JOHN LENNON – “(Just Like) Starting Over”
I don’t remember John Lennon being killed. It would be more accurate to say I don’t remember John Lennon being alive. His murder is the first thing I knew about him, a founding fact of pop music: John Lennon is dead. For me he has been dead longer than Bolan or Hendrix or Buddy Holly, who also came packaged in their deaths, but who I heard about far later.
I guess my parents were shocked, probably upset: I don’t think they cried. There were people crying on the news – but here I’m remembering footage I saw later, howling fans outside the Dakota building, flowers and candles in the snowy night. And then there was this, at Number One.
In the posts on “Imagine” and “Woman” I’ll talk about the later reputation of Lennon and about my reactions at the time to the convulsive impact his murder had on the charts. Normal spoiler rules don’t apply: all three were in a sense the same number one, a procession of Lennon at the top until the grief had begun to be worked through. “Starting Over” happened to be in the right place at the wrong time, so it was up first.
The strength of “(Just Like) Starting Over” is that tragedy slips off it: it still sounds as slight and relaxed as it must have done in November 1980, a natural No.20 hit by a star whose comeback was to be greeted with fondness but not overly indulged. Even the horrid irony of the title and sentiment has faded, leaving its mushy goodwill intact. A pastiche of the 50s rock and doo-wop Lennon loved, “Starting Over” can seem little more than superior Showaddywaddy, the man’s gifts for a hook and obvious enjoyment lifting it out of the retro trap. It’s a strong record but not at all a great one: in fact it fits comfortably into the minor canon of Later Solo Beatle Works, cosy pop music made by clearly talented men with nothing much left to prove.
Even so there’s a little more to it: Lennon picked it as a comeback single because of its self-referential qualities, reintroducing himself to an audience who’d moved dramatically on since 1975. The song is a man feeling his way back into a relationship by deploying the music he’d loved when younger, implicitly asking himself (and us) what this music might still mean now middle-age was rolling on. “Starting Over” is a record that treats rock music with an amused, endearing fondness: not trying to recapture past glories, just wondering out loud whether they could fuel deeper, richer present satisfactions. As demographic and format changes turned the rock audience upside-down, the question would become an increasingly crucial one: the questioner never got the chance to expand on this sketch of an answer.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,895 views • Share/Save
I see what you mean Lee (No18)I think I’m a bit younger so “my generation” didn’t really have an “our lot” as such being too young for the punk thing (and excluding the Sex Pistols almost cartoonish presence in the media punk figures never really penetrated into the mass popular culture even amongst the young)and by the time of Kurt Cobain a large proportion of us had already for years looked on “contemporary” rock as a complete irrelevancy.
But The Beatles/John Lennon were such a monolithic prescence in popular culture (even your gran had heard of them)that they were about as near as we got…
Finally further to the Yoko talk isn’t it fair to say that her “Walking on Thin Ice” (which John lennon obviously had such a large input to) now sounds as contemporary as just about any track recorded in 1980 with this becoming apparent 4 or 5 years ago when all those dance remixes by cutting edge producers were so successful in the clubs. So surely that shows the kind of boundary-breaking stuff he was still capable off. I just wish he had been round in 1988 twenty years after when on being asked about ‘Revolution No9′ he’d replied that “one day through electronics you’ll not have to be a musician to make music”. And when being asked about what could almost be seen as an early form of sampling too. IMO one of the single most prescient utterances by any major figure in popular music…
I was deep into my “Beatles suck – Specials (or someone else important at the time) rule” phase. Lennon’s death was still a poignant moment. I don’t follow US football, so I didn’t hear the Howard Cosell break-in like a lot of yanks did. I don’t remember how I heard. But I do remember all the memories of the past rushing back. Making fun of my best friend’s older sister who had the 1st Beatle picture out of a newspaper I’d ever seen. Cherishing “Hand” with the collarless jacket pose. Seeing “A Hard Day’s Night” about a half dozen times. Switching from soul back to Beatles because of “Pepper”. Taking acid to see “Magical Mystery Tour”, thinking it was rather sinister for days afterwards – yeah, I know, it was just the drugs. Then it really hit me & I just cried. This cat grew me up, he just started getting it together again, and, there you go. It was #1 because of that. I wanted his new stuff to rock so fucking hard, to show the Punk world “Here’s how you do it” – but he was 40, and that wasn’t going to happen. I understand that now, being old myself. Still, I wished he would’ve come back screaming. But I’m glad it was #1.
