By Michael Dwyer
You know the story about the drawing. “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” the four-year-old artist told his father. One can only paraphrase such an intimate moment half a century past, but that’s the gist. It’s one of two classic pop fables that have preceded and defined Julian Lennon for nearly his whole life.
The epilogue is that when he decided to own this story, he discovered it wasn’t his. As a tribute to his accidentally famous childhood friend Lucy Vodden, Julian wrote a song called Lucy in 2009. A rummage for the relevant artwork led him not to his estranged parents’ attics, but to the art collection of wealthy Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
“I did ask him, ‘When are you going to give me my drawing back?’,” Lennon says from his home in Monaco. “But the funny thing is … Mum said, ‘I don’t think that’s the right drawing’. I’d still take it if he was giving it away. But I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen.”
OK, yes. As metaphorically rich as it may be, it’s kind of a cheap shot to begin a story about Julian Lennon by mentioning his legendary father. But the truth is, no matter how you frame this story, one Beatle or another photo-bombs it almost instantly.
Julian Lennon’s new album is called <i>Jude</i>.Credit:Robert Ascroft for foureleven.agency
Jude is the title of Julian Lennon’s new album. The cover lettering is in Paul McCartney’s hand, taken from a rough manuscript of his song Hey Jude from 1968. To remind you of the second of those classic pop fables, that song was originally Hey Jules: a song to comfort young Julian in the sadness of his parents’ separation.
“The idea of naming the album Jude was just to say, ‘Listen, what are you going to ask me now? What can you ask me?’” he says, feigning exasperation. “It’s really just coming to terms and saying, been there, done that, I’m Jude, OK? Are we done now? Onwards and upwards, please.”
Another good beginning for this story is in a big waterfront pub in Glenelg in the early 1990s. At the time, Julian was enjoying a No.1 hit in Australia with Saltwater, an environmental lament with a killer guitar solo workshopped (but not actually played; it’s a long story) by George Harrison.
Mirning elder and whale song man Bunna Lawrie remembers that meeting with some emotion. Then as now, he was in the process of petitioning the Australian Federal Court for recognition of his people’s custodianship of the land and water of the Great Australian Bight, a struggle that goes back to his grandfather more than a century ago.
“[English filmmaker] Kim Kindersley brought Julian over from London because they wanted to make a film about people who are connected to cetaceans; dolphins and whales,” the elder explains. “You can see [the meeting] in that film, Whaledreamers. My sister Iris was there. She’s a Mirning elder and she presented to Julian Lennon a white swan feather … if you listen to the swan when they call out, their voice sometimes sounds like a musical instrument, like a trumpet of an angel.”
For Julian, it was a life-changing call. But once again, the voice he heard was his father’s. “Dad had said to me years before that if something ever happened to him, that the way in which he would show me that either he’s going to be alright, or that we’re all gonna be alright, was going to be in the form of a white feather,” he says. “So when I received that, that was undeniable to me that there are connections we do not see…
Julian Lennon with his father in London in 1968.Credit:Getty Images
“That was definitely a sign. And that point was the beginning of my journey into the world of trying to do some good and making some change in the world. It really was, well, do I just continue being a rock’n’roller? Or do I actually step up to the plate?”
Whaledreamers was the first film he produced in 2006. His White Feather Foundation has since played a hand in several more documentaries on environmental and humanitarian subjects, including Women of the White Buffalo and Kiss the Ground. The White Feather website is a gallery of awareness and fundraising concerns, from the Mirning custodianship battle to ambulances in Uganda; Indigenous filmmaking fellowships to the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship For Girls.
“All of the work that I do, it’s about making my mum proud,” he says of Cynthia, John Lennon’s first wife who died in Majorca from cancer in 2015. “It’s always been about that … Whatever I’m doing, I want to help. I feel privileged enough. I feel I’m sane enough. I’m alive. I’ve survived. If I can do some good along the way, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JULIAN LENNON
The change of career emphasis was due. By the time of Saltwater, Julian was openly disillusioned with a business hellbent on marketing him as the son of a man for whom he has always expressed deeply mixed feelings. The fact that he was ignored in John’s will (he sued to win an undisclosed sum in the ’90s) is just one tangible illustration of an imperfect relationship.
