In the spring of 1969, as he famously sang, John Lennon honeymooned in Paris with his second wife, Yoko Ono, after which they took up residence at the Amsterdam Hilton, ‘talking in our bed for a week.’  One voice that talked back--tetchily, too--belonged to Maureen Cleave, journalist with the London Evening Standard, to whom, three years before, Lennon had gifted a ticking time-bomb in the shape of his remark that the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus.  Explosion also characterised Cleave’s words at the Lennons’ bed-in.  She was aghast.  What on earth were they doing?  What was all this nonsense meant to prove?  And what, above all, had the two of them done with Beatle John?  Lennon’s response was a fiery rehearsal for his pronouncement a year later, when the Beatles officially disbanded: if she or anyone wanted ‘The Witty Moptop’ back, yeah-yeahs and all, she had the film A Hard Day’s Night to give her solace, not to mention those early, deliberately wacky publicity stills of the Fabs variously bounding over rubble or springing from walls. 

        The implications of this febrile exchange lie at the heart of this new study by Janne Mäkelä, Research Fellow in the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland.  Charting Lennon’s career from the clubs on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn to his death at the hands of Mark Chapman, he assesses the changes wrought upon Lennon’s image by what he terms ‘the starnet’: that collocation of elements--sometimes uneasily at peace but never in total harmony--which include music production, the star publicity machine and, crucially important, the view from the fan-base.  Even after all that has been written on Lennon (and, in some ways, perhaps because of it), this is no easy task.  But Mäkelä performs it skilfully, offering analyses of Lennon’s progress and work in the context of such cultural studies issues as constructions of stardom, competing claims upon public figures and the often vexed questions of class and gender.  As a result, his study is a worthy addition to the Music / Meanings series, which is already distinguishing itself as a list to watch. 

        Dealing with this multiplicity of Lennons--the moptop, the writer sporting the cap of Milligan and Lear, the bag-ist, the peacenik, the ‘househusband’--is challenging indeed.  Like the ‘starnet’ which nurtured Lennon’s Beatle celebrity, it is a volatile mixture, but Mäkelä scrupulously evaluates each Lennon in turn.  Perhaps inevitably, his exploration of ‘Beatle John’, 1962 to 1967, offers a consolidation of previous studies rather than any new discoveries.  But that is not to undervalue the work, since he delineates all the well-known influences on Lennon’s music--the Englishness of music-hall culture, the manic inventiveness of the Goons, the breathtaking promise of the early Elvis--with a sureness of touch.  Where the study really comes into its own, however, is in the chapters devoted to Lennon the post-Beatle (a period which, in a sense, could be said to have begun with the death of Brian Epstein and the consequent un-glueing of the band).  The chapter on late-Sixties Lennon and Activism contains nimbly-written analyses of ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ and ‘Working-Class Hero.’  In the former, sardonic Lennon is well to the fore: the song may play with notions of messianism and martyrdom but its music is ‘fast rock ‘n’ roll shuffle’ (Mäkelä, p. 163), jaunty and upbeat.  With the latter, what appears to be a plea for social change is actually solo Lennon’s painful confession of guilt at the riches accrued by Beatle John.  Again, as Mäkelä notes, the music is at fruitful odds with the lyrics: lower register vocals, sparse strumming, an emphatically minor key--all proclaim the confessional intimacy of a Leonard Cohen rather than a Woody Guthrie call-to-arms.

        Exploring the Lennon of the early 70s, with his battles against deportation from the US and his lethally protracted ‘lost weekend’ in LA, Mäkelä is most illuminating on the ways in which, after more fraught negotiations between subject and ‘starnet,’ the latest Lennon appeared.  Here, he discusses ‘survival’ as an initially exciting but ultimately tedious trope of the time, especially in the US.  In so many songs, he points out, rock and pop musicians proclaimed that they had ‘survived,’ while often remaining hazy about the nature of the peril (the Nixon administration?  The deepening mire of Vietnam?  Their own excesses?  As Mäkelä implies, it could be any or all of the above).  Lennon is in there, surviving with the best of them.  However, as Mäkelä shows through critiques of such songs as ‘Intuition’ (from Mind Games, 1973), ‘Scared’ (from Walls and Bridges, 1974) and the single ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,’ this survivor is reflective, not shallow. The demons he confronts may be unspecified, but the legacy of the Beatles’ ‘starnet’ doubtless accounts for not a few.  That said, these songs find Lennon at the end of post-Beatles bitterness, a situation encapsulated in his own words: ‘I’m going to be an ex-Beatle for the rest of my life, so I may as well enjoy it’ (p. 192).  Tragically, it was this acceptance of ex-Beatledom, together with a refusal to inhabit any comparably glitzy ‘starnet,’ which struck the sinister Mark Chapman as such a betrayal and led to the appalling events of December 8th, 1980.

        The demands of blending two aims--in this case, musical analysis and cultural appraisal--are certainly great.  For the most part, however, Janne Mäkelä meets them admirably.  Rather than depressing the market in Lennon studies, John Lennon Imagined offers notable insight into the man as creator, as troubled product of the most famous ‘starnet’ in popular music--and, later, as reclusive rebel against all constructions of celebrity.  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ said Lennon of the Beatles’ break-up.  As this study demonstrates, his post-Beatle music can be heard as a heartfelt attempt to preserve the truth of those words.