When John Lennon was killed it confirmed to me, a nine year old, that the world was actually a shitty, frightening place to live. If it wasn’t someone whose music had been part of my life since year dot getting shot then it was a student becoming the Yorkshire Rippers’ latest, and last, victim about half a mile from where I live. All house doors locked and bolted, my Mum not being allowed out after dark and the Police around every house on my street asking all the Dads to prove their whereabouts. Violence, it seemed, was everywhere.
What was a boy to do? Well, get out the Red and Blue albums and play them repeatedly, listen to as much of Lennons solo career as you could, go out and buy Double Fantasy and generally immerse yourself in a Lennon tinted world for a while.
Unfortunatley, to these ears at any rate, it wasn’t worth it. Even as a kid the difference between Beatle John and solo John was striking. Where was the heart? Where was the drive? Where was the scorn, humour, tunes and crucially voice? (Props to post #25)
(Just Like) Starting Over is either the sound of someone who can’t remember what him great to begin with or the sound of a man who is trying to feel his way back in gently. Perhaps it’s the latter. Certainly Lennon himself seemed to recognise it weakness. After hearing Springsteens’ Hungry Heart, which stylistically is not too different from Starting Over yet is a million miles away in terms of delivery, he was inspired enough to get straight back in the studio.
Who knows what he’d have come out with? Something better than this, surely? 3
Don’t think I remembered about Howard Cosell announcing it (he always did like to think he was there when History happened) – can’t have been watching the game (guess my parents were in that night and had sent me to bed, or my sister had wrestled the TV control away from me). It’s on YouTube, inevitably, though, along with a 1974 clip of a surprisingly relaxed Lennon chatting to Howard at a game. “Will the Beatles ever get back together?” “You never know…” says Lennon, far from pissed off at the question.
as a seven year old, via my older brothers’ red and blue albums, i was a huge beatles fan, much more so than at pretty much any other time in my life. so i do remember getting ready for school hearing this on brmb, our local radio station. the detail that has always stuck in my mind was that in the morning the radio only saying that someoine who *looks like* john lennon has been shot. looking back i’m not sure how accurate this is – “looks like” seems an odd way of saying that the details hadn’t been confirmed – but that’s how i remember it. i’m much less sure how it made me feel. i’m sure i wanted to and tried to feel upset, but as a seven year old, a distant murder, even of someone who made the music you loved so much, is a pretty abstract thing (actually, come to think it, at any age the death of a celebrity is still a pretty abstract thing, but we can get to that in 97). i think probably, what i felt most was some sort of sense of belonging and validation from the fact that this music that meant so much to me meant so much to other people too – back i suppose to the sense of the beatles as a global club that tom has talked about earlier.
i really like starting over. as others have said, it’s slight, but it’s warm and heartfelt and the sound of it is somehow comforting in it’s chunkiness.
I was eight, and a huge Beatles fan because my mum’s old Help! LP was the only pop album my sister and I owned. I’d gaze at their pictures on the back cover and try to work out what they were like as people.
Lennon’s murder hit me hard, but in a way I can’t explain. When I think about it I have this nagging feeling I’m forgetting something, or that it had some profound lasting effect I can’t pinpoint. I think I felt denied. ANYWAY, this is no place for self-analysis.
I agree with someone up there about dangerous lapses into pub-singer territory; still, I like the intro and it’s all pleasant enough if terribly poignant.
I’d just turned 27 and was huge Beatle fan. They were the band that defined my pre-teen and teen years.
I must have fallen asleep during the football game , woke up, got out of bed, got ready for work. Walked to the street car stop and looking across this view ( http://flickr.com/photos/ettml/376032560/), saw the news paper headline that Lennon had been killed. I barely made it to work. Left early when I’d heard that there was to be an impromptu memorial service in the square at Toronto City Hall. I remember it was cold, and I remember alot of people holding candles, crying but mostly just dazed.
