John Lennon’s Sons Fought For Years, But They Just Made A Huge Announcement

The fact that Julian and Sean are putting out any kind of similar message should come as a shock. Julian has certainly never been shy about criticizing his late father. He actually made that damning “hypocrite” comment 18 years after John was murdered — and it wasn’t the only bad word he’s had to say.

“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,” Julian told The Daily Telegraph in 1998. In fact, John’s oldest son seemed determined to portray the writer of “Give Peace a Chance” as a very different person behind the scenes.

Julian specifically blasted his dad for cheating on his mom, breaking up his family, and not talking to him for years. He said that if John had been “true and honest” with himself, he would have known that he was a “hypocrite.” His dad’s treatment of him was also totally different from his treatment of Sean, you see. 

It did seem as if John had more love for Sean from the very beginning. After all, Julian was born in 1963 — the year, pop fans will know, The Beatles were really starting to blow up. And because of the band’s growing popularity, their manager had insisted on promoting the guys in the group as single men. Julian’s existence threw a wrench in those works — for a moment.

That’s why Julian was kept hidden from the Beatles’ adoring public. As was Julian’s mom, Cynthia Powell — even though she was actually married to John! This meant that John could still behave like a rock star… while someone else took care of his kid. Yet when Sean was born in 1975, John basically did the exact opposite thing.

Yup, John seemingly couldn’t get enough of being Sean’s father. He even referred to himself as a “house husband” in the years following his second son’s birth — and that wasn’t far from the truth. From 1976 to 1980, Yoko Ono — John’s second wife — took care of business while John took care of the baby. You can only imagine how Julian felt about that…

Yet this wasn’t the only time that John had seemed to publicly favor his second-born son. In September 1980 — just three months before his shocking assassination — the Imagine singer gave a revealing interview to Playboy. The conversation was published after John’s death — but the comments he’d made about Julian and Sean did not cast his relationship with Julian in a good light.

“It’s not the best relationship between father and son,” John admitted to Playboy. He seemed to partly blame this on Julian’s mom getting custody of Julian. “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,” the singer said. But then the interviewer pushed John for further detail — and he revealed something hurtful. 

“Ninety percent of the people on this planet, especially in the West, were born out of a bottle of whiskey on a Saturday night,” the late John said. Then he seemed to really add salt to the wound when he compared the conceptions of his two sons. “Julian is in the majority, along with me and everybody else. Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference,” confessed John.

“I don’t love Julian any less as a child,” John continued. “He’s still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn’t have pills in those days. He’s here, he belongs to me, and he always will.” As declarations of unconditional love go, this one is far from ideal. And it only added fuel to the Julian-Sean rivalry narrative. 

True to form, Julian let it be known that he was very unhappy with his father. During the 1998 interview with The Daily Telegraph, he was unmoved by the idea that John didn’t “know how to be a dad” — something Paul McCartney had said of his fellow bandmate. “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,” Julian said.

“You have to be around,” he continued. “You make time. It’s as simple as that.” And when Julian wrote a piece about his father for The Guardian in 2020, he confessed that John had made life difficult for him growing up. It had started long before Sean’s birth, though. For Julian, the bad times began when John seemed to have “disappeared off the face of the planet.”

The problem was that Julian and John did actually bond when Julian was a young boy. “A lot of the happy memories of my father are from the late 1960s,” Julian wrote. So it was doubly painful when John left and seemingly never looked back. “Maybe ten years passed during which my dad and I barely spoke. I was very angry about how he left the family,” he said.

Julian also told The Daily Telegraph that his father’s “house husband” routine with Sean was in part inspired by John’s treatment of his first-born son. John felt guilty, Julian said, so “he made sure he spent every moment with [Sean].” But that didn’t mean that Julian had let him off the hook.

“You cannot just discard people because you can’t face up to them,” Julian said. “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.” That’s probably why — despite the legend telling the opposite — the relationship between Julian and John didn’t get a chance to warm up before the former Beatle’s tragic death.

The popular story is that Julian and John were making amends in the time leading up to John’s death. But Julian set the record straight to The Daily Telegraph. “It was still very distant,” he said of their relationship. “There were cuddles now and then, but there was always an uneasy tension.” And those tensions likely only got worse after John was gone.

