John Lennon's son Julian fears Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney are trying to obliterate him from history | Daily Mail Online comments Julian Lennon has fought to be part of the Beatles story since his birth in 1963 Peace was said to have broken out in the extended Lennon family last year. After a lifetime scarred by a bitter feud with his stepmother Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon arranged a most unlikely reunion. Not only was his mother, Cynthia Lennon, in attendance at Julian’s first photographic show at a New York gallery, but he was also publicly reconciled with Yoko and her son — his half-brother — Sean Lennon. In an accompanying television interview, he insisted that, while he still believed Yoko to be ‘manipulative’, he was determined to be friends with her for the sake of her son. ‘The key point is Sean,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurt him.’ It had taken Julian a lifetime of therapy to get to this point. And yet, earlier this week, his calm attitude appeared to come crashing down. After a series of perceived snubs, Julian wrote on his Facebook page: ‘Wow . . .

Snubbed at Macca’s Wedding, Snubbed at the Anniversary of ‘LOVE’ in Vegas! (A Beatles Cirque de Soleil-themed show) Snubbed at Macca’s wedding reception in NYC, last night Snubbed at George Harrison’s Film Premiere . . . What have I done to be ignored in such a way? I was not invited to ANY of these events . . . I thought WE had a relationship . . . Obviously not . . . Gimme some truth . . . Maybe now it’s time to tell the Truth . . . I & My Mother will NOT be eradicated from History . . . How dare they.’ Yoko was present at almost all the events while Sean, 36, was at two of them; Sir Paul’s New York wedding reception and the Love anniversary. George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, and their son Dhani attended the London premiere of the documentary about Harrison’s life and the London wedding reception; as did Ringo Starr and his wife Barbara Bach.

Sources close to Paul McCartney claim Julian's lack of invitation to his two wedding parties was an 'oversight' Sources close to Paul McCartney claim Julian’s lack of invitation to his two wedding parties was an ‘oversight’ — for, certainly, McCartney has always been closer to Julian than his own father was. ‘Julian is regarded as part of the family, but everyone just assumed he was in Italy (where Julian lives),’ insisted a McCartney source. As for Beatles activities, such as the Love anniversary in Vegas, they were organised by the Beatles’ holding company Apple — and Yoko, who Julian once accused of wanting to ‘deny Dad’s English family’, serves as the sole Lennon representative for it. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share But it is little wonder that John’s Lennon’s 48-year-old oldest son sees darker forces behind the snub. The truth is, Julian has fought to be part of the Beatles story since his birth in 1963.

He and his mother were the band’s dirty little secret; manager Brian Epstein was so determined to make the foursome appear single and available that — even as reporters knocked on the door of Liverpool home where Julian was being nursed by Cynthia — he ordered flunkies to deny their existence. Julian's mother, Cynthia Lennon, was in attendance at his first photographic show - and so was Yoko Ono and her son - his half-brother - Sean Lennon Once the story was out, Julian remained out of sight; his father was either on tour or carousing with other women. And when Yoko Ono came onto the scene in 1967, precipitating the break-up of his parents’ marriage when Julian was just five, he was firmly ousted from his father’s life. They didn’t see one another for months, even years, at a time. Ever since, Julian has been fighting to be acknowledged. He is asked about his father wherever he goes and his own musical talent — he is a songwriter, guitarist and singer — has been overshadowed by the awe in which John is held. Little wonder he occasionally struggles to maintain his composure: ‘I have a short temper.

However, getting angry, negative and aggressive; it does no good. Dad used to shout in your face and scream. I recognised traits I had that were the same as his, so I stopped.’ Or, at least, he’s attempting to improve his temper. Shortly after venting his fury on the internet this week, he took the message off Facebook and replaced it with another, which said: ‘Rising above . . . Always have, Always will . . . And better for it . . . I Luv you Mum . . . Thank You.’ Manager Brian Epstein was so determined to make the Beatles appear single and available that - he ordered flunkies to deny Cynthia and Julian's existence Cynthia, who married three times after John but kept the Lennon name as it helped her find work as an artist, has had to pick up the pieces. Even before he left Liverpool for New York with Yoko in 1968, John was never much of a father. It took him three days to meet his son and then he immediately went back on tour. Often, postcards were his only communication for weeks on end. Paul McCartney felt so sorry for the young boy that he wrote Hey Jude to cheer him up soon after Cynthia and John divorced.

From then on, despite the millions John was making, he kept Cynthia and Julian on a financially-tight leash — they got an allowance of £2,400 a year in maintenance until his death. Things got worse when John was murdered and Julian was just 17. After John divorced Cynthia he kept her and Julian on a financially-tight leash For Julian wasn’t named in John’s will and it took him 16 years — and the threat of a prolonged court case — to persuade Yoko to hand over any of the Beatles’s millions. So, while Sean and Yoko enjoy an inheritance of £200 million, Julian is believed to have received £20 million in 1996. But he has always said the thing that hurt most was Yoko did not allow him to keep any of his father’s possessions. He has since bought back items from auction houses, including the postcards his father sent him from around the world. ‘The irony isn’t lost on me that I am using his money to buy back his things,’ he said, when he exhibited some of the memorabilia he collected.