I went to my local pub and my best friend says ” Jack Lemmon’s dead ! “. I was in no mood for jokes but he knew how hard this hit me and we proceeded to get very drunk.
Yes Lennon was a weirdo. But with his profile he was bound to seem strange to somebody. The stuff he was slagged off for seemed ahead of his time It’s really odd that all the experimental stuff that he got knocked for ( like Revolution Number 9 )…is now being re-claimed by Macca, as he tries to re-write the Beatles history to suit him.
At the time I was looking forward to hearing what Lennon had to say. He’d come through the long night of the soul and had seemed to find some happiness to which we, as we got older , could relate. But we knew that he’d tell it like he saw it , and that was always a unique view point.
I was just a vague twinkle in my parents’ eye at this point. Although I always knew who the Beatles were, no-one really listened to them in our house until my sister bought the red & blue albums some years later (on CD! how exciting!). I couldn’t believe that a) anyone could prefer the blue album over the red one, which clearly had all the famous songs on it b) that this Paul McCartney was the same dude that was mates with Rupert the Bear.
So no tears for J Lennon from me. There was quite a lot more fuss round our way when George died though – a bunch of my mates were working as cleaners at Harefield Hospital when he was staying there, and peeked in through his window every so often going ‘ooo it’s someone famous’. Huge bunches of flowers all over the place, apparently.
My mum was crying that day, which I guess affected me quite a bit, but later that evening, the BBC played ‘Help’, which was f****** amazing, because it had a laser in it.
The record is rubbish. Watching the Wheels is OK.
I must confess that when a friend and I heard about Lennon’s death, the first thing we thought was “How can we cash in on this?”
Needless to say, we didn’t.
This is a pretty humdrum 50s pastiche of a song, not actively bad but far from the best thing on the album, which is itself good but not tremendous – a creatively timid comeback. Lennon’s post-Beatles career is surprisingly disappointing when all’s said and done. Plastic Ono is good, Imagine is half-good, and thereafter it’s just a few odds and sods. Then the comeback album, which in some respects reminds me of Bowie’s Let’s Dance – ie a smash hit that is somehow lacking in the quirkiness and inventiveness that had been the trademark of both Lennon and Bowie.
Quite like the song. Yes, it’s slight, and yes the voice isn’t what it was, but I guess it’s hard to hear without thinking – that was the record he had just released when he was shot.
So, that makes it pretty difficult to judge. I suppose if it had been the third single of the album – and “Watching The Wheels” had been the first – no one would even remember it.
“Watching The Wheels” is a beautiful song. And I’ve lot of time for “Woman” too – both a more enjoyable listen than the majority of Lennon’s solo stuff, but then I’ve never really dug post-Beatles Lennon.
Extraordinarily insipid and vacuous song, certainly not worth waiting five years for, far too timid to emulate the glee and fun of the old rock ‘n’ roll it emulates.
Looking at my 1980 NMEs I see that ‘Double Fantasy’ is reviewed in the same week as ‘Sound Affects’ and ‘Gaucho’, two albums which really are serious integrated works, where you enter into a distinctive world and every song matters (‘Autoamerican’ is out that week, too). This must have seemed incredibly small beer in November 1980. Events of December 1980 meant that people grabbed the closest piece of Lennon product to hand, but this is no way to remember him, 29 years after that.
‘Watching The Wheels’ is quite good, though.
NMEWatch: 25th October 1980. Julie Burchill in full iconoclastic attack mode; “Gerry Munroe used to do songs very similar to this; pubs, Gracie Fields, maudlin singalongs. John Lennon either needs to be put away (if this record is meant to be good) or wants to be written off (if the direness of this is intentional). My guess is that he’s happy in his house-husband niche and did this merely to dissuade people who ask him when he’s going to get back into the “studio” to “lay down” some new “tracks”. ” (the comparison is actually a bit unfair on the demented falsetto of Gerry Munroe, if anything)
She doesn’t award a single of the week, in what is a very undistinguished-looking week. Also reviewed are;
Buzzcocks – Strange Thing
Buggles – Elstree
The B52s – Strobe Light
Rockpile – Teacher Teacher
Joan Armatrading – Simon
re 39 Compared to JBs later self conscious persona this seems only mildly iconoclastic and was not so out of step with much of the discourse that I can remember about Lennon in the NME at the time which tended to portray him as a bit of a has been
At least she didn’t say he should be shot which wouldn’t have been out of character for her.