Julian perhaps shouldn’t have been too surprised that John had decided to cut him out of his will. After all, he’d given Julian and his mother only small amounts of money while he was alive. The divorce settlement with Cynthia only demanded that John pay £2,400 a year for the care of his son. That’s not a lot considering his father was once a Beatle! 

Things didn’t get better after the reading of the will, either. It turned out that John had left his vast fortune to Yoko Ono. So the only thing that had ever been provided for the 17-year-old Julian was a £100,000 trust fund… that he couldn’t access until he was at least 21… and then would have to split with Sean. But Julian didn’t settle for this.

Julian launched a legal battle to get what he felt was rightfully his. But it would be a — ahem — long and winding road to victory. In fact, a financial settlement wouldn’t be reached until 1996 — 16 years after John’s death. The amount Julian accepted from his dad’s estate has never been confirmed, but it’s said to be about £20 million. Yet that would still have left Yoko and Sean with about £200 million.

“I don’t think it was necessarily fair, but I’m okay,” Julian told The Daily Telegraph in 1998. “The last thing I wanted was a court battle because there’s much more money on the estate side than my side.” It’s possible, of course, that Julian could have been awarded much more money if he’d been willing to push on. But there was another factor he had to consider. 

“A court case could have gone on for five years,” Julian said. “The slanderous remarks would have been horrific. There would not have been a private life for either Sean or me.” And so he made the only decision he felt he could: “I just wanted to resolve it, to get the hell out of there. A chapter in my life finished, over with.” But the family beef wasn’t over.

The reason Julian was talking to The Daily Telegraph was because he was releasing a new record. Photograph Smile was his fifth album and should have been cause for celebration. Yet there was another record coming out on the exact same day that only served to fuel the idea of a family rivalry among the Lennons. That album? Sean Lennon’s Into the Sun.

Yes, Julian and Sean Lennon released their albums on the exact same day in May 1998. Plus, Sean supposedly took attention away from Julian’s record launch by talking to the press about his father’s murder. It was a conspiracy theory that was too good for the media to miss. Julian had his say on the matter, too.

But Julian didn’t blame his half-brother. “I do think there are things done without his knowledge,” he told The Telegraph. “Someone in the camp could be manipulating events.” And he seemed to be talking about Yoko Ono. “She wants to make sure Sean’s okay, whatever it takes,” he said. Yet even here Julian stressed that the public weren’t getting the whole story.

“I love Sean to death,” Julian said. “If I’m in New York, I try to see Sean. If I move, I always give him my new number.” The first-born Lennon son has also insisted that his legal troubles with the Lennon estate have never had an impact on his relationship with Sean. Sean has been quick to agree, too.

“There’s a lot of misinformation and rumours about Julian and I not liking each other,” Sean told Mojo in 2020. “But we’ve always been very close. He was a real hero to me. There may have been complicated feelings between my mom and Julian, but that never affected us.” It seems like the bond between the two brothers has only improved since, too. How so?

Well, in 2021 the brothers posted a series of photos on Instagram that seemed to mark an end to the in-fighting once and for all. The snaps showed the Lennon boys during a long drive around the Santa Monica Mountains. It was something Beatles fans might never have expected — but it was likely a day neither man will forget any time soon. 

Julian wrote that the trip had left the brothers “wind blown and tired” but that it had been “so worth it.” He described the drive as “a magical day.” It was the kind of event that could never have happened decades ago… Yet it wasn’t the only earth-shaking announcement that Julian made in 2021. And the other one was to do with his father.

The oldest Lennon boy wasn’t the only person thinking about John in 2021, after all. The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has spent the past four years of his life toiling over 60 hours of footage of The Beatles for the documentary The Beatles: Get Back. And the resulting film had a profound effect on public perceptions of the band — Julian’s included.

The documentary is a compilation of footage that very few people have seen before. It shows The Beatles in 1969 recording their final album, Let It Be — just months before the band broke up. And for the longest time, the public perception was that this was the worst time for everyone in the group. John himself had once branded this period “six weeks of hell.”

