BIOGRAPHY: Philip Kingreviews John Lennon: The LifeBy Philip Norman, Harper Collins, 822pp. £25
JOHN LENNON was "born without brakes": from the very beginning it was full tilt all the way. Philip Norman's The Life tracks his helter-skelter journey from Liverpool blitz baby to slain icon outside New York's Dakota building.
John Lennon's grandfather, Jack, was born in Ireland, possibly near Dublin, in 1855 and, like many Irish men and women, fetched up in the city of Liverpool. He became a song and dance man who blacked up and became a member of Andrew Robertson's Coloured Operatic Minstrels.
John's father, Alfred or Freddie, was born in 1912, the fourth in a family of six. Alfred, who suffered from rickets, would sit on his father's knee "in his Tiny Tim leg irons and the two would sing Ave Maria together with sentimental tears streaming down their faces". Alfred showed musical ability of a high order at a very early age and that, coupled with what his brother Charlie called "that show off spirit", made him a natural entertainer, eager to perform.
Alfred married Julia Stanley, a banjo player and a fine singer, in December 1938, when he was 26 and she was 24. In Julia he had found a character whose craving for glamour and urge to entertain were equal to his own, but the marriage was strained from the outset. Julia's family deeply despised Alfred, her sister Mimi never accepted him and with the outbreak of war, he went to sea. John was conceived at number 9, Newcastle Road one day in January 1940 and born at the Oxford Street maternity Hospital, Liverpool, on October 9th, a day marked by an especially ferocious German night blitz.
John's parents' separation and the bitter haggling over the boy is heart-breakingly recounted by Norman. His subsequent "adoption" by the childless Aunt Mimi, who had always coveted him and subsequently raised him in suburban gentility, defined John's psychological and emotional make up, boy and man.
John was always convinced that his father walked out on him, which Philip Norman informs us emphatically was not the case. Alfred was the rejected one here, squeezed out by Mimi, Julia and her lover, Bobby Dykins. He left to lead a life of stewarding at sea and kitchen portering on land. Though the gulf between them seemed unbridgeable, the writer tells us that, "Freddie never gave up hope of convincing John he had not walked out on him that day in 1946, thereby causing the wound that still bled into his music".
The PS in chapter two of Alfred Lennon's autobiography is revealing: "PS Dear John . . . Like yourself I too was fatherless, but of course the circumstances weren't quite as distressing as your own, which left you with a chip on your shoulder, and if I may say so, strangely enough gave you the impetus to rise above yourself to your present status".
"In my life, I loved them all", and they are all here, in the 800-odd pages of Philip Norman's book. The book's sonic wash is known to all; we take "a ticket to ride" through John's complex life, public and private. We're in his world listening to The Goons and Two Way Family Favourites on the BBC, sketching with him in his box bedroom, devouring Just William books, forming a gang, and we're at his mother Julia's knee as she sings to him and plays the banjo.
We visit the Liverpool landscape of his youth: the teeming multi-racial docks, The Dingle, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and visit the chippie for a fish and fumbled finger pie to eat in the privacy of the cemetery, home of Eleanor Rigby's headstone.
From the beginning, John was a natural contrarian. He resented authority at home and at school. He rebelled in his Teddy Boy drainies against post-War Britain's conservative structures; he styled himself a rebel looking for a cause, and was a scrapper with an incendiary temper and a cruel, caustic, razor-sharp tongue. Norman lets us know early on that John cannot be refused. He was a wilful boy who almost always got his way though a mixture of magical charm and explosive anger.
Publicly, well before the Quarrymen or the Beatles, he was the leader, the clown, the comedian, the bully and the puckish entertainer. Behind the public mask he was shy and insecure, reflective, bookish, artistic and fuelled by ideas.
He knew too much of death as a young man and it marked him. When Julia was killed in a freak car accident, the shock, pain and outrage would stay bottled up in John "until the release like a howling genie more than a decade into the future". He was never the same; he was "crippled inside". "I was in a blind rage for two years; I was either drunk or fighting."
Like Dylan, Lennon was a sponge. Everything went in: music hall, ballads, skiffle, rock 'n' roll, folk, blues and beyond. All of which, when mixed with the vernacular scouse cadence, became the foundation of the Beatles' magical sound. Philip Norman's style is compelling, Lennon played out his life against the background of some of the most momentous events of the 20th century: the second World War, JFK's assassination, Vietnam. His songs are a soundtrack of our lives, and they sing off the pages like a juke box: punch 483 and you get Penny Lane, 634 for Instant Karma, 433 for Tomorrow Never Knows and so on.
THE DESCRIPTION OF LENNON AND McCartney's artistic and personal relationship is thrilling. They met, they sparked, they played together often in Paul's bedroom or in Aunt Mimi's front porch. No tape recorders just memory, two voices just like Charlie and Ira Louvin or Don and Phil Everly before them. From the beginning of their relationship, they could finish sentences and musical phrases for each other; as George Martin was to remark "John was the lemon juice to Paul's virgin olive oil".
There is none of Albert Goldman's gratuitous nastiness here. Norman is behind the man and produces a book that gives us a real sense of John Lennon, a cheeky and impressionable man, a great artist, publicly accepted and adored, privately full of rejection and self-doubt. He gave great joy and caused personal offence, but being angry with John, as Rolf Harris says, "was like trying to punch away a rain cloud".
John, Paul, George and Ringo were minstrels whom John's namesake Irish grandfather would have recognised, albeit white-faced and electrified.
You leave this book somehow feeling lonesome for John, Yoko, Sean, Julian, Mimi, Alfred and for Julia.
Mother, you had me
But I never had you
Oh I wanted you but you didn't want me
Father you left me
But I never left you
I needed you but you didn't need me
Mama don't go
Daddy come home.
• Philip King is a musician, writer, director and broadcaster