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John Lennon’s son Julian had a difficult relationship with his father. Lennon freely admitted that Julian’s mother Cynthia’s pregnancy had been an accident, and the father and son rarely saw each other after Lennon and Cynthia divorced. Julian said he felt angry at Lennon for a long time. Recently, though, this changed. He shared how watching The Beatles: Get Back made him feel proud to be related to his father.
In 2021, Peter Jackson released the documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. The three-part series followed The Beatles as they recorded what would become their final album, Let It Be. Get Back pushed against the idea that relations between The Beatles were entirely miserable in the late 1960s. It also made Julian feel proud of his father.
“Watching Get Back, I fell in love with my father again because I saw him as he was, as I remember him as a kid, before it all went a bit pear-shaped,” he told Esquire in 2023. “I came away feeling so proud to be a Lennon. I’ve always pushed it away a little bit, trying to forge my own path, but after this I’ve just now taken on this new mantle of like, fucking, I’m so proud to be part of the legacy and history of what went before and hopefully going to do some justice in carrying on with that.”
As a musician himself, he felt appreciative of the way his father and his bandmates influenced him.
“The music will always be in my blood and that’s partly due to Dad and it’s partly due to the Beatles, especially after having watched Get Back.”
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He did not initially want to attend the premiere
Julian loved Get Back but initially did not want to attend the premiere. The only reason he went was to support his younger half-brother, Sean.
“Sean didn’t really want to go to the Get Back premiere,” Julian said. “He felt overwhelming pressure. And I didn’t particularly want to go. But he said he felt obligated to go, so because I love him so much I said, Listen, I’m coming with you. We’ll face the demons together. And it’s funny because there’s always been, especially in the UK press, ‘Lennon Sons Feuding,’ this, that. We’ve never had a fight in our life. It’s such bull.”
In the end, he was glad he went, not just because he liked the series, but because he was with family.
“The love for Sean, and the love for Yoko, and Stella, and Paul, and Mary, and Dhani, and Zak — it’s a big old, weird family,” he said. “But as they say, families are always a bit screwed up.”
John Lennon had a fraught relationship with his son
In the past, Julian did not feel as warmly toward his father. Lennon was cold and distant to him, stating publicly that Julian had been “born out of a bottle of whiskey on a Saturday night, and there was no intent to have children” (via Playboy).
“It was still very distant. I probably knew him as much as I know you,” he told a reporter for The Telegraph in 1998. “That’s about how warm it was. There were cuddles now and then but there was always an uneasy tension.”
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