‘The postcards meant the most to me, as they showed he was thinking about me when he wasn’t around.’ Julian has even admitted the way his father treated him made him decide against becoming a dad. ‘The reason I decided not to have kids in the past was because I didn’t want to fall into the same pattern.’ He would like to have children now, but while he has been engaged twice — to socialite Lucy Bayliss and actress Olivia d’Abo — he has never married and is currently single. Home is a small house near Lake Como in Italy, which he once dreamed he would share with a wife and family. Although he has lived in many places — Wales, Majorca, Monte Carlo, and New York — Italy has always felt most like home, as it was where he would spend summers with the only man who ever acted like a father, his mother’s second husband, restaurateur Roberto Bassanini. Yoko, John and Julian in 1968 One former friend says he wonders whether Julian will ever find happiness. ‘He loves his mum, but that is the only relationship he has ever had that sticks,’ says the friend.

‘He can never relax and open up; he thinks everyone’s out to use him because his dad was John Lennon the legend. One of the few people who can understand him is his half-brother, Sean. The son of Yoko Ono and John, Sean had everything Julian didn’t. John announced he was retiring from the music industry while Yoko was pregnant with Sean, quitting work to look after his ‘beautiful boy’. Sean, subsequently, grew up in a New York apartment worth millions. ‘Sean had it all,’ Julian later recalled. ‘And I just thought: “Hmmm, I see. I see where the love’s going with this.” And there are Mum and I scraping by.’ Yet, just as John deserted Julian when he was five years old, Sean was also just five when the Beatle was brutally shot down by Mark Chapman. And, despite their mutual animosity, Yoko turned to Julian to help Sean in the aftermath. She did not know how to tell him his father had died and asked for his advice. She encouraged a friendship of sorts between the two; just as John had given Julian his first guitar, Julian bought one for Sean and taught him how to play it.

There was a brief time in the Nineties when the two did not talk, mainly because of the ongoing court case over Julian’s financial settlement. But Julian forged some kind of private reconciliation in 2007 when he turned up unannounced on his brother’s tour of Eastern Europe and ended up staying for two weeks. Julian has even admitted the way his father treated him made him decide against becoming a dad Some of the photographs he took on that tour formed the centrepieces of his New York exhibition, which both his mother and his stepmother attended last September. Although he has been seen with Yoko and Sean before at Beatles events (usually scowling from separate sides of the room), it was the first time they have appeared to be supportive of him. As Julian launched the show, he announced he was finally comfortable with himself. ‘I have turned everything around,’ he said. ‘I am starting to have a winning streak.’ Paul wrote Hey Jude to cheer Julian up soon after Cynthia and John divorced To that end, last month he brought out his first album in 13 years. He had some success as a solo musician in the late Eighties, but quit the music business when, immediately after writing one album, his record label demanded another.

The latest album, perhaps aptly titled Everything Changes, has garnered some positive reviews — although it’s failed to make it into the top 20 in Britain. He is still hoping to release it in America next month. ‘Julian is a perfectionist and that is partly because he wants to live up to his father’s talent,’ says a record source who has worked with Julian. ‘Although he constantly talks about what a terrible father John was, Julian is still the archetypal child who was deprived of his father’s love and still wants to win his approval.’ Tellingly, he often carries a white feather in memory of his father and he has named his charity — which funds everything from environmental projects to spiritual healers in London cancer wards — The White Feather Foundation. It’s a habit that stems from a rather eccentric story his father once told him; that when John died he would return to Julian as a white feather. ‘I realise that hate wastes a lot of time and energy and I would rather re-direct any energy I have to good and positive use,’ he insisted when he launched his charity. ‘It’s a connection. It’s a bloodline.

It’s a love line — you can’t just ignore that.’ And who can blame him for still desperately wanting that bloodline to be acknowledged — after all the pain it has caused him? Julian Lennon - Biography - IMDb Julian Lennon Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (30) | Personal Quotes (31) Overview (4) 5' 8" (1.73 m) Mini Bio (1) Julian Lennon was born on April 8, 1963 in Liverpool, England as John Charles Julian Lennon. Trivia (30) Half-brother of Sean Lennon and step brother of Kyoko Ono Cox . Father John Lennon 's song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was inspired by a drawing Julian had made at school. Was the inspiration for Paul McCartney 's song "Hey Jude", and was mentioned in father John Lennon 's song "Mother.". Was engaged to Lucy Bayliss; however, the relationship ended in early 2007. Has admitted he actually prefers Paul McCartney 's work in The Beatles to his father John Lennon 's, while he especially admires John's "Isolation", among his solo material.

