The legacy of John Lennon

Next month, the ex-Beatle would have been 70. Here, one of his confidantes reflects on his enduring importance and how he might have reacted to events since his death – from 9/11 to punk and the advent of Twitter

Full Article-http://bit.ly/94Hefh The Observer- Richard Williams (Who knew him in his prime)

……And Twitter, of course, to bring it right up to date. He would have loved Twitter. He was an inveterate sender of postcards, often decorated with doodled self-portraits, and he wasn't the sort of person to write a letter and then put it away in a desk drawer overnight before inspecting it the next morning and removing anything that might have been set down in haste. His generosity and his venom were equally impulsive in their nature and second thoughts didn't really interest him.

I happened to be there when he was learning to type, in the suite he and Yoko occupied in the St Regis hotel in New York as a temporary accommodation after making the move to the US in the autumn of 1971. He was sitting on their bed with a small portable machine on his lap, tapping away. One of the things he wanted to be able to do was type letters to newspapers.

My paper, Melody Maker, subsequently became the recipient of several lengthy broadsides, usually disputing assertions made in interviews by Paul McCartney or George Martin. He saw everything and let nothing go without comment. Twitter's immediacy, and its encouragement of the urge to respond, would have suited him down to the ground. Once Sean had shown him how, you wouldn't have been able to get him off it………..

……..He had been away from England for almost a decade when he died and visitors from the old country were often regaled with his yearning for Chocolate Olivers. London certainly missed him. As long as the Beatles were headquartered at 3 Savile Row, with its parade of bizarre hangers-on, the city seemed to have a centre of vibrancy and an unfailing source of headlines. New York turned out to be a better place to live, but he had been bruised by the battle to obtain his residency permit and by the discovery that J Edgar Hoover's FBI had been watching him as a result of his association with the Yippies and the Black Panthers…..

…There was talk of returning on the QE2 for a voyage that would end with the ship docking in the Mersey. He even speculated that he and Yoko would spend their later years, after Sean had left home, living among the artists in St Ives. Perhaps he would have resumed the engagement with art that began at Liverpool College of Art in 1957, or found time to explore once again the love of surrealistic wordplay that crackled through In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.

No doubt, some version of those notional events would have taken place. If all other lures had failed, the death in 1991 of his Aunt Mimi – the loving but stern Mimi Smith, his mother's sister, who brought him up from childhood through adolescence – would have drawn him to Poole in Dorset, where she lived out her last years in a bungalow paid for by a nephew who adored her despite that celebrated early warning: "Music's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living from it." Perhaps it was the formative supervision of the disciplinarian Mimi that gave him the habit of putting his trust, not always wisely, in strong, self-assured characters: Yoko, Spector, and the New York hustler Allen Klein, whom he brought in after Brian Epstein's death to sort out the Beatles' affairs, to McCartney's disgust.

And then there was George Harrison's death in 2001. Lennon and McCartney eventually settled their differences, major and minor, but as long as the four of them were still alive John always stood in the way of what he believed would have been the inevitable anticlimax of a public get-together with Paul, George and Ringo, even when implored by Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general of the United Nations, to perform at a fundraiser for the survivors of the Cambodian genocide.

Loyalty to Yoko surely played a part in turning him against a project that would inevitably have reminded his audience of how much they missed the old relationships between the four musicians, before the arrival of powerful women pulled the two principal figures into a new phase of their lives from which retreat became impossible. Whatever else the future might have held, there would have been no Beatles reunion.