John Lennon's sister: ‘Of course a Liverpudlian should play him'

Telegraph

04-04-2025

As an acoustic rendition of John Lennon's Imagine rings out from the stage of the Cavern Club, a petite lady strolls unnoticed through the thickening Wednesday lunchtime crowd of Beatles fans. If the pilgrims gathered here in the subterranean epicentre of Liverpool's Fab Four-themed backstreets, located just eight miles from the city's John Lennon International Airport, had cared to observe the 78-year-old's features ­– her piercing brown eyes, her strong chin, her centre-parted shoulder-length hair, her familiar nose – they'd have realised that the closest thing to a Beatle they're ever realistically likely to meet was walking among them.
Julia Baird is Lennon's half-sister, sharing a mother – also called Julia ­– with Lennon, who was six years her senior. She's strikingly similar to him in personality as well as appearance. For the nearly two hours that we chat in the Cavern's backstage green room, she's as sharp, acerbic, funny, feisty and bruised as her famous sibling, who was killed by an assassin's bullet in New York nearly 45 years ago. He was, she says, 'a brilliant older brother, very bossy – a family trait'.
We've met to talk about Live Odyssey, an immersive pop music 'experience' that opens in London's Camden in May and will, it promises, take visitors on a 'journey through British music history'. As well as David Bowie's microphone from Glastonbury and holograms of The Libertines, Live Odyssey will feature a multi-sensory exhibit about Lennon's unorthodox early life, created in collaboration with Baird.
Just hours before we meet, 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. Baird, it must be said, seems spectacularly nonplussed. 'I haven't seen anything. I've got a dog to walk,' she says drily.
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. No pressure, boys.
Baird has nothing to do with the films and is not a decision-maker regarding Lennon's estate – it's run by Sean, his son with second wife Yoko Ono. Still, I wonder 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.
But nothing – and I mean nothing – about Lennon's life needs making up. His early years are an extraordinary tale of circumstance and tragedy that explain his insecurities and temperament but also his drive. What looks on paper like a complicated family history was made vastly more turbid by the social mores of the time. 'Nobody talked about anything… Rarely were the men mentioned,' Baird 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. Having grown up in an orphanage, Baird says Alf's own history made him 'incapable of creating the home that my mother and John needed'. Alone, Lennon's mum had an affair with a man called Taffy Williams and became pregnant with a daughter Victoria, born in June 1945.
Victoria was immediately given up for adoption after pressure from Julia's ashamed father and oldest, formidable sister Mimi. The loss of Victoria 'destroyed' Julia, Baird says. Less than a year later, Lennon – aged five – went to live with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George in their house, Mendips. Around this time, Julia got together with John Dykins, and together they had Baird, in 1947, and her sister Jackie, in 1949. Julia was killed when she was hit by a car driven by an off-duty policeman in 1958, when Lennon was 17 and Baird was 11.
Baird is categorical that her mother didn't want Mimi to take Lennon. She talks of screaming matches and tears between the women. It was messy. Once, prior to Lennon's permanent move to Mendips, Alf turned up when Lennon was staying there and took him to Blackpool, with the idea of them relocating to New Zealand. Julia and Dykins tracked them down and gave Lennon a choice: do you want to be with your daddy or your mummy? He said 'Daddy' then ran after his mother. Baird is aghast that Mimi let this happen. 'So she's just stolen [John] and then lost him,' is her take. She describes Mimi, who didn't have children of her own, as 'opportunistic' in later taking Lennon in full-time. 'This little boy needed extra help and she was right on hand to provide it,' says Baird.
All this had a big impact on Lennon, who could get aggressive and angry. Boys were warned by parents to keep their distance. '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. Among the police dog demonstrations and candyfloss stalls, musical history was made. Mischief was made too as the Quarrymen's wobbly decorated lorry-cum-stage entered the churchyard.
'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.''
Lennon met the visiting McCartney 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. It was five long years between the St Peter's fête and debut single Love Me Do being released, much of that time spent in the sweatboxes of Hamburg. 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 ('all drinking Coca-Cola' – how times would change), 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, Lennon instructed two burly 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, Lennon'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.
There are two things Baird won't discuss. One is the accident that killed her mother. 'Absolutely not,' she says pointedly. She mentions, though, that McCartney also lost his mother young, at 14. In the early Beatles days Julia Lennon 'felt sorry' for Paul because ('ironically') 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 by Mark Chapman 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.
Baird shares Lennon's pacifist tendencies. 'Imagine not having drones, wouldn't that be wonderful,' she says, unwittingly suggesting another alternative line to her brother's most famous song. And she has abundant social empathy. We discuss Netflix hit Adolescence and the forks in the road faced by troubled young working class men. When Lennon reached those forks, I ask, what stopped him marching towards trouble and sent him down the path to becoming, well, a Beatle? 'Ambition,' she says.
Lennon famously said that he lost his mother twice: once when he went to Mimi's and once when she died. I suspect Baird feels she lost Lennon twice: once to fame and once to a gun. She admits that life has given her a 'very tough shell'. But her warmth and protective instincts shine through. And then she says the most loyal and heartbreaking thing you can imagine.
'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.'