When 11-year-old Julian visited John Lennon in the recording studio during the "Walls and Bridges" sessions, the two played an impromptu version of "Ya Ya", with John on piano and Julian on drums. John surprised Julian afterwards by revealing there'd been tape rolling--and their performance was going on the album. It turned out to be their only collaboration. Julian's inheritance from father John Lennon 's estate was a small one--a $250,000 trust fund set up when he was a toddler, which he refused to touch when he received it at age 25. Was given several large cash gifts from Yoko Ono years later; nonetheless, he has said he'd rather have had some of John Lennon 's song copyrights and other possessions of his to share with his Lennon relatives in England. Claimed early in his career to be looking for a mystical sign John Lennon had promised to send him if he died; a white feather floating evenly across the room. His song "Well I Don't Know" mentions his "feeling the presence of the dead", a reference to sensing John's presence in a house (which he later learned John had visited in life), when he was writing material for his first album.

Years later in Australia, an Aboriginal native presented Julian with a white feather, causing him to re-examine his feelings toward his father, and toward promoting peace. After the relative failure of "Help Yourself", he took a five-year break from recording, to do some soul-searching and especially to come to terms with being John Lennon 's son; he realized he'd been very angry with John, who had publicly preached about peace and love while privately being rather harsh and neglectful toward his own family. His comeback album "Photograph Smile" was dedicated to his stepfather Roberto Bassanini, who'd "really raised me.". Had a rough time growing up, with schoolmates who automatically assumed that being the son of a pop star meant he was rich and snobbish; in fact, he and his mother lived in a modest house on a small income, and he had a hard time persuading father John Lennon to buy him things, or send him money - even when he related tales of what he was expected to live up to. Fought a long battle in the late 1990s, to acquire the Internet domain name "johnlennon.com" from its registered owner.

Has also spent the last several years (and thousands of dollars) collecting items that once belonged to his father. When Julian decided to pursue a music career, he submitted demo tapes to record companies without his name on them, wanting to be signed on the strength of his own talents, rather than the Lennon name. Charisma Records in the UK offered his band a recording contract, not knowing until the signing who the lead singer was. Had a "bad boy" period in his teen years, forming and dissolving bands overnight with names like "The Lennon Drops" and "The Lennon Kittens", and letting himself be photographed washing dishes in a hotel, much the same as his grandfather "Freddy" Lennon had in the Sixties. Mother Cynthia Lennon finally made him move out of her house, tired of his bringing would-be collaborators home at all hours, while stepmother Yoko Ono gave him a $100 a week allowance to stop him working menial jobs.

Along with receiving a birthday card every year from Paul McCartney , Julian also received a telegram from him when his first album was released in 1984: "Good luck, old fruit." Was engaged to actress Olivia d'Abo in the early 1990s; she sang backup on his album "Help Yourself". Played in an early 1980s band with 'Koz Mirblouk', who later wed model Julie Chan (now Julie Mirblouk). Godson of Brian Epstein His father John Lennon wrote the song "Good Night" for him, which closes the Beatles' 1968 self-titled album (commonly called the "White Album"). John gave the song to Ringo Starr to sing. Named "A Day in the Life" (one of the handful of The Beatles songs actually co-written by his father, John Lennon , and Paul McCartney ) as his favorite Beatles tune. Stepson of Yoko Ono . John Lennon says "Hello Julian" in his recording of "Stand By Me", and is the reason Julian sings the song in concert. He has had a long and troubled relationship with his stepmother, Yoko Ono .

The song, "Hey Jude", was written by Paul McCartney , to console Julian during his parents' breakup. Admits that he was closer to Paul McCartney than he was to his father. Became lifelong friends with George Harrison . Nearly eight years after the death of his father, he appeared in George Harrison 's, "When We Was Fab," which talked about the days of Beatlemania, when The Beatles were referred as "The Fab Four." Lennon was holding one of his father's solo records. Julian Lennon At 50: It’s Never ‘Much Too Late’ For Lennon Family Discord Julian Lennon At 50: It’s Never ‘Much Too Late’ For Lennon Family Discord Chris Willman Tweet Share Watching not just the Beatles but the Beatles' children grow older is one surefire way to be astonished at the quick passage of time. Julian Lennon, the most famous Beatlekid of them all, turns 50 on April 8, which would be cause enough for gasps or sighs, for those of us with a "where did the years go?" mindset. It's all the more breathtaking when you consider that "little" Julian has now lived a decade longer than John did.

Sorting out where Julian stands in the Lennon family firmament as he enters his sixth decade is as puzzling a prospect as ever. Just as friendly relations among the surviving ex-Beatles always seemed to be in an on-again, off-again mode, the same holds true for many of the Fab Four's children and past or present spouses and in-laws. The recurring rifts between Julian and his mum Cynthia Lennon on one side, and Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon on the other, represent one of the most intriguing divides of all. In 2010, at least some of the polluted water seemed to be under the bridge, when Julian opened a photo exhibition and, at the opening night, four people posed for a photo-op that most Beatles fans thought would never happen: brothers Julian and Sean with their mothers Cynthia Lennon and Yoko Ono. Hell, it seemed, had frozen over. At that point three years ago, reconciliation seemed to be in the air. Julian seemed to be sorry that he had publicly expressed his disdain for how Yoko had handled things over the years. "I think the key point to all of this for me at least has been Sean," he said at the time.

