Did John Lennon secretly destroy his own father’s attempts at a music career?
“Father, you left me/ But I never left you/ I needed you, you didn’t need me,” John Lennon sings on ‘Mother’, his devastating take on his childhood.
It was a rough one. Lennon’s father abandoned the family, came home randomly one day expecting it all to be fine, and then even attempted to kidnap his young son, getting him to visit the dad in Blackpool with plans for them to emigrate to New Zealand. The drama between his parents ended in a traumatic blow-out that had a major impact on the kid, as Alfred and Julia Lennon forced the then five-year-old John to choose a side, with him reportedly picking his dad until he saw his mother walking away and ran after her, sobbing.
After that, Lennon didn’t speak to his father for 20 years. Throughout the entire launch of The Beatles, through all their Liverpool club shows and throughout their swift rise to the top, Lennon senior wasn’t there, and that was the way Lennon junior wanted it. Then, in classic eye-rolling fashion, when Lennon was world-famous, his dad made a return.
It was 1965, and The Beatles had the world in the palm of their hands. Beatlemania had swept the globe, meaning that had Fred, as he was now going by, innocently lost track of his son, he definitely couldn’t miss him anymore, as Lennon’s face was plastered everywhere. That would be the optimistic view, the father finding his estranged child again, only to realise he’d gone on to major success, leading him to want to make contact again, all to congratulate him.
The cynical view is the one Lennon took. “I never knew my father,” he said in a 1966 interview, “I saw him twice in my life till I was 22, when he turned up after I’d had a few hit records. I saw him and spoke to him, and decided I still didn’t want to know him.”
In Lennon’s eyes, the reunion was all a product of greed. He had fame and money now, and his father wanted some of it; however, Fred didn’t just come begging, he tried to ride Lennon’s coattails.
In 1965, Fred Lennon randomly tried to launch a music career with the track, ‘That’s My Life (My Love and My Home)’. The eye-rolls keep on coming as the father was trying to release this track on December 31st, mere weeks after Lennon and his band released ‘In My Life’ on Rubber Soul.
With that album still in the charts as his dad suddenly started trying to use the name and connection for his own gains, it seemed as though Lennon and the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, put out a hit on it.
“At Christmas 1965, we heard that Alf had made a record, under the trendier name of Fred Lennon,” John’s wife Cynthia Lennon recalled.
“‘That’s My Life (My Love and My Home)’ was awful, and hugely embarrassing to John, who was furious at his father’s blatant jump onto the bandwagon of his own success,” she said as Lennon found the return of his estranged father genuinely distressing. Desperate to keep his father from the name he’d made famous, Cynthia said, “He asked Brian to do anything he could to stop it. Whether Brian did or not, I don’t know, but the record never made it into the charts and soon disappeared”.
All sources suggest that either Epstein did something directly as Fred’s manager, Tony Cartwright, remembered getting a disparaging call from him. “Tell me it’s not true, Tony,” Cartwright recalled him saying, trying to put him off representing Fred, “Is John’s dad really a kitchen porter? What are the papers going to make of that!”
But according to the family themselves, the final blow came directly from John in the face of his old man. Fred’s brother, and John’s uncle, Charlie Lennon remembered, “Alfred went up to visit John in Weybridge and to see why Brian Epstein had taken Alfred’s record, ‘That’s My Life (My Love And My Home),’ off the charts.”
According to him, Lennon’s response was clear: “He slammed the door in his dad’s face”.
After that, Cartwright’s theory is that Fred simply gave up, as if maybe the whole thing was just an attempt to reconnect with his son. “Freddie was heartbroken, and immediately gave up the music business,” the manager said, “‘It’s brought me nothing but unhappiness’, he said. ‘I’d rather go back to washing pots’. And so he did.”
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