‘The Daily Howl’: John Lennon’s first calling as a journalist
When you think about the music world’s biggest and best creative minds, in some respects, it seems as if they simply popped up out of nowhere. But the reality is that songwriting prowess, particularly in someone like John Lennon, was innate in his being ever since he was a child, with a visionary mind concocting up a whole load of different artistic outlets long before the heights of The Beatles ever came calling.
One such creative venture was The Daily Howl, a newspaper Lennon created in his school days to show his classmates. It featured all kinds of stories, poems, and drawings that perhaps give a greater insight into the early Lennon universe than any other facet. Indeed, who’s to say that drugs influenced the Fab Four’s penchant for psychedelics? If the content of The Daily Howl was anything to go by, those swirling sentiments were always just in his nature.
Lennon conceived of the idea for The Daily Howl at his home on 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton, Liverpool, before taking it into school each day to show off to his friends. In 1955, at just 15 years old, the future sonic visionary evidently already had a clear eye for the artistic direction his future life would take. He later commented on his nascent creative project by saying: “I would write it at night, then take it to school and read it aloud to my friends; looking at it now it seems strangely similar to the Goon Show! Even the title had ‘highly esteemed’ before it!”
In truth, whether Lennon had a warped sense of humour beyond his years or was already getting high on the fumes of LSD, many of his cartoons were a satirist’s dream in creating all kinds of weird and wonderful inventions. There were giant babies dressed as men, flying pancakes, and a bizarre obsession with Wigan Pier, which appeared in many stories, such as one called ‘A Carrot in a Potato Mine’.
Admittedly, all of this makes Lennon sound like he was permanently out of his mind, but all of it proved the flashes of ingenuity that made him into the transcendental force of his future. There was a range of writing excerpts alongside his drawings, including weather reports – “Tomorrow will be Muggy, followed by Tuggy, Wuggy and Thuggy,” one said – and poems, some of which went on to form part of his professional canon.
For example, one such effort titled ‘The Land of Lunapots’ was later published in a real Liverpool newspaper, exposing Lennon to a world of recognition that he clearly thereafter found too intoxicating to ever ignore. That specific poem, made up of nonsense phrases and words, was inspired by the Lewis Carroll classic ‘Jabberwocky’. However, the throughlines to a tune like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ are not all that dissimilar, and subsequently, the links of his life become more and more connected.
Although Lennon’s early calling to journalism may have been a rudimentary and short-lived affair, naturally whatever copies of The Daily Howl have whipped up their fair share of interest among the diehards, with the original edition being sold at auction in 1988 for £12,000. If only he had kept on at it, the world could have had not just a prolific songwriter, but a top-tier satirical cartoonist too.
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