"If I hurt Sean’s mother, then I hurt Sean.” But a year after that, in November 2011, Julian felt pushed to the breaking point again by being excluded from some gala Fab Four occasions, and used his Facebook page to post his disappointment: "Wow... Snubbed at Macca’s wedding, snubbed at the anniversary of LOVE in Vegas! Snubbed at Macca’s wedding reception in NYC... Snubbed at George Harrison’s film premiere... What have I done to be ignored in such a way? I was not invited to ANY of these events... I thought we had a relationship ... Obviously not... Gimme some truth... Maybe now it’s time to tell the Truth... I & My Mother will NOT be eradicated from history... How dare they." Shortly after posting that, the ellipses-loving singer deleted that bitter message and substituted a more resigned-sounding post: "Rising above... Always have, always will... And better for it... I luv you Mum... Thank you." Still, the message about Lennon family relations was clear: To paraphrase his biggest hit, it may not only be much too late for goodbyes, but much too late for good vibes.

In an April 2012 interview with the London Express, he explained that he'd considered the rapid succession of non-invitations to be "laughable. I really did think it’s just too funny to be real. I try to look at it in a lighter way; otherwise I would be at war with everybody." On the subject of the McCartney wedding, the subject of Paul's song "Hey Jude" said: "I am not going to say that we weren’t close because he certainly was around at certain times of my life that were important. The wedding? Well, OK, but at least maybe the reception. All of my friends, who are mutual friends, went. I don’t want to dwell on it. He did get back to me saying someone obviously made a huge mistake and I accept that. I’ll leave it at that.” As for his occasional bursts of public combativeness, he added, “I think I could handle things a little more delicately but I also don’t want to candy coat things. I don’t want to fight with anybody but there are some things I have to stand up for. That comes from Dad and it comes from Mum.

She is not going to take any s--- from anybody, especially given what’s she’s been through in her life.” Julian may have felt particularly vulnerable in 2011. It was then that he released his first album in eight years, Everything Changes, which was met with mixed reviews and generated no hit singles. The album wasn't even released in America, but there is a plan to remedy that situation. Lennon entered the studio again last summer to record some additional tracks for the album with the idea of giving it a full international release for the first time as well as reissuing it in Europe. Read More One of those new tracks, "Someday," featuring Steven Tyler on backing vocals, is coming out via iTunes on April 8 to commemorate Julian's 50th birthday. (This follows Lennon being invited to sing backup on the opening track of Aerosmith's album last year.) Julian certainly hasn't seemed to have his heart too deeply in music since the turn of the decade.

That was a far cry from his ubiquity in the mid-'80s, when he followed his platinum debut (Valotte) with a gold follow-up, had two inescapable top 10 singles, and was one of MTV's first breakout stars. In recent years, he's focused on photography, and had another exhibit open this year at L.A.'s Sunset Marquis Hotel. “I think it does help that Dad was never a photographer so I am judged by the work alone,” he told the Express last spring. "The fact that the photographs were taken seriously gave me goosebumps." He acknowledged the difficulty of seeing his popularity as a recording artist wane. "Yes, I have had a few knock-backs. Too many to mention. Pulling myself back up on the horse, time and time again, over many years, has been tough...I have been close to quitting on numerous occasions, especially when after the release of an album the comparisons begin without people having even listened to it." Some Beatles fans have been vocal in saying that Julian's interests would be better served by keeping quiet about his intermittent feuds with Yoko.

But few would suggest that he hasn't had a right to grievances about the way he was treated by his father in the two decades when they both walked the earth...or afterward, since he was left out of his father's will. It's a chip that any sane disenfranchised son would have carried on his shoulder. When Julian was born in 1963, the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, was still doing his best to keep John's marriage to Cynthia under wraps, lest the group's legion of screaming fans have one less lad to lust after. Not that John himself was ever in much danger of independently projecting an image of domestic tranquility or proud fatherhood before he left Cynthia--and Julian--for Yoko in 1967. Even in 1980, in an interview shortly before he was murdered, John couldn't bring himself to wax overly sentimental about his first child, citing him as one of the "ninety percent of the people on this planet" who resulted from an unplanned pregnancy. "Julian is in the majority, along with me and everyone else. Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference," he said. "I don't love Julian any less as a child.

He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days." There was little attempt to paint an illusion of father-and-son closeness. "It's not the best relationship between father and son, but it is there," Lennon said in '80. "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future. Over the years he's been able to see through the Beatle image and to see through the image that his mother will have given him, subconsciously or consciously...I'm just sort of a figure in the sky, but he's obliged to communicate with me, even when he probably doesn't want to." "He was young and didn’t know what the hell he was doing," Julian told Record Collector magazine in 2011. "That’s the reason I haven’t had children yet. I didn’t want to do the same thing. No, I’m not ready. I want to know who I am first.” Hearing Dad's peace-loving stance perpetually celebrated got to Julian. "I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite," he told the London Telegraph in 1998.

"Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces--no communication, adultery, divorce? You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself." Julian has allowed that he is a "mother's boy," and Ono has cited that as the reason why she never got close to him: "Julian and I tried to be friends. Of course, if he’s too friendly with me, then I think that it hurts his other relatives. He was very loyal to his mother. That was the first thing that was in his mind." John Lennon left his entire estate to Ono, leading to 16 years of legal wrangling before Julian settled in 1996 for unnamed amount which the Daily Mail reported was "believed to" be in the area of 20 million pounds. Cynthia Lennon remembers John being cruel in laying out his terms for the divorce settlement and child support, supposedly saying: "My final offer is seventy-five thousand pounds.

That's like winning the pools, so what are you moaning about? You're not worth any more." In her 2010 memoir, John, Cynthia also described years passing between some father-son visits. Shortly after "Imagine" was released, she wrote, "I picked up the phone to hear Yoko’s voice: 'Hello, Cynthia,’ she said. 'John and I have decided that if you wish to make contact about Julian, you should talk to me'...I had put up with a great deal from John and Yoko, but now they had pushed me too far. I was not willing to deal exclusively with Yoko and told her so. If John wanted to see Julian, I said, he could call me himself. Then I hung up…Surely, I reasoned, Julian meant more to him than some foolish agreement with Yoko about dealing with each other’s ex-partner. I was wrong. It was three years before John saw Julian again.” Since receiving the settlement, Julian has become something of a John Lennon memorabilia collector. He paid 30,000 pounds, for example, for the coat Lennon dressed up in for the cover of Magical Mystery Tour.

"The irony isn't lost on me that I am using his money to buy back his things," he said. As he predicted, reviews for his 2011 comeback album all invoked Dad.

The Telegraph dismissed it with a two-star review: "This son-of-a-Beatle’s unenviable quest to be taken seriously as a songsmith in his own right seemed to have ended after the failure of 1998’s Photograph Smile...A lethargically-paced exercise in dogmatic, sub-Imagine agonizing about how terrible the world is, it’s hardly likely to help him emerge from his father’s shadow." Record Collector magazine was more upbeat, saying that while "the genetic lineage is clearly detectable, Everything Changes offers enough of Julian as his own man to be judged on its own merits...The bottom line is that Julian Lennon’s new songs exists in a confident world of classily-crafted adult pop with smart lyrics and solid musical constructions, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ben Folds or John Grant." That critique even claimed a couple of the tunes were "more attractive than more than a few of Lennon Senior’s later efforts." With even the good reviews drawing the inevitable family connection, it remains to be seen how much Julian has invested in the belated U.S. release of that album, or whether he's happiest trading in albums like Photograph Smile for actual photographs. Reblog 'Dad was a hypocrite.

He could talk about peace and love to the world but he could never show it to his wife and son' - Telegraph Culture 'Dad was a hypocrite. He could talk about peace and love to the world but he could never show it to his wife and son' Julian Lennon has many reasons to be angry. In this interview from 1998, he tells Elizabeth Grice about money, manipulation, John and Yoko By Elizabeth Grice 6:14PM BST 01 Apr 2015 This interview was originally published on May 23 1998 By an unhelpful co-incidence, the two sons of John Lennon released solo albums on the same day last week. In headline terms, this could mean only one thing: the half brothers were engaged in "open warfare" to determine which of them has inherited the creative talent of their late father. It made a great piece of what they call "promo" in the music business. "It's news to me," says Julian Lennon mildly. "I love Sean to death. He's a very smart kid. But I do think there are things done without his knowledge.

Someone in the camp could be manipulating events." By this, he means the New York-based Lennon "camp", under the control of Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow and the mother of Sean. "She wants to make sure Sean's OK, whatever it takes." Julian Lennon doesn't strike you as a conspiracy theorist. His quietness isn't throbbing with menace or malice. He appears to be a puzzled chap asking two puzzling questions: is it really a coincidence that Sean's album Into The Sun came out on the same day as his own Photograph Smile? And how come that the day before he broke a seven-year silence by introducing his new songs at a press conference in Germany, his half-brother Sean created a media diversion by talking about his father's assassination? "Very weird," says Julian. Julian Lennon, centre, with his parents Julian, 35, is the Sixties child of John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia; he was abandoned by his father when he was five and only recently received a share of the vast Lennon estate. Sean, 22, is the favoured son, for whom John Lennon became a househusband.

He lives with Yoko in the sumptuous Dakota building in New York, where Lennon was shot in 1980, and will inherit the bulk of the Beatle's reputed £220 million fortune. "If I'm in New York, I try to see Sean," says Julian. "If I move, I always give him my new number. I call him from time to time, but I never get a return call. I think it's to do with the difference in our ages. The last thing he's thinking about is his older brother." Julian Lennon is not always so ready to make allowances. When people come up to him in the street, blabbing about their love for his father, "because he spoke the truth", they meet with a polite reserve. "I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces - no communication, adultery, divorce?

