Pop Culture Safari!

Pop focus: The vocal stylings of Freddie Lennon - John's dad

Freddie (also often called Alf) Lennon re-entered his son's life in an unpleasant fashion at the height of Beatlemania in 1964.

If you've read a lot about the Beatles, you've heard the different accounts. In a nutshell, the senior Lennon vanished from John's life when the future Beatle was age 5.

There was a dispute between Alf and John's mother Julia over his custody. It's tangled, but John was living with Julia's sister, Mimi, at the time. Alf made an attempt to take custody and Julia turned up to stop him.

John went back to living with Mimi and didn't see his dad again until he turned up in London looking for him. Alf, a former merchant seaman, was working in a hotel kitchen at the time and a co-worker pointed out he had the same surname, and looked like, one of the Beatles.

Alf either exploited this link, or it was exploited for him (probably a bit of both) and he ended up selling his account to the tabloids and making the 45 rpm single featured below.

John and Alf had a tense relationship that gradually settled, for the most part, into civility as the 1960s went on. John also provided his dad with a regular allowance, which helped prevent him from talking too much to the press, or doing more things like this:

Coming up: Barnaby Volume Three

Out July 18, 2015.

The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by legendary children’s book author Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Carrot Seed), collected in full and designed by graphic novelist and Barnaby superfan Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Volume Three collects the postwar years of 1946–1947, continuing five-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his Fairy Godfather J.J. O’Malley’s misadventures. Bumbling but endearing, Mr. O’Malley rarely gets his magic to work―even when he consults his Fairy Godfather’s Handy Pocket Guide. The true magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson’s clean, spare art. In its combination of Johnson’s sly wit and O’Malley’s amiable windbaggery, a child’s feeling of wonder and an adult’s wariness, highly literate jokes and a keen eye for the ridiculous, Barnaby expanded our sense of what comics can do. This volume also features essays by comics historians Charles Hatfield and Coulton Waugh, as well as Johnson biographer Philip Nel. Black and white with over 50 pages of color.