The Barnabeat Festival is a cultural event dedicated to the universe of The Beatles, founded in 2025 by Martin Grossman, Max Lemcke, and Pira Bastourre, held at the Centre Cívic Casinet d'Hostafrancs in Barcelona.
It took place yesterday, Saturday, and featured the participation of Julia Baird, John Lennon's maternal half-sister. In addition to tribute concerts, exclusive talks, and open-mic spaces (OpenBeat), Julia answered many questions about John, her books, and her personal opinions on various topics. Here is the transcript of the questions asked for La Vanguardia:
Q: Do you still listen to John's music?
JULIA BAIRD: Well, I just got back from International Beat Week in Liverpool and I've been listening to it for four days; I don't think anyone can ever get tired of his music. But if I put on a CD at home, I usually play the Rolling Stones or a classical music CD... Very rarely do I put on a Beatles CD.
Q: Was John, as a child or a teenager, very demanding of himself?
JULIA: As an adult, he wanted to have the biggest band in the world and, furthermore, achieve world peace... -We all have a duty in life to aspire to the unattainable, it's just a step toward what could be achieved. Otherwise, nothing would happen. So yes, world peace seems unattainable, even more so now than when John was alive. Everything seems much worse than before, but if we think it's unattainable, we won't do anything at all, right? John gave everything for peace back then, and everything he did remains relevant today.
Q: In your books about your brother, you describe a very familiar, warm, and affectionate environment. That doesn't fit with the reading that John had a tormented childhood.
JULIA: John had a worse time than my sister and I did. He didn't live with his mother and no one understood why; my book Imagine This explains it. My mother had four sisters who outlived her. At the end of her life, in the mid-90s, the last survivor told me things I had never heard before, that I hadn't even suspected, which had been kept quiet for years. I wrote the first book in defense of my mother, but John didn't live with his mother for any reason that any of us could understand. My sister and I lived with our mother and our father; John didn't. He had a harder time than we did.
[Repeatedly during the interview, Julia Baird expresses her disagreement with the outcome of Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Johnson's 2009 film loosely based on her book Imagine This. Lennon's sister insisted at various points in the talk on the divergences between what her book tells and what the film displays. “A lot of people associate it with John Lennon because it says it's based on his sister's book. It's not. It's absolute rubbish.”]
Q:Despite everything, it gives the impression that John was a healthy, fun child and young man.
JULIA: He was very intelligent and perceptive. He was biting—you only have to watch his interviews. A lot of that was a defensive strategy to keep people from asking the wrong questions. It's a tactic we all use unconsciously. So yes, he was a lot of fun, very witty. He was very quick, very spontaneous, which made him fun and also very sarcastic.
Q: Politically incorrect?
JULIA: The definition of humor has changed now because we don't want to offend. The humor we grew up with did precisely that.
Q: You and John both lost your mother. Although John already knew a boy who had lost his mother: Paul McCartney.
JULIA: As children, we didn't know many people who had lost their mother. It's wonderful that Julia, my mother, and any other mother reached out and treated him like a son. My mother always tried to step up, get involved, and do things. When John used to tease Paul, she would remind him: “That poor boy has lost his mother.” John had lost our mother in a way [Lennon spent his childhood and adolescence living with Mimi, his aunt, his mother Julia's sister], but she was still there. When our mother died, a huge bond was created between Paul and John. I saw them almost as brothers.
Q: Speaking of Paul and Ringo, do you maintain any relationship with people linked to the beginning of The Beatles?
JULIA: No, well, I don't know. I could contact Paul if necessary, but we aren't friends, we aren't part of each other's lives. Ringo? I don't know, his life is in the United States.
Q: And what about the Beatles biopics that Sam Mendes is preparing? Has he contacted you?
JULIA: Sam Mendes doesn't want to talk to me. I might say, “that's not right, and that's not right either”... Maybe I wouldn't, but he doesn't want to take that risk. I know they've been going back and forth to Liverpool, they've been very active.
Q: I also wanted to ask you about your relationship with Julian and Sean, John's sons. In your book John Lennon, My Brother, you regretted that you didn't have much contact. Do you keep in touch with them?
JULIA: Yes...
Q: I'm glad to hear that.
JULIA: But it's a personal and private relationship. I will never talk about this. Never.
Q: Also in John Lennon, My Brother, you explain that in the second half of the 1970s, when John retired from public life, you would talk on the phone and he would ask you for cooking advice on how to make lamb and other dishes...
JULIA: He was exhausted from being a Beatle—I think they all were—and he just took a break. One of my favorite songs is Watching the Wheels; the lyrics explain perfectly what John was doing.
(The first stanza of Watching the Wheels says: “People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing / Well, they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin / When I say that I'm o.k. well they look at me kind of strange / 'Surely you're not happy now you've no up-to-date name.'")
Record companies tried by every means possible to get him out of his shell, to leave behind all that Dakota mess (the New York building where Lennon lived with Yoko Ono and his son Sean) and record an album. John's response was: “I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round.” It's one of my favorite songs. And when they finally dived deep into the production of Double Fantasy in late 1980, he composed Starting Over... I think that's what was happening. He was starting over. He was still putting his life into his songs, so you can see what was happening at that moment.
Q: On that album, John seems more mature than ever. He was clearer than ever about what he wanted.
JULIA: Yes...
Q: Many people, had they been related to John Lennon, would have made a way of life out of it. But you didn't. You went to live in Belfast in 1968, right in the middle of Beatlemania, you made a living as a teacher and social educator...
JULIA: Making a living out of being John Lennon's sister was not the life I wanted. No way. I didn't tell anyone. Good thing nobody found out! Back then was when John and Yoko were going on stage inside garbage bags, and doing press conferences from bed (bed-ins) and silly things like that. Stupid and embarrassing things, very embarrassing. And I was glad nobody knew. I only started talking about John after his death. Anyone would write about him without knowing him. John's public image was changing; the public image of my entire family was also changing. It was being created by people who had never known us, so that's when I decided to step up. I thought: “I have to do something, I'm next.”
Q: You approached it not as a matter of self-defense, but as a defense of John's memory.
JULIA: Yes. Whatever you say about someone who has passed away, they can no longer tell you: “I'm going to sue you for defamation.” If he had been alive, he would have defended himself: “That's a lie.” But if someone is gone... You have to keep telling what the truth is. It's not enough to say it's not true. You have to tell the truth.
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