You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself." Lennon has a way of delivering vehement thoughts as if they were the shipping forecast. He sits casually smoking and smiling, distilling the essence of what it has meant all these years to be the outsider, burdened with expectations on the one hand, stripped of status on the other. He picks occasionally at the quicks of his fingernails, but his voice doesn't change much. It's the same unemphatic Northern threnody, attractive in its way, whatever his subject. A careful civility veneers all his utterances about Yoko Ono. He calls her "a hardball, a very strong woman. I admire her - she's a tough cookie - but I don't necessarily agree with her". He even suggests that she may have done him a favour by waiting 16 years before allowing him any money from the estate. In the original divorce settlement, Julian was to receive £2,400 a year in maintenance and to inherit a £50,000 trust fund when he was 25.

After a long legal wrangle, he secured a further settlement from the estate in 1996, the details of which he is forbidden to discuss. "No," he says, "I don't think it was necessarily fair, but I'm OK. The last thing I wanted was a court battle because there's much more money on the estate side than my side. "A court case could have gone on for five years. The slanderous remarks would have been horrific. There would not have been a private life for either Sean or me. I just wanted to resolve it, to get the hell out of there; a chapter in my life finished, over with." Is it as simple as that? "Well, I have been dealt a set of cards I can't change too much. But maybe I can make them into a winning hand later." He didn't much care about the money, he says wearily; it was the principle of the thing. He's not after a sympathy vote, but what he found really sad was the lack of any personal mementoes, "seeing nothing offered to me at all, having to go out and buy back Dad's stuff with his money".

He recently paid £30,373 for the Afghan coat John Lennon wore on the cover of the Magical Mystery Tour album in 1967; £17,246 for a black velvet cape (worn in the Beatles' film, Help!), and £25,000 for the scribbled notes of the song Hey Jude, written by Paul McCartney for Julian when his parents were splitting up. Paul once observed that John didn't really know how to be a dad. Does Lennon think it is fair to blame someone for being a poor father? "Yeah, I do." We are all, he argues, capable of doing what we set out to do. "If you bring a child into this world, whether it's planned or an accident, you'd better make sure you can care for it. You have to be around. You make time. It's as simple as that." Julian and Cynthia in Liverpool in 2010 After many years of caring for Julian alone on a small allowance, Cynthia Lennon reminded her famous ex-husband that he also had a son in England. A few awkward meetings ensued, Julian always having to do the Atlantic hop.

According to sentimental legend, just as father and son were getting to know each other, Lennon was shot. But Julian doesn't make it sound all that promising a relationship. "It was still very distant. I probably knew him as much as I know you. That's about how warm it was. There were cuddles now and then but there was always an uneasy tension." He believes the unease sprang from his father's guilt at being an absentee parent. "That is why, with Sean, he made sure he spent every moment with him." But this is too simplistic for Julian, who continues his calm indictment: "You cannot just discard people because you can't face up to them. You cannot say: 'Here's my new life. I'm older, I understand more, I'll make it better now.' It doesn't work that way." Julian Lennon remembers once sharing the upbringing of a girlfriend's baby and how, despite the broken nights, he loved being a surrogate father. "It was phenomenal, magical. I know bringing up a kid is tough, but I cannot understand how anyone - not just dad - can walk away from that.

After the relationship broke up, I think I missed the child more than I missed his mother." Early pictures of Julian show a long-faced pasty youth, whose features are a bland, unformed copy of his father's. Though still wan, he looks more interesting now, and the likeness to his father is disappearing. After the success of his first album, Valotte, he hated the way the record industry tried to dish him up as the reincarnation of Lennon. "They tried to create this image. It was like being a puppet, a pawn being shifted around. To me, it was about the songwriting, the songs. But nobody wanted to hear that. They just wanted to see me and touch me and play with me and ask me questions about Dad. For many years, I went along with it. I was too nice. "I could have been the nastiest son of a bitch you ever met, but I chose not to take that route. I did have that anger inside me. I did have that [his father's] laconic wit - but it's in its place." Having suffered himself from his father's clever tongue, he says he'd rather not use his own to "tear someone up".

As in all moral dilemmas, he took his cue from Cynthia Lennon. "My mum taught me how to turn everything around: you just kill people with kindness. There is no need to be mean, nasty or cruel to anybody." Cynthia now lives in Normandy with her companion of the past 16 years. "She's loving life and I'm very happy for her. Of course, there are things that hurt inside - there's still a place in her that loves Dad - but she's over any anger. There's no great trust between her and Yoko, but we rarely talk about that these days. Mum's very grounded; I think there's more insecurity on the other side." As Cynthia moved home, her son went to many different schools. It was always the same agony: being introduced in assemblies as the son of John Lennon, blah, blah, blah, and then being ambushed by local gangs on the way home. "Trying to make friends in those days, particularly when we were in North Wales, was tough. Every school was a nightmare. Often, when a friend and I went to the fish shop at night, there would be 10 or 20 guys outside just waiting for us.