BTW Tom, kudos for getting us talking about this record on the anniversary of the shooting. Your best piece of synchronicity since reaching “Lonely This Christmas” a few days before Christmas last year. (Which indicates, incidentally, that you’ve really been cracking on with it in 2008 – more than six Popular-years in one real-time year)
Just remembered I was watching the (very good) film “In Bruges” the other night and in it Colin Farrell punches an American tourist in the face with the words “That’s for John Lennon, ya Yank c*nt!”
I seem to like this a lot more than most here! I don’t remember “Watching The Wheels” at all, to be honest, aside from a vague memory of the chorus.
There is some ‘celebrity gift wrap’ by Yoko in the Guardian today: I’d forgotten it was the anniversary until Erithian mentioned it, so serendipity that we’re discussing it, rather than plan.
I remember when Lennon got gunned down because my dad got all upset as the Beatles were his time and I didn’t come along until five years after they split up. Of course, “it will be just like starting over” soon became “feels like I’ve just been turned over” in some quarters and the other joke was that Lennon went just a little over the top in the publicity stunt for getting his comeback record selling shitloads. I actually think that this track is good enough by itself but it would not have gone to the top without Lennon getting himself killed and my mate reckons that as he sailed to the floor having been plugged he was probably cursing Paul McCartney rather than the toerag who had just put him out the door.
#39 – “An undistinguished-looking week” in which Buggles release “Elstree”? I’m confused.
(“Elstree” is better than any solo Beatles single, I say)
#44 – I saw The Guardian at the station today, and fell about laughing. “TODAY: free Xmas gift-wrap designed by Yoko Ono. Tomorrow: Sienna Miller”. The Guardian’s always had a certain lack of self-awareness, but it’s getting out of hand these days.
Anyway, unfolding my free gift, I see it is a bit of white paper which says “IMAGINE” and “PEACE” on it, in differently-sized letters. Remember, the fear of being seen as a philistine is what these people shaft you with…
“Use your blood to paint.
A: Keep painting until you faint
B: Keep painting until you die.”
yoko was great till she met lennon — i don’t think her intelligence is analytical, certainly not self-analytical, and (given that her best pieces work by virtue of the smallness their reach, i think her conceptual intuition is massively swamped by non-comprehension of her own fame (cf my yada yada above, on lennon’s increasing uselessness once he’d learned to game all his “opponents”)
“smallness of their reach” isn’t very clear — what i mean is that they appear to impose so little on you that you find yourself toppling into them
given how things turned out, “cut piece” shows that BEFORE she met lennon, she totally understood mark chapman — a meeting r.meltzer has hinted actually started life as a fluxus project (kaprow: “yr cute yoko! go bag a beatle!”)
This thread inspired me to look out ‘Watching the Wheels’, which I hadn’t heard before. It’s really good. ‘Starting Over’, not so much.
This was the first John Lennon song I heard, or at least the first one I heard knowing that it was by John Lennon. I was 11 years old and adored it as it climbed up the charts in the weeks prior to his death – more so in the weeks after. Because I had an older brother who bought the music papers, I knew that it wasn’t cool but didn’t understand why its detractors missed the blindingly obviously great tune. It’s not just the tune I remember appealing, but the discernible sincerity of its sentiments. Although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, it was like a trailer to an emotional movie that I one day hoped to be able to star in, ten years or so down the line. Years later, I feel grateful that my entry point into the work of several “major” artists was often with a record regarded by critical consensus as weak. Without the baggage of a golden period to compare such songs to, you’re perfectly placed to take them for what they are. I was similarly lucky with Neil Young’s Computer Age (for about six months I thought he was some crazy robot futuristic guy – imagine my surprise, etc, etc) Anyway, (Just Like) Starting Over is an occasion when the events of your life inspire you to pastiche music that meant a lot to you as a younger person – a certain Four Seasons pastiche that hit number one three years later also fits the bill.
Aw, that’s nice, we all thought. John’s been quiet for a long time now and we all know he’s had his problems with drink and drugs to the point where even Yoko was getting fed up. And then this comes along. It’s no Strawberry Fields but it’s a pleasant enough little ditty, worthy of the lower reaches of the top twenty which is where it appeared to be stalling.
