John Lennon in My Life

"Obviously, for One Two Three Four I read countless books about The Beatles. There’s a far higher percentage of good books about The Beatles than there are good books about the royal family or, particularly, Princess Margaret. Royal family books tend to be stodgy and sycophantic and not very well written, just slightly pompously written. Whereas a surprisingly high proportion of rock books are pretty well written. They tend to be overly serious, I suppose, especially new ones written by serious people, like Mark Lewisohn, who chronicles virtually every minute of each Beatle’s life. He does it really well. There is some kind of beauty to it. I can’t think of any contemporary biography of anyone in any field, which covers a life in such amazing, almost Proustian detail. Are you aware of Mark Lewisohn? He’s done various books about The Beatles, but the first volume of his new project came to over a thousand pages and that just takes the band up to 1962. It’s unbelievable. Every time they drive in a car you get the car number plate and that kind of thing. It’s absurd, but it’s also rather marvellous. Anyway, I could have gone for that kind of really dogged chronicling. But I’ve chosen this Pete Shotton book, which is comparatively unknown. Pete Shotton was John Lennon’s best friend at Quarry Bank School and they did everything together. They formed a kind of Just William gang and were obviously naughty boys—not absurdly naughty, but they’d shoplift and things like that, played practical jokes and were naughty in class. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In some ways John wasn’t a very friendly character, but when he became famous he stuck with Pete Shotton. He obviously needed Pete Shotton to keep his life at least slightly real. Eventually he brought Pete Shotton into the Apple organisation and Pete Shotton ended up running the boutique. It was all a disaster, of course. This book is ghostwritten, but it just has that tang of truth. You feel he’s telling you exactly what happened, through this Dr Watson perspective, with John as Sherlock Holmes . That’s not an ideal analogy, but he’s a normal guy watching this friend go slightly mad, especially with Yoko and with Apple and with drugs. Pete Shotton just about stays on the straight and narrow. John then buys him a shop, or gives him £25,000 to buy a shop. He buys a sort of grocery store-cum-newsagents near Bournemouth. Pete Shotton tells John, although this is very nice, he doesn’t have to do this for him. But John says, “No, you would have done it for me,” which is probably quite right. But John also needs him socially, so he spends a lot of time just staying at John’s house. The book gives you a very accurate and affectionate portrait of John and the amount of drugs and things he was taking—or they both were. Then you get Yoko’s sudden emergence. Yes, he did. 1983. In the last chapter George rings him to say that John is dead. Yes. Obviously, those friendships don’t exist as they did before because one half is one of the most famous men in the world and unbelievably rich and the other is just a normal Liverpool lad. It’s a bit like Lady Glenconner and Princess Margaret . A friendship with a lady-in-waiting is lopsided. So, in a way, Pete Shotton became the lady-in-waiting to John Lennon. But within those confines it seemed pretty uncomplicated. When John was fantasising about Brigitte Bardot and was then invited to see her, he took Pete along, which is an odd thing to do. If you thought you were going to get your leg over with Brigitte Bardot, you wouldn’t take your best friend with you. I think there’s something quite sweet about their friendship. It all ended happily, although it’s not in the book. In the 1980s, presumably from the original investment he put into the grocery/newsagent, he started a chain of burger restaurants, which I vaguely remember, called Fatty Arbuckle’s, and he became a millionaire. No. The book deals with that. He didn’t have any great musical capabilities, although he was in Lennon’s original band, The Quarrymen. No. And there were quite a lot of people who were in The Quarrymen. The other thing to say is that you shouldn’t be put off by it being ghostwritten. I think a lot of ghostwritten books are rather underrated because it’s just another version of oral history. And, if they’re well done, they’re better than if the person had written it for themselves. People often get very overawed by writing and so their real self doesn’t really come out. They try and do a version of themselves. Whereas, I think if you’re talking to a good ghostwriter, then you can get the truth out."