The Search for John Lennon: The Life, Loves, and Death of a Rock Star

by Lesley-Ann Jones

Pulling back the many hidden layers of John Lennon’s life, Lesley-Ann Jones closely tracks the events and personality traits that led to the rock star living in self-imposed exile in New York—where he was shot dead outside his apartment on that fateful autumn day forty years ago.

Late on December 8th, 1980, the world abruptly stopped turning for millions, as news broke that the world's most beloved musician had been gunned down in cold blood in New York City. The most iconic Beatle left behind an unrivaled body of music and legions of faithful disciples—yet his profound legacy has brought with it as many questions and contradictions as his music has provided truths and certainties.

In this compelling exploration, acclaimed music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones unravels the enigma that was John Lennon to present a complete portrait of the man, his life, his loves, his music, his untimely death, and, ultimately, his legacy.

Using fresh first-hand research, unseen material and exclusive interviews with the people who knew Lennon best, Jones's search for answers offers a spellbinding, 360-degree view of one of the world's most iconic music legends. The Search for John Lennon delves deep into psyche of the world's most storied musician—the good, the bad and the genius—forty years on from his tragic death.

Genres: Biography, Music, Nonfiction, Audiobook

352 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2020

About the author

Lesley-Ann Jones is a British biographer, novelist, broadcaster and keynote speaker.
She honed her craft on Fleet Street, where she worked as a newspaper columnist and feature writer for more than twenty years. She has also worked extensively in radio and television, appears regularly in music documentaries in the UK, USA and Australia, and is the writer and co-producer of ‘The Last Lennon Interview’, a film about the final encounter, in New York, between the former Beatle and BBC Radio One presenter Andy Peebles.

Her debut memoir ‘Tumbling Dice’ is out now.
NB: the cover of TUMBLING DICE displayed here is NOT the current, correct one, but is of an edition that was never published! It appears to be impossible to change it! The ISBN for the CORRECT, CURRENT VERSION is 978109175

First serialisation rights for TUMBLING DICE were acquired by the Mail on Sunday UK, published across four pages on 7th April 2019. Second serial went to The Times, UK, featured as a double-page spread on 10th April.

The author’s interview with US ABC Radio network is syndicated to 2,000 stations across the United States. She has discussed the book on most BBC local stations, including BBC York, Northampton, Guernsey, Cornwall, Solent, Hereford & Worcester, Derby and Oxford. Live radio exposure continues over the coming weeks, with BBC Radio London’s Robert Elms Show, Wandsworth Radio, Express FM’s The Soft Rock Show, K107FM Scotland, Wycombe Sound, Camglen Radio (Scotland), the Sticks Radio Show & podcast, BBC Radio Kent, Radio Caroline, Talk Radio’s The Paul Ross Show and Talk Radio Europe’s Bill Padley Show.
Lesley-Ann Jones’s agents are currently negotiating with two independent production majors on a screen adaptation of TUMBLING DICE.

Other recent works include ‘Hero: David Bowie’, ‘Imagine’, and ‘Ride a White Swan: The Lives and Death of Marc Bolan’. Her globally-acclaimed definitive biography of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, re-issued in 2019 as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, is a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. The book accompanies the band’s long-awaited eponymous feature film, the highest-grossing music biopic of all time.

The author is currently working on two further titles, for publication in 2020.

She is a mother of three, and lives in London.

Reviews

[*TUDOR^QUEEN* · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

I was very grateful for the opportunity to read this book. The "Season of Glass" is nearly upon us, and John Lennon is on my mind. He would have been 80 years old as I write this review, October 9th 1940 being his birth day. To be honest, I was initially rubbed the wrong way as I delved into the introduction to the book where the author speculated what John Lennon would think or do about the current political climate. I thought to myself, "Jeez, can't I get away from this hateful rhetoric in any book I read lately? I really don't need to encounter the "c" word within the first 10 minutes of a book I'm looking forward to reading." I actually did a couple of word searches within this kindle book to see if these uglies occurred anymore, because I would have stopped reading the book. I'm so glad after that unfortunate hiccup I was whisked away on that cozy and familiar Beatle historical journey I love so much.