But the new film shows that The Beatles were in good form throughout the recording sessions. “I was amazed,” Jackson told The Guardian in 2021. “I was waiting for it to get really bad, but it didn’t. It actually gets happier and happier as it goes.” Yet the cameras did capture their fair share of tricky moments — and they couldn’t all have been easy for Julian and Sean to watch.

One particular moment stands out in relation to the Lennon brothers. The film was shot in 1969, remember, just one year after the divorce of John and Cynthia, Julian’s mom. So when John and Yoko are seen celebrating Yoko’s divorce in the movie, it must have brought up conflicting emotions for both men. And we do know that the Lennons have seen the documentary.

In November 2021 Julian and Sean Lennon rocked up to the Get Back premiere in Los Angeles. They were pictured sitting with Stella McCartney — daughter of ex-Beatle Paul. The three Beatle babies even attended an event organized by Stella after the movie as well. And after the night was done, Julian shared his thoughts on the experience. 

“What an amazing night, firstly seeing Get Back and then Stella’s event afterward,” Julian said in a November Instagram post. “The one true thing I can say about it all is that it has made me so proud, inspired, and feel more love for my/our family than ever before.” The caption accompanied a picture of Julian and Sean at the premiere. But what of his thoughts on the movie?

“The film has made me love my father again, in a way I can’t fully describe,” Julian gushed. “Thank you to all who had a hand in bringing this project to fruition… Life-changing.” So many years after his father’s death, Julian appears ready to truly embrace John again. And he wasn’t the only one to have a strong reaction.

Stella McCartney went above and beyond to create a special clothing line to commemorate the new movie. “The film [captured] such a special, precious moment — it’s epic,” the designer told Vogue in November 2021. There was no word on what Sean thought about the flick — but then his relationship with his father was arguably not as complicated as Julian’s.

The past few years have seen the sons coming to terms with their father’s legacy, though. In 2020 the pair conducted interviews for BBC Radio 2’s celebration of John’s 80th birthday. Sean even spoke to Elton John — his godfather — on the record for the very first time. But the most poignant memories cropped up when Sean interviewed his brother.

The boys dropped never-before-heard tidbits about what it was like to live with a Beatle. This included things such as John giving an 11-year-old Julian a guitar, and a young Sean hanging out in the studio while John recorded his last album, Double Fantasy. They touched on their relationship with each other, too.

At one point, for instance, the first-born Lennon boy showed his half-brother how to play Faith — the George Michael song — on the guitar. And Sean actually looked up to Julian so much as a kid that a 17-year-old Julian had to be flown in just to tell Sean about John’s murder.

Sadly, Julian wasn’t the only one whose relationship with John was, at times, a little fraught. It’s widely known that things got tense between all of the iconic bandmates. Paul McCartney actually opened up about John in a 2021 interview. And he seemed to finally clear up what happened when the band fell apart.

In 1970 it was Paul McCartney who seemingly broke up The Beatles for good. That year he released his debut solo record, McCartney, and with it came a press release that shocked everybody. McCartney replied to the question, “Are you planning a new album or single with The Beatles?” by stating: “No.”

Newspapers immediately started reporting that McCartney had quit The Beatles, and the rest of the band freaked out. They dispatched Ringo Starr to McCartney’s house to ask him to push back the release of his solo debut until after the group’s Let It Be dropped. But McCartney reacted with anger and threw Starr out.

This incident came to light in 1971, when a sworn statement from Starr was heard in a courtroom as part of the legal proceedings to dissolve The Beatles. He said, “I went to see Paul. To my dismay, he went completely out of control, shouting at me, prodding his fingers towards my face, saying: ‘I’ll finish you now’ and ‘You’ll pay.’ He told me to put my coat on and get out.”

McCartney later expressed regret about his actions towards Starr that day. “It hadn’t actually come to blows, but it was near enough,” he said in 2000’s Beatles Anthology. “Unfortunately it was Ringo. I mean, he was probably the least to blame of any of them.” The tensions in the band had reached a breaking point.

And John Lennon had been quietly angling to leave the band for a while. In fact, some might say that he’d already embarked on his solo career before McCartney had made his announcement. He’d already performed solo tracks accompanied by his girlfriend Yoko Ono, after all — and her part in the band’s split would of course be analyzed for decades.