They wanted to be violent and I felt aggression inside. But I would talk just long enough to distract them, just long enough for me to throw the chips in the air and run. "Rumours would go round town that I pinned £5 and £10 notes on the ceiling for fun. They thought we had millions in the bank, but we never had any money when I was a kid. Mum had enough from Dad for schooling, food and clothes. That was it. Later, the only money I had, I earned." Julian claims that he doesn't care if he never makes another album. "There's life outside the music business. After being on the treadmill for 10 years, I value other things more than I did before: friends, love, relationships." His independently-made Photograph Smile (on the Music From Another Room label) is dedicated to his Italian step-father, Roberto Bassanini ("more of a father to me than anyone"). To Julian, it symbolises cutting loose from the messed-up, manipulated, lost-boy Lennon and emerging in his own adult colours. "For me, it's my first album. It feels like the perfect representation of the work I do.

Without being snotty or modest, I think it contains some very good songs. My goal in life has been to be a songsmith, not a pop person." He blames the frenetic music business for locking him into the alternating hyperactivity and lassitude that characterised his life in the late Eighties. "It got to the point where you didn't get up in the day, you didn't work, you didn't do anything because you were so screwed up. But I've never been addictive in anything, and I looked in the mirror and saw it was time to stop. There's a piece of me that stays aware at all times." The turning point came in 1994 when he travelled to London to accompany his mother to the premiere of Backbeat, a film about the Beatles. It made him see how stagnant his life had become. So he put his house in Los Angeles on the market and "booked out" of America, renting a flat in Monte Carlo as a base for exploring the countryside and himself. He eventually bought a house by the lakes in northern Italy, "where I'm pleased no one seems to know me at all".

Then, with the settlement money, he bought a second-hand Range Rover and did up his 1969 rust bucket, a Mustang convertible. "I was never the kind to buy the Ferrari or the yacht. There's no big house anywhere." All in all, the cards seem to be falling right. After years of short-lived love affairs, he says he has found the woman of his dreams. "I've always been trying to find that one person. Now I have, I want to keep the secret as long as possible." The conversation drifts amiably on to his love of sailing, cooking, riding his motorbike into the hills, discovering little towns and poking into village kitchens. "I love to sit on a mountain top and gaze," he says. "I don't think of anything but the people I care about and the view. At the age of 35, I've found the first step to contentment and peace." John's Children - Sean Lennon and Julian Lennon Tweet It was never going to be easy living up to your dad when the man in question is John Lennon. Julian Lennon was born in Liverpool on 8 April 1963 and is the son of Cynthia Powell, John Lennon's first wife.

In a foretaste of what their later relationship would be like, John did not make it to Julian's christening. Young Julian inspired several Beatles compositions as a child. He made a drawing of a classmate and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds evolved. Then, during Cynthia and John's divorce, he became the subject of Paul McCartney's Hey Jude. His relationship with John was never close and he saw little of him after his marriage to Yoko Ono. Sean the beloved After many miscarriages Yoko Ono gave birth to a son, Sean Ono Lennon, on 9 October 1975. Legend always had it that John gave up music for four years to care for his newborn son Sean. But a recent biography of Lennon, by Geoffrey Giuliano, claims the break was quite simply caused by unemployment, because John's record contract had expired. Whatever the truth, Sean grew up with a present father and a strong mother in Yoko Ono. Later life Always musical, Julian began playing guitar and drums at age ten, adding piano as a teenager. His singing career was moderately sucessful but the critics just could not forget who his father was, not helped by the fact that his voice is definitely similar to his father's.

Sean too took after his father and began recording music. In the spring of 1998 Julian and Sean released albums almost at the same time. Claims of a feud arose, but both insisted it was merely coincidence. Julian's album, the largely acoustic Photograph Smile, was accused of attempting to sound like John, but critics at least felt this was no bad thing. Sean's eclectic and in parts jazzy first album Into The Sun received one out of ten in music weekly NME. Sean now plays with his Japanese girlfriend Yuka Honda in a New York-based band, Cibo Matto, as well as collaborating on a dizzying array of other musical projects. To date neither son seems particularly enamoured of their famous father. Sean once said: "I think of my dad as a huge asshole. The only thing that made it okay was that he could admit it." Julian posted musings on his website about his father's inadequacies on his website. But the brothers at least maintain solidarity with each other.

On his website Julian expressed his love for his brother Sean and said: "I hope that he's able to cope with his destiny." Yoko's role Yoko Ono was an artist and musician of repute long before she ever met John Lennon in London in 1966, although her art was more widely known for its notoriety. These days she still works as an artist and exhibits occasionally. Her work remains conceptual, in that the ideas that are behind the art are as important as the final product. She still lives as quietly as is possible in the Dakota Building in New York, close to the spot where John died. Julian was left nothing by his father and ended up fighting a protracted legal battle with his stepmother to get some of his father's estate, ending up with an estimated ï¿½20 million in 1998. There is little love lost between the two with Julian claiming his father was a "manipulated soul" on his website. But Yoko Ono's relationship with her son Sean remains warm. © BBC Julian Lennon Julian Lennon, the son of murdered Beatles star John, has revealed his bitterness that his father was so often absent.

