Growing Up To Be Julian Lennon

Growing Up To Be Julian Lennon

Sylvie Simmons

Julian Lennon’s life has been as normal as a country-and-western Motley Crue album, as an outburst of David Lee Rothian modesty, as a Simon Le Bon boat trip that doesn’t end up on the rocks! It’s surprising Julian isn’t all washedup, with the things he’s been through: hidden by his mom, first wife of the Beatles’ John Lennon, back in a time when pop stars were meant to have the love life of a “Ken” doll, then exposed to the world in a glare of publicity when British reporters camped on his front lawn to reveal the news that his father had been murdered.

But here he is, a week before his 23rd birthday, a month before his first-ever tour of his home country, an hour before his second visit of the week to the dentist (the legacy of a terrible addiction to— cookies), friendly, funny, honest, frank, and pretty, well, normal.

The same guy who tore up the countryside on his motorcycle?

The same guy who hung out with the heavy metal crowd? Who took drinks where he could find them at trendy London clubs, inspired “PLAYBOY JULIAN HITS THE BOTTLE AGAIN’’ headlines in the British daily papers, hung out with blonde models who sold their love stories to the salivating press, which got up his nose (a lot like his father’s nose it is too, and the reason for that nasal, slightly Liverpudlian voice) so much they’d print “ANGRY YOUNG MAN” stories the next day?

“I think my image changed a lot after the first album came out,” Julian grins, and the eyes that looked alternately piercing and quizzical light up. It wasn’t Julian Lennon, Playboy or Poor Little Julian, Son Of Murdered Pop Legend anymore. “It was more ordinary, boring,” he laughs, ” normal."

He was born in Liverpool, where his dad’s group had two records that very day in the British Top 10 charts. ‘‘We moved around all the time when I was little,” he recalls, away from the prying of his father’s fans, finally settling in the countryside just outside of London. And then his father left them, married Yoko Ono, and got on with his "love-ins” in New York. His mother remarried twice. The first stepfather—"a lunatic Italian”—got his approval, the second one didn’t. Partly it was a personality thing, partly because young Julian, who’d just turned 11, was discovering rock ’n’ roll. And, with it, rediscovering his real father. "I went to New York and stayed with him and Yoko. We’d sit around on the floor and listen to old records or jam. I’d signed up for guitar tuition at my school, and my dad gave me a copy of a Gibson Les Paul for my 11th birthday.”

Did his mother and stepfather encourage the emerging talent?

"Not at first,” he says. "They still wanted me to do well at school, you know, and all that. But they couldn’t really stop me,” he grins. "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.

"After a while, when they realized there was nothing they could do, they started encouraging __ _ »j me.

His first group was with schoolchum Justin Clayton, who still plays in Julian’s band—a "funny little band,” he describes it now; their first gig was a school party.

‘‘I just enjoyed it. I just kept on doing it and doing it and writing and writing. It was just a natural thing.”

He found writing ‘‘very easy”; from there it seemed an obvious move to sing the songs himself. The best bit about rock ’n’ roll was that it was somewhere to hide from the crazy world around him: fathers, stepfathers, stepmothers, newspapers, everything. He didn’t like home too much when the second stepfather moved in—‘‘he tried to be more of a dad than my dad was; it was like, ‘Be in by 10 o’clock.’ ‘No! Get lost!”’—and school wasn’t much better. He liked art and drama, but not much else, and the other kids weren’t so great. ‘‘They gave me a hard time because my dad was a millionaire,” and because that same dad was in the papers doing Strange Things with Yoko, inviting reporters to their bedroom, being photographed with protesters. “It was a bit embarrassing,” shrugs Julian. “It wasn’t easy...”

So he hung out with the rock ’n’ roll crowd, and put together the best band he’d had up until then: The Lennon Drops. But it all fell to pieces when his father was killed...

Four years later, Julian emerged with the sensitive, well-thought-out album Valotte, after a period of “going pretty crazy” and sorting his feelings out. Or trying to, at least. He still says he’s “confused” a lot of the time.

Asked what he daydreams about most of all—his latest album, after all, is called The Secret Value Of Daydreaming—he says, “mostly about being confused!” This even though he strikes you as being very together—writing the album in just over a week when essential equipment failed to turn up on the Caribbean island he shut himself away on to get some good new songs together.

“I’m very proud of the new album,” he says. “I think it’s much heavier than Valotte, but that’s only natural because we spent so long on the road and that sort of toughens you up,” he laughs.

As for touring, he can take it or leave it. It’s good to have such an old friend as Justin around for moral support (the other band members are Carmine Rojas, Alan Childs, Chuck Kentis and Frank Elmo)—although Julian points out that he has to “virtually make an appointment!” to see Justin these days. “He’s in love these days, so I don’t see him as much. He’s been taken away!” he laughs. “Another one’s gone!”

As for Julian’s own love life, his lips are sealed. The last Big Romance—an English model named Debbie—broke up under bitter circumstances, and she sold their story to the British newspapers. As for another publicized romance—with pretty heavy-rock singer Fiona—his diplomatic answer is the usual “just good friends.”

Julian Lennon has had enough of the Weird And Wonderful headlines in his very un-normal life, and wants us to listen to his music instead. “It would be nice,” he says, only half-joking, “if the most exciting thing people could write about me would be my album!”