Lennon was upset that McCartney had tried to release a solo album first, perhaps in part because he wanted to be the one to do that. He told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, “We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us that was what he was going to do,” though Lennon claimed he was never angry about it.

But who was it who really put the final nail in the coffin for The Beatles? Well, different people have said different things. In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article titled “Why The Beatles Broke Up” that attempted to get to the bottom of what happened. By 1969, the magazine claimed, McCartney was the only Beatle “who had any sense of urgency” about the band.

The death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967 had cast a dark shadow over things, it seemed. Numerous observers believed that he’d been fundamental to the band’s stability, and without him The Beatles were cut adrift. Lennon thought Epstein’s passing marked the end for the band, but McCartney had other ideas.

Within a week of Epstein’s passing, McCartney had talked the other Beatles into making a new movie to be aired on the BBC. This was Magical Mystery Tour, and it didn’t go well. When it aired in the UK over the Christmas holidays, the media absolutely roasted it. Since McCartney had been the driving force behind the project, this did little to help his standing within the band.

And then there was Yoko Ono. She’d a bad time of it as Lennon’s girlfriend in a time when sexism and racism were rife. Many fans of the band hated her, and the other Beatles didn’t like her much, either. Lennon usually flew off the handle whenever anyone offered him advice during recording sessions, but he let Ono do it, and the band resented that.

And it’s generally considered that egos were getting way out of control during the final days of The Beatles. The 2009 Rolling Stone article notes, “Each of the Beatles treated the others as his supporting musicians — which made for some spectacular performances and some explosive studio moments.” Starr left the band for a fortnight, and then Harrison seemingly quit for good.

Harrison walked out during a recording session, after having had a fight with Lennon that reportedly saw them trade punches. Lennon seemingly wasn’t all that bothered and got Ono to do Harrison’s parts instead. The other two Beatles had no idea what to do, believing that if they got involved Lennon might also leave.

Lennon floated the idea of the band bringing Eric Clapton in as a permanent replacement for Harrison, but thankfully it didn’t come to that. The band were able to make up shortly afterwards, though tensions remained. The other members of the band still deeply resented Ono’s status as the “fifth Beatle.”

The Beatles’ iconic album Abbey Road was released in September 1969, but it was arguably the last hurrah for the band. That same month, Lennon played the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival with Yoko Ono and Eric Clapton. And he seemed to prefer their company to that of his old band-mates.

According to Rolling Stone, shortly afterwards Lennon dropped an absolute bombshell. When McCartney said in a meeting that The Beatles should go back on the road, Lennon reportedly replied, “I think you’re daft. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I’m breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce.”

But whether Lennon actually meant it was open to debate. Over the following year he made statements that indicated the band was still together and making plans for the future. George Harrison apparently wanted the group to go back on tour as well. But McCartney’s solo album and aforementioned “No” statement left everybody embittered.

And everyone knows the rest of the story. Lennon was shot and killed in 1980 by a crazed fan, Mark David Chapman, just as he was embarking on a comeback. Across the entire world, fans mourned and paid tribute to him. The Beatles had split, but now it really was all over.

George Harrison has also since passed away, having died of cancer in 2001. At the time of his former band-mate’s death, McCartney released a statement saying, “We knew he’d been ill for a long time. He was a lovely guy and a very brave man and had a wonderful sense of humor. He is really just my baby brother.”

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are both still alive, and McCartney’s the more public and active of the two. In 2020 he gave an in-depth interview to GQ magazine and spoke about his old band-mates. He still dreamed about them in better days every now and again, he said.

McCartney told the magazine, “The thing is, if you’re a performer, or me as a performer, I find that dreams are often related to a gig or getting ready for a gig or being in a recording studio and I think a lot of performers are like that. So, often, John or George will be in there.”

McCartney continued, “And the good thing is you don’t really think anything of it, it’s just normal, like, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And you’re just chatting away, talking about what we’re going to do, as in making a record or something. So he’s often there, I’m glad to say... And it’s normally very pleasant, you know? I love those boys.”

But despite that touching statement, McCartney also has memories of the less pleasant times — and he’s spoken about them as well. He went into detail about the infamous Beatles breakup during a 2021 chat with journalist John Wilson, which was broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 series This Cultural Life.