Another little annoyance I had with this book was the author's attempt to psychoanalyze John Lennon. Obviously, he endured a lot as a young child as well as a teenager. His mother Julia Stanley married Fred Lennon, but he went off to sea where he worked as a ship's waiter. Julia was a very free spirited and beautiful young woman. She became involved with another man, later giving birth to a daughter which she gave up for adoption. Julia eventually met and moved in with another man, having two daughters with him. Julia's elder, stern and childless older sister Mimi Smith freaked out when she discovered that little John was sleeping in the same bed with Julia and her live-in boyfriend. Mimi went to the authorities and soon John was installed in his aunt's upscale home called "Mendips" in the Woolton suburb of Liverpool. At one point John's father Fred Lennon returned to Liverpool and attempted to take John with him to start a new life in New Zealand. Julia followed after them and John was actually made to decide between his two parents. At first he said he wanted to stay with his Dad, but when he saw his mother walking away he changed his mind and ran after her. Even so, John once again wound up moving back into 251 Menlove Avenue with his auntie. Mimi was very strict and conservative, but her husband George taught John gentleness. Tragically, Uncle George died suddenly at the age of 51 from a liver hemorrhage when John was a teenager. Julia loved listening and dancing to the latest rock and roll records, and John started visiting her more and more. She bought John his first guitar. She knew how to play the banjo, so all she could teach him was banjo chords which he played on the guitar. Just as she and John were getting ever closer, he lost her for good when she was hit by a car driven by an off duty policeman and killed instantly. I don't need to read psycho-babble to understand why John had mental issues. His life was an emotional rollercoaster! Paul McCartney was 13 when he lost his mother to breast cancer, so this was one sad thing these future band mates had in common.

This book covers the full life of John Lennon- his childhood, friendships, marriages, tenure in The Beatles and solo adventures. There is a wide variety of of "voices" in this book whose points of view I really valued reading. Some of these were John Lennon's lifelong best friend Pete Shotton, Hamburg friend Klaus Voorman (he drew the Beatles Revolver album cover and played bass on John's excellent first solo album "Plastic Ono Band"), first wife Cynthia Lennon, and "lost weekend" lover May Pang. I really enjoyed the clashing perspectives on the subject of Lennon's second wife Yoko Ono which ranged from her absolutely being John's soulmate and true love to her seeming quite happy soon after his murder and shacking up with younger boyfriend and interior designer Sam Havadtoy at The Dakota.

I felt like I was reading this book for a long time, but it was far from boring. I was savoring every bit of this quality biography. There were a lot of footnote narratives at the end of the book, which I normally don't read, but they were so interesting that I did. As is the usual case for me, quite a few books listed in the author's bibliography are books I own and have read, or have yet to read. However, I gleaned some new kernels of Beatles lore from this book, which is always a gift as far as I'm concerned. Well done... I truly enjoyed this new Lennon biography.

Thank you to the publisher Pegasus Books / Simon and Schuster for providing an advance reader copy via Edelweiss.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[John Lennon] was a snarl of contradictions. One minute a hilarious mischief-maker, the next a bitter fool. Both vicious brute and sniveling baby. Overconfident, gauche, phlegmatic, paranoid, he could be both wildly extravagant and surprisingly restrained. He was spiteful but gentle. Mean, yet generous. Uncertain, though discerning. Remorseless and self-reproachful in the same breath . . . Damaged, dysfunctional, and defiant . . . But who was he?" -- the author, on pages 13-14

