#john interview

John being interviewed about his favourite Beatles tracks, stating he would do Help! again, but slower + his 1970 Help! demo on piano

—From In His Own Write (1964) | First published in Mersey Beat August 17, 1961 | Written 1958-1959 (see below)

Q: There’s a very, very sad poem at the end of the play about Kakky Hargreaves who is some sort of person whose name changes during the poem who’s gone lost. Who was Kakky Hargreaves?

JOHN: Well, nobody, you know. It was Kakky, or Cathy, or Tammy. So it was all those people. But the point is that you GOT it -- the sadness that I wrote into it. But after you write something, a song or anything, you get the sadness and then you perform it or you put it on paper and then that’s gone. And the only way you get the joy back of writing it or the sadness back, is when somebody like Victor or somebody else comes and reads it to you, or acts it out. Like, when I first saw the rehearsal of the play, and they said these words back to me and I got the sadness from Kakky Hargreaves like I’d never heard it before.

Q: You wrote that one when you were very young.

JOHN: Yes. That was, sort of, pre-Beatle. Eighteen. Nineteen.

VICTOR: (laughs)

Q: And have you written lately?

JOHN: Well I write, I think, all the time. So I mean, it’s the same. I actually don’t put it on paper so much these days, but it goes into songs -- A lot of the same energy that went into those poems. I don’t know what I actually do with the thoughts, but they come out either on film, or on paper, or on tape. I’ve just got lots of tape, which, I suppose if I put onto paper it would be a book. But it’s just a matter of, do I want to make those tapes into paper or make the tapes into records.

Q: Does it feel the same to you when you’re writing something on paper and when you’re writing a song lyric?

JOHN: It does now. In the old days I used to think, if song writing was this... you know, 'I love you and you love me,' and my writing was something else, you know. Even if I didn’t think of it quite like that. But I just realized through Dylan and other people... BOB Dylan, not Thomas... that it IS the same thing. That’s what I didn't realize being so naive -- that you don’t write pop songs, and then you DO THAT, and then you DO THAT. Everything you do is the same thing, so do it the same way. But sometimes I’ll write lyrics to a song first and then I'll get the same feeling as Kakky Hargreaves or a poem and then write the music to it after. So then it’s a poem, sung. But sometimes the tune comes and then you just put suitable words to fit the tune. If the tune is (sings) 'Doodle-loodle loodle-leh,' and then you have 'Shag-a-boo choo-cha.' You know, you have sound-words then, just the sound of it. ‘Cause it IS all sound. Everything is vibrations, I believe, you know. Everything is sound, really, or vision. And just, the difference between sound and vision I’m not quite sure about. But its all just (imitates a vibrating sound) 'vuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh.'

—BBC-2 Interview of John Lennon and Victor Spinetti (about the In His Own Write play) [x] | June 6, 1968

—Remember by John Lennon | Written: started July 1969 | Recorded: October 9, 1970 (John’s 30th birthday), after seeing his father the last time | Released: December 11, 1970