Julian’s Treatment

Julian’s Treatment

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by Sylvie Simmons

There’s several people I wouldn’t want to be, and one of them’s Julian Lennon.

John Charles Julian Lennon, born in Liverpool, ’63, between the astronomical signs of “Please Please Me” and “From Me To You,” son of Beatle and The One Who Wasn’t Yoko. Hidden from fans, photographed in twee baby-kilt with vanishing Japanese step-stepsister, pestered by mediums with songs his dad’s written for him in Heaven because his songs are well, you know.

If I played rock ’n’ roll, lived rock ’n’ roll, instead of filing my nails on a typewriter to it, I wouldn’t want to be Julian Lennon. I wouldn’t want to be told I looked like my Dad, sang like my Dad, talked like my Dad or didn’t. I wouldn’t want The Thoughts Of Dad in answers on Trivial Pursuit cards. I wouldn’t want to be talking right this minute to a journalist who used to hang outside my Dad’s house 20 years ago just to see him put out the actual milk bottles.

But hell; the music business is not the butcher business or the furniture removals business or the funeral business, and unless your last name’s Bach you’re going to have to expect some stick if you want to take over your father’s trade.

Julian Lennon doesn’t seem to find it too painful. Now his tooth, that’s painful, and he’s getting it fixed while he’s over here for a few days (lives in New York now; British dentists, like British writers, dig deeper—-heh heh—and come cheap) and until the chauffeur picks him up I can ask him what I want. And it’s all answered, friendly, unpretentiously and straight. I like him; the music’s going to take a bit longer, but he’s got a lot going for him. You know I think his dad would have found Julian’s music a far finer tribute to his memory—unless he got completely half-baked by that latter-day bread-making—than Yoko’s screeching, well-meaning, Starpeace twitterings. His son’s got some of his voice, some of his nuances and a lot of his attitudes. But I still wouldn’t want to be Julian Lennon. People have all these conceptions about Julian Lennon. “Like, I’m rich,” he says, “that I’ve got a snooty attitude towards people, and that I just don’t give a damn. And I’m totally the opposite.”

Except for the rich bit.

‘‘No! I’m not! I have no inheritance of that money until the end of my 20s, 30s. I’m making my own living!

“If I’d have had lots of money I probably wouldn’t be in this career now. I’m doing this because I enjoy it, but I think if I’d have had loads of money I would have been a slob throwing money about.” What’s so bad about that, I wonder? Julian wonders too. He comes up with something first.

“I’ve learned what money’s worth. If you’ve earned the money and bought a couch and someone spills coffee on it or whatever, you’d go, ‘You can’t do that! I earned that!’ ” I make a mental note not to flick my ash on his rather fine jacket. “That’s just an example,” he grins, “but obviously I’ve learned values in life.”

But how about political values? Does he feel it’s up to him to pick up John & Yoko’s banner and wave it for the world to see?

“Yeah, well,” he squirms just a tad, “obviously / have certain ideas of what I think in life—politics, war, you name it, peace, whatever. I’ve written songs like that. But,” he hesitates, “it’s too close. It’s too much what people might expect of me to turn to, to keep the Lennon name. I don’t know, maybe, eventually, in a couple of years, when people understand I’m an artist in my own right, maybe I will actually write about the world as we know it,” slight twist of irony. “But for the moment, anyway, I don’t know enough about the world to say what’s right and wrong.”

But that never stopped your father, I said, or maybe I just thought. I wouldn’t want to be Julian Lennon. If your dad’s the ultimate rebel, a man who protested just for the hell of it, the man who said that J.C. thing, for crying out loud, what do you do? Were you a teenage rebel, I ask? “No, I wasn’t,” he answers.

“Well, I was only rebellious because of my second stepfather, who tried to be more of a dad to me than my dad was, I mean trying to be too much of a dad, like ‘Be in by 10 o’clock!’ ‘Do this, do that.’ And I was like, ‘Get lost!’

“The first stepdad I had, you see, was a real nice fun Italian, a lunatic. And after having it free and easy—well, not too free and easy but within reason—coming up against this guy it was just, forget it\

“All the friends I had and all the people I used to hang out with, he didn’t like; he said, ‘You’ve got to stop seeing them.’ And I said, ‘No chance!’ I used to go and disappear for time on end. It would drive my mum mad, but I’d say, ‘I can’t live with this guy, he’s not my dad, who does he think he is?’ I ran away a couple of times.”

So did I, but I went back.

“Me too!”

And anyway there was always rock ’n’ roll, that Great Cliche From On High that swoops among us in our dangerous years and separates us into those that do and those that listen. Julian did. Did it since he signed on for guitar tuition at school and hung out with John on those parental visits, “sitting on the floor of his place in New York; we’d jam sometimes”—his dad bought him a Gibson Les Paul copy for his 11th birthday—“or listen to old rock records,” Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, the Everlys, that sort of stuff. And then he’d go home to England and listen to his mother Cynthia’s Steely Dan records, and Keith Jarrett and the Eagles and the Doobies and Elton John, Zappa, “a real mixture. I was into all that more than I was into Chuck Berry.”

His first band was one of those highschool-hop jobs with schoolfriend Justin Clayton (still in his band; along with Carmine Rojas, Alan Childs, Chuck Kentis and Frank Elmo), then “a couple of funny little bands.”

How funny?