I had remarked in my GR review for Ray Connolly's excellent Being John Lennon: A Restless Life three years ago that it is sort of fascinating how authors can continually churn out new biographies on Lennon, even at a mere 40 years after his murder and with various editions already crowding the shelves of libraries and book stores. Lesley-Ann Jones' unique The Search for John Lennon: The Life, Loves, and Death of a Rock Star wisely side-steps a strict or maybe expected chronological retelling of the man's life story - at approximately 315 pages, it's not really meant to be the absolutely most detailed bio on him out there - and is instead infused with a certain amount of slyly hip attitude or charm (Jones - who previously wrote about Queen's Freddie Mercury and T. Rex's Marc Bolan - reminds me of a cool big sister or aunt type who takes you to your first rock concert, or buys you your first alcoholic beverage on the 21st birthday) and pop psychology to attempt to explain the many personality quirks / dualities of Lennon. It's been said that a musician with some talent can take a tired old song and breathe new life into it, and I think Jones has done that here in a literary sense with her particular and sometimes peculiar slant on Lennon's life. Her coverage of his rough childhood, the Beatlemania years, his two wives (and affairs), and the final decade of his life never felt like a simple retread or rehash, but more like it really brought some fresh ideas to the table.

[Denise · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let's get it out of the way: I'm a big Beatles/Lennon fan. I'm always thrilled to read a new book, learn new things, be presented things from a different angle. And I really wanted to enjoy this book. First official biography of John Lennon written by a woman (besides the books written by his ex-wife and his half-sister), I was hoping to get a new perspective. The book was a major let-down.

I still don't know what her real intentions were in writing this book. 2020 being the 40th anniversary of this death and the year he would have turned 80, John was sure going to be talked about at the end of the year, so it was a good year commercially to publish a new book about him. Down deep, was it her only reason for writing the book? Does she even like John Lennon? She paints such a negative portrait of him - describing him as a tormented soul whose "enslavement" to the suffering from his past left without any real agency in his own life - that after finishing the book, I'm quite convinced she doesn't.

She seems intent to psychoanalyze him and treat him like some psychology research subject. John was no saint, but he was no devil either. Everyone is part light, part shadow, everyone has skeletons in their closets. If you are going to write his biography, I would expect a balanced and respectful bio that would give an accurate image of the man in the end. He was half of the most influential creative duo of the century, after all, and left a huge mark on music and the social role of artists/musicians. The name-calling (she calls him a narcissist, a wife-beater, a "sclerotic incapacitated creature" and other disrespecful things) got on my nerves. So did the way she insists on revealing juicy, crispy details about his very intimate life. Who cares that so-and-so gave her permission to reveal this or that - John is no longer here to defend himself. And neither is David Bowie.

The book is also not particularly well written. There are sections here and there that don't have anything to do with John, side comments about the history of England or the psychological damage of physical punishment, for instance, that a wise editor would have shortened or downright cut out. Those sections are not necessarily without interest, but were so out of scope and long they felt like fillers.

She does follow a certain chronology, but at times jumps ahead only to come back later, which forces her to repeat herself at times, just so the readers can follow. And she doesn't clearly answer the very question that she sets out to answer in the first pages of the book: Who or what "really" killed John Lennon, and when. (Brian? Fame? John himself? Yoko? She asks the question on page 21, and then never comes back to it to give it a proper analysis.) So the book would have benefited from a thorough editing.

If you want to read books about John Lennon, I would recommend skipping this one. There are far better ones out there.

[Carol Storm · Rating 1 out of 5]

"He would have demolished Trump." Really? I beg to differ. John Lennon *was* Donald Trump. He loved building himself up to be something he wasn't. He loved creating an aura of invincibility through lies and intimidation. He was a genius at talking big and taking credit for other people's accomplishments. And he was grabbing women by the p**sy before Donald Trump was old enough to know what the word meant.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am very familiar with the story of John Lennon’s life, and this is a good account. There are some very good, intricate details about his family history, some of which I didn’t know.