The gravity of an iconic father, though, is probably not something any son easily shakes – least of all in the music business, where personality reigns supreme and genetic inheritance is undeniable. “They will speak of my father when he’s not around/ You’ll be hearing his voice like you’re hearing it now,” Adam Cohen once sang, with a fair tilt at his old man Leonard’s wit and wisdom.
Lennon has been more-than-usually immersed in Beatle lore of late, having auctioned a series of NFTs in February.Credit:Robert Ascroft for foureleven.agency
Jude is a collection of unreleased songs recovered from the basement of an ex- manager, Julian explains, as well as several new pieces. The general mood was therefore “certainly to do with reflection. Looking at the last 30, 40 years of my musical life …”
He’s also been more-than-usually immersed in Beatle lore of late, having auctioned a series of NFTs in February with “a generous proportion of the proceeds” going to the White Feather Foundation. Collectors paid a few hundred thousand dollars for digitised facsimiles of his dad’s clothes, guitars and other mementoes, including the aforementioned Hey Jude manuscript by “Uncle Paul”.
“Also, there was the whole Get Back movie, which Sean and I saw together,” he volunteers. His half-brother, “one of my best friends, if not the best,” had to twist his arm on that, but “Stella’s (McCartney) going to be there,” he said, “So I just said, ‘Listen, all right, let’s go together as a united front’.”
“Sean and I both really enjoyed it. I mean, for me especially, it truly reminded me of what [John] was like, when I was growing up with him. His goofiness; the fun side of him, but also the cynical side of him. The madness, the talent, how he communicated and connected with the rest of the band members.
“It’s been the most bonkers existence,” Lennon says of his career.Credit:Robert Ascroft for foureleven.agency
“Through watching that I fell in love with him again. I really did. And it just reminded me that’s who he was before it all went pear-shaped. So that hit me hard, too.”
The brief from Julian’s PR team, quite understandably, is to try and minimise dad talk. I don’t bring up his recent cover version of Imagine, the song he swore he’d never sing, which helped Stand Up for Ukraine raise a reported US$10 billion in April. But it’s hard to interrupt Jules Lennon once he’s on a roll.
“The icing on the cake” of familial introspection, he reveals, was a recent decision to change his name by deed poll. He’s never gone by his given name, John, but it often caused a scene at passport control nonetheless. “It was always a bit of a pain in the backside,” he says, so in 2020, he ceased being John Charles Julian Lennon and began a new chapter of life as Julian Charles John Lennon.
“So now when you see any documentation, I’m finally me. I’m finally Julian … That related, again, to Julian, to Jules, to Jude, and a sort of coming of age, if you will. And finally reaching, through all the madness, some level of balance, some level of peace, focus, even more purpose, and a smidge of happiness thrown in there.”
With touring now a distant and not very happy memory, Julian is in no rush to commit to concert dates to follow this week’s release of Jude, though following one fabulous experience with the Hong Kong Philharmonic many years ago, he is intrigued by the possibility of mounting some full orchestral shows if the opportunity should arise.
Meanwhile there’s no shortage of documentary projects on the White Feather agenda, with topics including endangered sea lions in the Galapagos and orangutans in Borneo. Combined with his late-blooming sideline as an exhibiting photographer, the musical string to his bow seems perhaps destined to continue a slow slide to stillness.
“Let me tell you, it’s been the most bonkers existence,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, I’m finally talking about putting a book together…” The inspiration for that, he reveals, was the recent photograph-heavy twin-volume memoir by his Uncle Paul.
“For me, being a visual artist as well as a photographer and documentarian, I think the pictures tell more of a story than any words could do,” he says. “Pictures don’t lie. For the most part.”
Jude (BMG) is out now.
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