McCartney remembered that the breakup of The Beatles was the “most difficult period” of his entire life. His desire had been for the band to carry on, especially since they were continuing to make “pretty good stuff” at that point. “This was my band, this was my job, this was my life, so I wanted it to continue,” McCartney declared.

Instead, McCartney claimed, the blame lay at Lennon’s feet. He said, “The point of it really was that John was making a new life with Yoko. John had always wanted to sort of break loose from society because, you know, he was brought up by his Aunt Mimi, who was quite repressive, so he was always looking to break loose.”

And McCartney also discussed the fact that he was often the one blamed for the split. He said, “I had to live with that because that was what people saw. All I could do is say, no… I am not the person who instigated the split. Oh no, no, no. John walked into a room one day and said I am leaving The Beatles. Is that instigating the split, or not?”

McCartney told Wilson that after this, the band were left confused as to where exactly they stood. Their manager Allen Klein made them keep everything away from the press. And according to McCartney, “It was weird, because we all knew it was the end of The Beatles but we couldn’t just walk away.”

In the interview McCartney remembered Klein as “dodgy” and added, “Around about that time we were having little meetings, and it was horrible. It was the opposite of what we were.” McCartney said that he then got “fed up of hiding it” and so “let the cat out of the bag.”

As for the court case, McCartney recalled, “I had to fight, and the only way I could fight was in suing the other Beatles, because they were going with Klein. And they thanked me for it years later. But I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny coming in one day and saying ‘I’m leaving the group’.”

But McCartney indicated in the interview that he wasn’t trying to re-ignite the old feud between him and Lennon. He added that Lennon had “wanted to go in a bag and lie in bed for a week in Amsterdam for peace. And you couldn’t argue with that.” And McCartney didn’t blame Ono either, saying, “They were a great couple. There was huge strength there.”

As for Lennon’s side of the Beatles breakup story, obviously he can’t speak for himself anymore, but he went into it with Rolling Stone in 1971. He was asked: “Always the Beatles were talked about — and the Beatles talked about themselves — as being four parts of the same person. What’s happened to those four parts?”

Lennon said in response, “They remembered that they were four individuals. You see, we believed the Beatles myth, too. I don’t know whether the others still believe it. We were four guys… We were just a band that made it very, very big, that’s all. Our best work was never recorded.”

And then Lennon added, “You know Brian [Epstein] put us in suits and all that, and we made it very, very big. But we sold out, you know. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain… That’s why we never improved as musicians; we killed ourselves then to make it.”

“The Beatles broke up after Brian died,” Lennon continued. “We made the double album, the set. It’s like if you took each track off it and made it all mine and all George’s. It’s like I told you many times, it was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group, and I enjoyed it. We broke up then.”

But Lennon also believed that McCartney had tried to “take over” the band after Epstein’s death. “I don’t know how much of this I want to put out,” he told Rolling Stone. “Paul had an impression, he has it now like a parent, that we should be thankful for what he did for keeping The Beatles going. But when you look back upon it objectively, he kept it going for his own sake.”

And now, McCartney definitely seems to be the front-man of the Beatles’ legacy. In the 2021 BBC interview he mentioned that he’d recently found an unrecorded song by himself and Lennon titled “Tell Me Who He Is.” Perhaps it was one of those “best works” that Lennon had spoken about.

McCartney hadn’t only found that track, but he’d also uncovered a lost radio play penned by him and Lennon. He said, “For years I’ve been telling people that me and John wrote a play. It is quite a funny thing called Pilchard, and it is about the Messiah, actually.” And that’s not all.

In November 2021 McCartney released a book called The Lyrics, an autobiographical work that included a lot of previously unpublished photos and letters. He said in a press release that he hoped the volume would “show people something about my songs and my life which they haven’t seen before.”

McCartney’s 80 years old now, but there’s still time for him to reveal more about The Beatles. One of the most touching revelations regarding Lennon and the band breakup actually came out in the GQ interview. McCartney said that eventually, before Lennon died, “We settled our family squabble and I was able to see him and to speak to him on a number of occasions, so we were friends till the end.”