I had a slight problem with the author’s style of writing. But overall, a good account of his life, with some great photos I’ve never seen before.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I went into this one with some trepidation because, after purchasing it at a local secondhand bookstore, I looked at some of the reviews online (here and on Amazon) and was struck by many of the negative ones. I've long been a Beatles fan, and especially John Lennon (we share a birthday), so I have read a lot about him and the band over the years. But I decided to give this a try and, while I don't necessarily think it's a great book, I think it's pretty entertaining.

"The Search for John Lennon" by Lesley-Ann Jones is Yet Another Biography of John Lennon, yes. And at only 313 pages of actual text, it's not going to be packed full of shocking revelations that you haven't heard before. But why am I rating it so highly, then? It's very entertaining, honestly.

I've read doorstop-length bios of Lennon before (from Ray Coleman and Philip Norman, respectively; I haven't tackled the infamous Albert Goldman book yet though I might someday; some of the allegations in that one don't ring as "shocking" when you've been exposed to the ways in which celebs sometimes hide dark demons in their psyche). And I liked those, but I've read so many books about the Beatles that take them oh so seriously that sometimes it's hard to remember what made the group interesting in the first place: how fun they were, as recording artists and personalities. Jones, a veteran journalist, isn't about to regale us with pomp and circumstance about "Saint John," who didn't exist anyway; Lennon was a much more complicated, contradictory human being, and Jones knows this.

Like I said, I've read a lot of Beatles books (a *lot*). When I was first dipping my toes in the waters of Beatle-fandom, something like Norman's "Shout" or other similarly serious tomes would've been my guide. But as I've gotten older and more skeptical of the party line, I think books like "150 Glimpses of The Beatles" are more my style: less concerned with placing the Beatles into some huge context of importance and remembering that, at the end of the day, they were arguably the best musicians of their time and of ours (or the most lucky, perhaps). No one's making a movie like "Yesterday" about the Backstreet Boys or BTS (though both acts owe a huge debt to the Beatles in terms of "tapping the market of screaming teenage girls" and proving that one could sustain a career doing so), where the world suddenly wakes up without the music of either and is somehow the lesser for it.

"Search," then, is more just "the most recent biography" of Lennon, though with Jones' wit and chops it's pretty damn entertaining. Nothing here is brand-new, except the revelation that Yoko's long-lost daughter from her previous marriage (Kyoko) eventually reunited with her, but the saving grace of books like this is often not that "they reveal anything new" so much as they "make it interesting to read again." This is not an exhaustive biography, nor does it need to be; John himself would've been embarrassed by Coleman's reverential doorstop as he would've by Goldman's salacious one. The real John Lennon, who lived all of forty years but who had such an oversized, eccentric life that it feels like many more lifetimes than that, is someone that will ultimately never really be captured on the page or screen. But we can keep searching for him, and as Jones shows, finding him again and again to defy our expectations or beliefs.

So I would recommend this book to Beatles fans who have been through the literature and who know that the story has as much comedy as drama, as much humor as tragedy, and who aren't insulted that a book about one of the main heroes could possibly be shorter than "War and Peace" and still be good. If you're way too reverent about the Beatles or John, you might not like this book at all. But if you're like me, someone who feels like he's okay with Beatles books that don't take themselves or their subjects too seriously, this is a fun, entertaining read.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted so much to like this book but found the writing trite and kitschy. Disappointed.

[Tobin Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author basically pop-psychoanalyzes Lennon through his various relationships while dropping as many lyrics and song titles as possible into the narrative. She also inserts herself in there wherever possible.

Jones breaks no new ground here, just comes at it from a different angle with dubious results.

There's far better books out there than this one.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting take on John Lennon and his legacy. I did like that the book seems to assume that its readers already know a bit about its subject, so there’s not endless re-hashing of the well-known stories many Beatles fans know almost as well as incidents from their own lives.

At the same time, if you are not already a fan and know next to nothing about John Lennon, this probably shouldn’t be your first book. It skips around its timeline quite a bit, and I could easily see someone who doesn’t already know this timeline well becoming confused or frustrated.

