of. “Mick (Jagger) had to vanish up his own manhole to get Keith (Richards) and the rest of them in to tour even. I mean, he did a lot of behind-the-scenes work just to get ‘em to be allowed in. So all of us have problems. It’s just that I wanted to stay here.”
You can hear more excerpts from the interview and Horne’s memories of the encounter tomorrow evening (October 9) on Boom Radio.