“Very funny!” He laughs. They were funny. “They were always original bands—we never did cover stuff, never! Embarrassing. Whenever we played live we were always forgetting the lyrics, making mistakes.”

None of this particularly came with his mother’s approval; hardly surprising considering the deal Cynthia Lennon got out of the rock business.

“But they couldn’t really stop me. They * still wanted me to do well at school. But it sort of went so far that I forgot school, forgot what I was doing, didn’t pay any attention, and just went with the local guys who were playing in bands and left school and hung out with them.

“I was acting in school—I was very serious about acting. And art—I was going to go to art school and do the whole works. But because I met all these rock ’n’ rollers, so to speak, I got involved, and I just liked it from there on.

“After a while when they realized there was nothing they could do, they started encouraging me.”

When I asked him if having the Lennon name made it harder or easier I was glad he said “easier.” “Because dad knew a lot of people, and very nice people, and whenever I come across them they look after me, we talk about the times they had with dad or whatever and they say, j ‘Anything we can do for you,’ which is real nice.

“I’m proud of the Lennon name and I’m proud of what my dad did. The only strugJ gle I’ve got is making myself known as me, you know.”

He had a band called the Lennon Drops in 1980, the year that arsehole shot his dad. From as-near-to-obscurity-asyou-can-get, he woke up to find newspaper reporters on the front lawn wanting something to file under their POOR LITTLE RICH BOY, SON OF MURDERED LEGEND headlines. The poor little rich boy sodded off, lived in a grungy flat in London’s Notting Hill, hung out with socialites and let them buy him drinks, dated dumb-blonde models and got photographed on his 19th birthday with a topless specimen at Stringfellow’s. PLAYBOY JULIAN BOOZING AGAIN muttered the headlines. “I’m pretty calm nowadays,” says Lennon. “I think my image changed after the first album came out.” A laugh.

His first album was Valotte, written in a French chateau, dedicated to “My mother Cynthia and to my Father...” It sold two million copies. Some people didn’t like it because it didn’t sound enough like his dad. Other people liked it because it did. Hell, I wouldn’t want to be Julian Lennon.

“It’s not a conscious effort to sing like that. When you sing, you sing. It’s not like I’m like—what do you call those guys who mimic people? Whatever comes out, comes out. Especially for the first album—that’s when I really started singing, so there’s no way I knew how to mimic anybody. It was just what came natural.”

Part of any similarities there were you could blame on Julian and John having had some of the same old rock influences; others on the fact that when Julian came out with Valotte, acousticguitar-based, everyone else had silly haircuts and synthesizers.

“Exactly. I didn’t get off on any of the new music that was around—all the synthesizers and stuff. I mean I like synthesizers—I play them—but within reason. I like the guitar a lot, too.”

His follow-up, The Secret Value Of Daydreamilng, he reckons has “a more modern feel. I wanted to get involved in electric music, so to speak, just a little bit, because I was mainly acoustic on the last album.

“After the tour in America and playing with a hard American band—it sounded like a heavy metal album on the road! and I sort of said yeah, I like this sort of stomp,” (Not for the first time either. In one of his earlier incarnations he hung out and played with Paul, Son of Lemmy, another candidate for Sainthood, and drove a mean motorcycle.) “So I brought that into the album—more stomp. But it’s the same band and there’s still the same simplicity with the lyrics, and the honesty.”

Julian thinks he writes pretty good songs. Writing comes easy, he says, “I can write a tune in five minutes. As far as lyrics go I tend to take a little more time because I have to think.” He pulls a face. I sympathize; I try and think as little as possible. ‘‘Not that I don’t with music. Sometimes I write bits of tunes and put them aside and leave them for a year or two, find them in a pile of cassettes and re-record them and start working again.” Most of the songs for this album were written on a writing holiday in Barbados, or in the studio.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43

Any worries about topping two million, proving the first album wasn’t bought as a one-off gesture for John?

‘‘I have to be a good songwriter permanently because of the name, and because of what I’m trying to prove. That / am physically, actually writing the songs, and if you like the songs, then that’s my work.”

He’d probably rather you never mentioned John Lennon in an interview; but I had to. And now I’m going to mention Yoko. They’ve patched up their differences, he says. And Sean? Is he getting the rockstar itch now big stepbrother’s doing so well?

‘‘He used to be very interested in computers. When dad played, he sort of used to like it and all that, but now he’s seeing his older brother sort of being successful in music he’s getting sort of jealous and saying, ‘Well, / want to do that!’ So now he’s having piano lessons, guitar lessons, sax lessons,” he laughs. “I just hope he has the feel for it, and not the technical thing. Because if you use too much technical it could be dodgy. But I’ll see about that. I’ll sort him out!”

Time’s running out. Quick questions. What’s one thing about his private life that would surprise people?

‘‘Oh, oh—I don’t know. I can’t think that quick. Maybe that’s it—that I can’t think very quick.”

Does music take up his whole life? ‘‘Yes, totally, totally.”

What goes through his mind when he’s onstage? ‘‘What’s the next lyric? Why am I walking into the speaker? Stuff like that.”

If he was doing my job, what would he write about Julian Lennon? ‘‘That would depend whether I liked me or not. I suppose I’d say that I’m a sufficiently capable singersongwriter who does a good job.” So would I.

And the final question? Oh, the usual one, you know what it is.

‘‘Most of all I want experience. I like experience, meeting people, seeing places, doing different things, that’s it.”

That’s it. E