Long Tall Pauly

_John Lennon, Paul McCartney and/e Ringo Starr; The Beatles; England/Inglaterra; London/Londres; Abbey Road; EMI Studios/Estúdios EMI; Studio Two/Estúdio 2 da Abbey Road; Sgt. Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band; With a Little Help From My Friends; March 29th 1967/29 de março de 1967.

_Photo/Foto: Leslie Bryce.

HELLO MAGAZINE: Where were you when you heard the news that your father had been shot?

JULIAN: “I was living at the time in the attic of my mum’s house in North Wales and in the middle of the night the chimney fell through I learnt afterwards that, apparently, at that precise time my dad was shot. Mum was away in London and I didn’t do anything about the chimney but just went back to sleep. The next morning I went downstairs and my step-dad was there with all the curtains drawn.        When I pushed them back I saw that there were hundreds of people and press outside. My mum had told my step-dad not to say anything until she got back, but it was very hard for him because I kept asking what was going on. In the end he told me. I couldn’t believe it and burst into tears.”

HELLO MAGAZINE: How did it feel at the age of 17 not only learning that your father had died but that he had been murdered?

“I’m more than likely still in shock. It was my first experience of having someone taken away so that you could never see them again. Then I had to deal with the aftermath of his death on a public level which was very hard. My first thought was really to take care of Mum who was the closest to him - after all I knew him much less well. My heartfelt thought was to make sure she was all right. I think   there were still a great deal of things she loved about him. He was, after all, the first major love of her life and now he’d been taken away from us both a second time.

"My next move after that was to go to New York and see Sean and Yoko. So the very next day I found myself on the plane surrounded by people all reading about Dad. They had no idea who I was. I honestly think that being surrounded by all these people and feeling so unbelievably alone was the most numbing feeling I’ve ever had in my life. I wanted to go to New York just to make sure it was all a reality and not a dream. But witnessing the whole situation was quite scary for a 17-year-old kid who was very young for his age. There was a lot of panic, and a phenomenal amount of people and energy outside Dad’s            building, where he’d been shot.”

-HELLO MAGAZINE December 16, 1995

“When Julian Lennon was touring as a musician in Australia, he met a group of aboriginal leaders who asked him to use his voice and fame to bring attention to their plight. It was a pretty normal request, until one of the tribal leaders presented Julian with a white swan’s feather.     

Julian, son of John Lennon, felt goosebumps wash over him.     

In the interior cover of his second solo album, Ram (1971), Paul McCartney included a photo of a beetle screwing another beetle. The symbolism wasn’t lost on John Lennon, who parodied Ram’s front cover on a postcard that came with his next album, Imagine (1971), which also featured a scathing song addressed to his former partner, “How Do You Sleep?”