Julian Lennon on John, Paul, "Hey Jude," Yoko...and Love
The day the Julian Lennon album Valotte was released in 1984, my older brother and I pooled our lawn-mowing money and rode our bikes to Record Express in West Hartford, Connecticut. Our local top-40 station, 96.5 WTIC FM, was playing “Too Late for Goodbyes” every other song—MTV too—and we had to have it.
I still have the album. He’s on the cover, black-and-white, sitting backward on a chair, staring out at you, unsmiling. I know now, though I didn’t know then, how much he looks like his father in that shot. I was 9 years old. The album was probably my gateway to the Beatles, the first lesson in an education.
Lennon surrounded by reporters in 1984, the year his album Valotte was released. It earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and "Too Late For Goodbyes" became a number-one hit. Some speculated that the song was about his father.A year ago, I interviewed Lennon. The Beatles documentary Get Back had just come out, and Lennon had seen it with his half-brother, Sean. (Sean’s mother is Yoko Ono; Julian’s was Cynthia Powell, John Lennon’s first wife.) The interview was meant to be part of a larger project about what it’s like to have a song written about you. “Hey Jude” was written by Paul McCartney about Julian and Cynthia; a friend of mine, Chadwick Stokes of the band Dispatch, had recently written a song about me and my family and some hard times. That project is for another day; here, now, is my interview with Lennon. In it, he told me about his new record that was coming out. The title: Jude.
Source: Ryan D'Agostino/esquire.com