And then came that morning. I was back at work, doing computery things for a printing company, and running late. Dave Lee Travis was playing Beatles records back to back on the morning Radio 1 show but I never did get to hear why before I had to go out. I asked my office colleagues what was going on and neither of them knew. Then Gary the dedicated Bowie fan from the design studio came in. Did he know? Indeed he did. Lennon’s been shot. Terrible news.
And it really did feel like the day the music died. I don’t remember the demise of Buddy Holly but I knew at this moment what it would be like. Of course, one always knew that of all the Beatles John would be the one to go violently, but all the same I think we all felt that the Beatles were forever, even if they were no longer an item.
It has extra resonance for me. I was in a marital and domestic rut and I was unhappy there. When Lennon died I knew the game was up. Something very apt, which we won’t officially be discussing but I bet we will, would soon mark the beginning of the next phase of my life. But for now, well, we were all Yoko that day.
That chart run in full: 30-20-13-8-10-21-1-2 (Xmas) – 5-5-15-22.
Well, the first six weeks (i’m sure it went down to 21 the chart after he died, but anyway) was a respectable chart run for his comeback single, as low-key as it was ever going to be. 2 weeks top ten.
average pop song but when compared to the abysmal “Woman” it suddenly became a masterpiece.
Excerpt from Press Association release, Friday 7 January 1977:
“Heathrow Airport was teeming with reporters, photographers and thousands of screaming fans to witness the unexpected return of John Lennon to Britain. Striding confidently through the Arrivals gate, the Beatles star and peace campaigner, 36, was smiling, tanned and besuited, with wife Yoko Ono and their two-year-old son Sean in tow, happily signing autographs – though some fans did notice the SEX T-shirt being discreetly worn under his expensive-looking suit.
At a specially held press conference in the Dorchester Hotel shortly after his arrival, Lennon enthusiastically responded to journalists’ questions. He spoke of the genuine outrage which had provoked him to force the hand of EMI shareholders, demanding that the Sex Pistols’ contract with the record company be maintained and that their debut single “Anarchy In The U.K.” – which this week shot to number one, becoming the surprise first chart-topper of 1977 – not be withdrawn from sale.
Lennon admitted that the “punk rock” boom had been the decisive factor in influencing his return to the UK, declaring that it was “like the Cavern all over again, but without Brian making us all behave nicely.” Later that evening both John and Yoko were to be seen in London’s Roxy club, “pogoing” energetically to controversial new girl punk band the Slits (“Yoko’s astonished that her musical style has finally caught on with the kids”) and speaking intensely with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the highly-rated punk band the Clash. It is understood that Lennon has now entered into talks with the group with a view to producing their debut album, scheduled for release on Parlophone later this year.”
Yes, the above should have happened, but didn’t; instead the 36-year-old househusband stayed at home in the Dakota, baking bread, raising Sean, spinning the same old Jerry Lee and Eddie sides he’d spun in his Toxteth bedroom, being sarcastic and dismissive of the Pistols and others. But above all it should have happened because if Lennon had returned to Britain he might still be alive. He took too much for granted, and trusted too much; tentatively re-emerging in suit and short back and sides – looking for all the world like a young Peter Sellers – with a nice and reflective album about the renewed love he had for his wife, he thought it could still be Hamburg in ’61, that he could still walk around New York freely, unprotected by bodyguards, unsealed in bulletproof limousines. He never quite lost that naivety; thus the child inside him was killed by another outside(r) child who couldn’t forgive him for not having made “Revolution #10,” for not still being on the frontline of protest and action, for being a “phoney,” unmasked by the gross crime of wanting to become a middle-aged adult instead of being a child all of his life (“We have grown”).
In this way the critics who uniformly slaughtered Double Fantasy at the time of its release were not that far removed from Mark Chapman; they bellowed bile at Lennon for not being Weller, for not coming back with a hitherto unimagined Joy Division/B52s/Wire fusion, or fission. But how did they, or Chapman, know that he eventually wouldn’t? There was the American market to consider; Double Fantasy was never going to be dreamt up with Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios. But, as I said, it was also a tentative re-entry into the world after half a decade of deliberate silence, a wink of “remember me? Are you still interested? Well, we’re still happy, if not happier.”