In a message posted on he blamed John's fear of fatherhood and his relationship with Yoko Ono for the distance that came between them. "I had a great deal of anger towards Dad because of his negligence and his attitude to peace and love, that peace and love never came home to me," he wrote. The message is to mark the 20th anniversary of his father's shooting by obsessed fan Mark Chapman on 8 December 1980 in New York. Julian, Lennon's son from his first marriage, described his father as a "guiding light" who was "sucked into a black hole". He said he went through "love/hate relationships" with him whether he was there or not. "I wonder what it would have been like if he were alive today," he wrote. "I guess it would have depended on whether he was `John Lennon' (Dad) or `John Ono Lennon' (manipulated lost soul)." 'Manipulated' He said he thought his father's work was incredible and so was what he achieved with his the three other Beatles, Paul, George and Ringo.

But he said it did not give him any clear insight into what his father's real life was about or how he truly felt about it. Julian, himself a musician, also spoke of the expectations he has had to live up to being a music legend's son "Life is difficult enough," he said. "Trying to find one's own identity makes it even harder, especially when you're not allowed to be you." Brotherly love In his message he speaks with warmth about his half-brother Sean, Yoko Ono and John's son. "I have a brother and I love Sean very much and I hope that he's able to cope with his destiny," he said. "One thing's for sure he's got a big brother who will protect him and love him till the end, whatever happens." He rounds off his message with a few words for his father. "I just wanted to say that wherever he is I hope he realises the mistakes he's made as I realise them and hope never to repeat them, as he did his father's," he wrote. Read More about Julian Lennon HERE Yoko Ono has marked the anniversary of his death with an appeal for the world to reflect on the horrors of "gun violence".

Discography: Julian and Sean Lennon Julian Lennon Julian Lennon blames father John for his lack of children - Telegraph Julian Lennon blames father John for his lack of children John Lennon was such a bad father that he put his own son, Julian, off having children. British rock singer, songwriter and guitarist John Lennon (1940 - 1980), of Beatles fame, with his son Julian, at their home in Weybridge Photo: GETTY By Richard Eden, Mandrake, and Adam Lusher 7:32AM GMT 04 Dec 2011 Julian Lennon, 48, John Lennon's son by his first wife, Cynthia, has revealed that his difficult relationship with his famous father has discouraged him from starting a family. Julian, who has never married, said that – unlike his father – he wanted to be mature enough to cope with fatherhood. “He was young and didn’t know what the hell he was doing," Julian said. "That’s the reason I haven’t had children yet. I didn’t want to do the same thing. No, I’m not ready.

I want to know who I am first.” Lennon’s comments, made in an interview with Record Collector magazine, are perhaps his most forthright yet about his relationship with his father. Julian, himself a musician, was five when John left Cynthia for Yoko Ono in 1968. When Julian was born at the start of Beatlemania in 1963, John Lennon was away on tour. Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, initially covered up the fact that John was married with a child to make him more appealing to female fans. Related Articles Julian Lennon on John and Cynthia 01 Apr 2015 After Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see his father again for two years. The pair were later reconciled, but Julian was still hurt when John gave an interview shortly before he was killed by Mark Chapman in 1980, in which he implied that Julian was an unplanned child who “came from a bottle of whiskey”. Julian told an interviewer in September: “Mum was more about love than Dad.

He sang about it, he spoke about, but he never really gave it, at least not to me as his son." He added that he had to control the aggression he inherited from his father: “The darker side definitely comes from Dad. Whenever I get too aggressive, which comes from Dad's side, I try to calm myself down, be more positive." Julian has, however, also shown understanding of his father’s situation – in particular the fact that he was a young parent who had himself endured a difficult childhood. John Lennon went 20 years without seeing his father Alfred and grew up living with his aunt Mimi, not his mother Julia. Julian Lennon has also had difficult relationships with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Yoko and John’s son. In 2009, he admitted he once “unleashed hell” on Yoko over her control of the Lennon estate, but insisted the pair had since reconciled.

He has also admitted jealousy of Sean, 36, saying: “I remember thinking, when Dad gave up music for a couple of years to be with Sean, "Why couldn't he do that with me?" Those thoughts haunted me for a time.” By 2007, however, relations between Sean and Julian had improved so much that Julian accompanied Sean, also a musician, on a tour of Croatia and Slovenia. Julian’s childhood difficulties did, however, produce one of the Beatles’ most famous songs. Paul McCartney wrote Hey Jude as a message to Julian when he was on his way to see Cynthia as the marriage was ending. The song was originally "Hey Jules", but McCartney decided Jude scanned better before recording it.

Question: One of John Lennon’s sons is named Julian. What is the other son’s name?
Answer: SEAN