One thing I didn’t always like was the author’s writing style. Some may dislike the chatty, dishy tone taken, but what I found the most aggravating was the author’s attempts to wedge as many song lyrics as possible into seemingly every paragraph, whether or not they actually flowed well with the text or made much sense at all with the rest of the material. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea but it was silly and distracting. I also had a problem with the author’s use of first names for everyone, including many peripheral individuals in the Beatles’ story. There are lots of common first names, and I found myself paging backwards, wondering who it was that she was talking about.

That said, this book contains some newly discovered or under-reported stories that fans will appreciate, and it’s also nice to see more women writing rock tomes. Sadly, rock journalism, especially when it centers on music of Lennon’s era, has for too long been a boys’ club.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read other books about JL and the Beatles - this one was chatty, digression-filled, complex and sometimes contradictory, much like John Lennon himself. I learned a few new things, and got a much clearer sense of why John could be a difficult,, abrasive person - his childhood experiences made that pretty much a given. I liked the writing style and enjoyed the book.

[Martin Kilkenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! A fascinating look into what may or may not have influenced Lennon and his song.

[Margie Hickey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring

So much bias and rambling text. I recommend that you leave this on the shelf I am sorry that I trudged through it.

[Shaun Moriarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gist:
A nuanced, humanizing look at Lennon — neither worshipful nor condemning, but refreshingly in-between.

Why it matters:
So much Lennon writing leans either myth or takedown. This one strikes a more honest chord, cutting through some of the propaganda without trying to rewrite who he was.

What you’ll remember:
• It challenges stories long taken as gospel, like the “choose your parent” moment from John’s childhood.
• Access to Cynthia, May Pang, Klaus Voormann, and others gives it real depth.
• Lennon’s contradictions — insecurity and bravado, cruelty and kindness — come through with clarity.

[Shirley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most biographies, the more time that passes between the famed subject and their death, the more information appears and the more accuracy in reporting is displayed.

This is the most relevant of the biographies I've read on John Lennon and I enjoyed it. For all that I know he was the "leader" of the Beatles, I still believe they never would have made it without the duo of John and Paul together. George was the musical artist and Ringo was the stabilizing background.

John's own confusion and contradictions fueled much of his artistry, and that is brought out well by this book.

[Chet Slonina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read MANY books on the Beatles and John Lennon and this one is the most revealing, eye opening and gives solid reasons especially that for Yoko Ono, for one, that truly explains her, John and the Beatles. The reasons songs were written as a means of getting feelings across and the relationships amongst so many was well detailed. I felt I understood John Lennon much better as an success all to himself and as an entity of the Beatles. Alas, All things must pass as we have, at least to me, the reason of why, "All you Need is Love"!

[Sydney Pusey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, John was kinda horrible. There was a lot I didn’t know, but this book was hard for me to read by how the author would sometimes go on tangents that I personally didn’t feel were that relevant. I felt like we got to know John Lennon by the various interviews of anyone who had even the smallest encounter with him

[Private · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't know much about the guy i just know many people who love him so i was curious to find out why ... I guess what I learned while reading this is that i will never understand because i wasn't there to see it, just like people growing up now won't ever understand my love for kurt Cobain. You have to be in the era of impact to understand such moments in history.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the rock history, and being reacquainted with the incredible performer and person who was John Lennon. Did not love the lengthy quotes and evaluations by "experts ??" into his psyche. Who are these people? Why should the reader assume their particular insight is any more valid than, say, mine? Much less interested in the author's various celebrity connections; references to these make it feel less of a thoughtful analysis (as demonstrated in some chapters) and more of a tabloid bio (especially towards the end).

[Deborah Sowery-Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this biography with lots of stuff about people around John Lennon, history of the music of the time, very detailed.

[Eric Riggenbach]

interesting rehash on the legend of a legend

[Victoria]

dnf

[Suzanne Gert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much new information and a lot of padding.