BEATLES MAGAZINE: JULIA BAIRD: "I’D SAY THE ORIGIN OF THE BEATLES WAS MY MOTHER AND JOHN. STAGE TWO IS JOHN AND PAUL”

Monday, 7 April 2025

JULIA BAIRD: "I’D SAY THE ORIGIN OF THE BEATLES WAS MY MOTHER AND JOHN. STAGE TWO IS JOHN AND PAUL”

Live Odyssey, an immersive pop music “experience” that opens in London’s Camden in May Live Odyssey will feature a multi-sensory exhibit about Lennon’s unorthodox early life, created in collaboration with Julia Baird.

Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes announced the cast of his four upcoming Beatles biopics. They’ll star Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Harris Dickinson, recently seen opposite Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, as Lennon.

Julia Baird said: “I haven’t seen anything. I’ve got a dog to walk”. Previous attempts to capture The Beatles on film have lacked authenticity, she feels. With Mendes’ celluloid Paul and Ringo hailing from Ireland and John and George coming from London, does Baird thinks that Liverpudlian actors should have been cast? “Yes, of course. No one else can get that Liverpool intonation. Nobody,” she says.

What advice she’d offer Mendes to help him capture how life as a Beatle really was?... “He’s never going to ask me! I’m the last person he would want to talk to because then he can’t make it up,” she says.

Lennon’s mother Julia and his father, Alfred, met as teens in Liverpool’s Sefton Park. Despite her family’s disapproval, they had a decade-long relationship, got married and had John in 1940. By now a merchant seaman, Alf went AWOL in 1943.

Baird says Alf’s own history made him “incapable of creating the home that my mother and John needed”.

“He was a naughty boy. You can see why,” says Baird. As poignantly described by her, their family history is a lesson in causality. Absent Alf, struggling Julia, opportunistic Mimi… all these streams converged in Lennon, the confluence of this knotty history that, despite the pain, was filled with love and best intentions. Lennon would visit his mother and Baird’s home regularly.

Baird was there on July 6 1957 when 16-year-old Lennon famously met 15-year-old McCartney at the St Peter’s Church fête in Woolton, where Lennon’s skiffle band The Quarrymen were playing.

“John was trying to take this really seriously and he went and sat on the tailgate so he could play. Jackie and I went up, had a leg each and tried to pull him off,” says Baird, her eyes lighting up. “My mother was saying ‘Leave him alone, girls’ because at home we just crawled and jumped all over him all the time. He was going ‘Mummy, get them off.’”

John met the visiting Paul as the band were humping their gear inside the church hall for the evening show.

Lennon was taken by the talented younger teen. He was slightly calculated too. “John said he did look a bit like Elvis, so he would have been jealous of that but he realised it was good for the group,” says Baird.

The pair would often rehearse at Lennon’s mother’s house as Mimi had strict rules. “Mimi only allowed John – and sometimes John and Paul – to play their guitars in the porch with the door closed, and if you’ve been in the porch it’s about the size of this cushion,” gestures Baird. “So my mother picked up an instrument” – a banjo – “the minute they got [to our house] and joined in.”

Despite John living elsewhere, his mother had instilled in him a love of performance. “My mother was a wordsmith, an artist, a singer, a dancer and a painter. She was everything that John was plus [more],” says Baird, adding later: “I’d say the origin of The Beatles was my mother and John. Stage two is John and Paul.”

The Beatles’ success was a slow burn. At its height, Beatlemania was “utter madness”, Baird says. She recalls the social – and physical – ructions that accompanied the birth of The Teenager in those post-war decades. “It started with Frank Sinatra, galvanised with Elvis and was firmly locked into place with The Beatles.”

At a Beatles concert at London’s Finsbury Astoria in January 1964, having hung out backstage with the Rolling Stones, Julia and Jackie insisted on sitting in some empty rows at the front of the venue. Lennon warned them that the seats were being kept empty deliberately but they persisted. When The Beatles came on stage, the surging crowd engulfed the girls. From the stage, John instructed two security guards to extract them. They were dragged out on their stomachs. Once safely stage-side, Lennon cast a brotherly “‘Told you so’” sideways glance in their direction.

Baird had a lot of time for Cynthia, John’s first wife, who he married in 1962 and divorced in 1968.

“I met Cynthia when I was 12… She was adorable.”

Baird is diplomatic when I ask whether she met her next sister-in-law Yoko Ono, who Lennon married in 1969.

“Cynthia couldn’t wait to meet us. Yoko couldn’t wait not to meet us. That’s about the best way you can put it,” she says and we move on.

Julia mentions, that Paul McCartney also lost his mother young, at 14. In the early Beatles days Julia Lennon “felt sorry” for Paul because his mother had died. “She would say ‘Oh bring that poor boy for tea, his mother’s died.’

And that of course was a huge bond between John and Paul [in later life],” says Baird.
And she won’t discuss Lennon’s shooting on December 8 1980. At the time she hadn’t seen her brother for years due to his hectic life and relocation to New York in 1971. But they spoke on the phone regularly between 1975 and 1978. Lennon “hadn’t got over” their mother’s death, Baird says. “He was beginning to heal. But it didn’t take much of us talking for us to fall apart.” They last spoke on November 17 1980 when they planned a family reunion. Three weeks later he was dead.

Julia Baird admits that life has given her a “very tough shell”. But her warmth and protective instincts shine through. And then she says:
“To be John’s sister is a privilege that I couldn’t begin to describe to you. But given the choice I wish he’d never seen a guitar,” she says carefully. Why? “Well, then he might have been an art teacher and he’d still be here.”

source: telegraph

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