The school bell which begins “Starting Over” sounds like a resigned sequel to the “1-2-3-4” which began “I Saw Her Standing There” at the other end of my life. But the resignation is desired, and Lennon sounds satisfied. Fuck the history and the past, “let’s take a chance and fly away somewhere alone”…even as by doing so he was flying back into the public consciousness.
“Starting Over” is a straightforward mid-tempo rock ‘n’ roll ballad, with period echoes courtesy of producer Jack Douglas, and Lennon does indeed appear refreshed, even mischievous with his Presley trembles (“It’s been too long since we took the time”) and the genuinely joyous yelps he makes on the line “It’s LIKE we both are falling in love again.” He is rushing nothing, wants to go back to “the early days”; but there is also a wistfulness about his tone, as demonstrated in the final “let’s take a chance and fly away somewhere” where his voice is phased and synthesised into momentary non-existence. Somewhere away from life?
Then the music starts again, with airport announcements of flights and departure times, and Lennon bows out; this is the life I want, and I’m off to live it, and you can come with me if you like – but note those increasingly orgasmic yelps (cf. “Revolution #1”) in which he indulges at the fadeout. Don’t take me for granted; I’ve still got some new tricks to play.
On a personal level, I associate “Starting Over” and Lennon’s assassination with my Oxford interview, since the news had broken on the Tuesday morning that I was due to have the interview – and even in the misty early winter sunshine of Lady Margaret Hall I have never, before or since, seen so many people shellshocked, stunned; the only one who didn’t seem to be was the tutor who interviewed me, who immediately asked me (seeing as one of my entrance examination essays was to do with Keats) the second I entered his study: “Lennon or Keats?” I instinctly and immediately shot back “But where does that leave Cole Porter?” Under such circumstances are futures decided.
I also recall the train journey from Glasgow Central to Oxford that Monday, down through the dark, rainy and oppressive remnants of the industrial North, cathedrals of sacrificed steel, drowned fires, and associate quite a lot of the darker chart hits of December 1980 with that journey – UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming,” the Specials’ “Do Nothing,” the Stray Cats’ “Runaway Boys” – and certainly there seemed to prevail a cloak of impending catastrophe. As someone in the NME letters pages of the time put it: “first today’s music dies with Ian Curtis, then the father of pop dies.” Meanwhile I got to go to Oxford; and a quarter-century later I listen to this song about starting over, about “our love” being “so special,” about the need to take a chance and fly away, the airport tannoy announcements – and the song means something different to me now, as I am sure its author intended it to sound.
Marcello’s double fantasy provoked some further thoughts on John Lennon – linked to John Lydon who also left an iconic group before releasing an album mourning the loss of both his mother and railing against the image and music that had become like a straitjacket.
I don’t know what Lennon (would have) made of UK punk. Living in New York he could have seen any number of the US wave of bands. I suspect his response to UK punk would have been ambivalent at best: “you can count me out/in” but hope he might have responded more positively to the Ramones, Blondie or Patti Smith
In the last interview – just before his death – he says that he likes Madness.
FLASH! J D SALINGER DIES!
Whenever somebody of note checks out, Rosie, Erithian and myself start texting away with our mini obits. It’s normally a race to see who can get in first:
Rosie: J D Salinger caught at last in the rye.
Erithian: catcher in the rye = caught in the slips.
Waldo: I bet Lennon’s beating the shit out of him as we speak.
Erithian: and Reagan joining in!
RIP, JD. One man. One book.
One of the reasons why Rock’n'Roll could exist in the first place was JD Salinger’s book. I’m not sure if the young Lennon had obsessed over the book as much as his killer had, but in his Quarrymen days, he struck that typical rebel pose, and adopted the attitude and manner that went hand-in-hand with being a rock’n'roller.
@ Thefatgit # 59:
“One of the reasons why Rock’n’Roll could exist in the first place was JD Salinger’s book.”
Too much credit. If ‘Catcher’ hadn’t been written we would still have Rock ‘n’ Roll. Good book for those who feel like ‘outsiders’ though.