John Lennon
John Lennon co-founded the Beatles, wrote a large share of their catalogue with Paul McCartney, and spent his later career as a political provocateur. Born in Liverpool in 1940 during a war, he was raised by his aunt Mimi after his father went to sea and his mother Julia gave him up; Julia taught him banjo chords and was killed by a car in 1958, when he was seventeen. He formed the Quarrymen at school and met McCartney at a church fête in July 1957. With George Harrison and later Ringo Starr, and long residencies in Hamburg that turned them into a hardened live act, the Beatles became the most commercially successful group in the history of popular music. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was credited jointly regardless of authorship. His own songs tended towards the sardonic and the confessional — Help!, Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day in the Life — and he pushed the group towards studio experiment and away from love songs. His remark in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus produced record burnings in the American South. He met Yoko Ono in 1966, and their relationship, collaborations and bed-ins for peace in 1969 were treated with derision by much of the press. The group broke up in 1970 in acrimony and litigation. His solo work included the stripped-down Plastic Ono Band, Imagine in 1971, and explicitly political records that led the Nixon administration to attempt to deport him. He stopped recording for five years to raise his son Sean. Weeks after returning with Double Fantasy, he was shot dead outside his New York apartment building on 8 December 1980.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: musician, singer_songwriter, activist
