Lennon, John Winston (1940–1980)

UK rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist; a founder member of the Beatles. He lived in the USA from 1971. Both before the band's break-up in 1970 and in his solo career, he collaborated intermittently with his wife Yoko Ono (1933– ). ‘Give Peace a Chance’, a hit in 1969, became an anthem of the peace movement. His solo work alternated between the confessional and the political, as on the album Imagine (1971). He was shot dead by a crazed fan in 1980.

Lennon is regarded as having tempered with cynicism and acerbic wit the tendency to sentimentality of his Beatle co-writer Paul McCartney, but idealism was evident in Lennon's life outside the Beatles, with publicity stunts like the 1969 ‘bed-in for peace’ (he and Ono stayed in bed in an Amsterdam hotel for a week, receiving the press). His first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), contained deeply personal songs like ‘Mother’ and ‘Working Class Hero’; subsequent work, though uneven, included big hits like ‘Whatever Gets You Through the Night’ (1974). He often worked with producer Phil Spector. On Rock 'n' Roll (1975) Lennon covered non-original songs that the Beatles had played in the early 1960s. Double Fantasy (1980), made in collaboration with Ono, reached number one in the album charts after his death.

At the height of Beatlemania, Lennon published two small books of his drawings and nonsense writings, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965). An anthology of Lennon's solo work and an album of previously unrecorded material, Wonsaponatime, were both released in 1998.