Nadeau

Beatle John Lennon at last vindicated:
Red Mole, Black Dwarf, White Album

It took more than 40 years, but John Lennon has finally got in his furious response at having Revolution, one of his most famous songs with the Beatles, unfavourably compared to the BBC radio drama Mrs Dale's Diary.The jibe that the Beatles had sold out to the establishment was made in 1968 in a letter to Tariq Ali's radical journal Black Dwarf – which had concluded that the Beatles' mortal rivals, the Rolling Stones, had superior radical credentials. […]

Today's music fans will be stunned by the circumstances of the interview: Lennon spoke for six hours at his home in Surrey, sustained only by macrobiotic bread and jam made by Yoko Ono, to an overawed first-year student from Keele University who had hitchhiked hundreds of miles to meet him after applying by a letter sent to a fan magazine. […]

John Lennon died on December 8 1980, shot on the doorstep of his Dakota building home in New York by Mark Chapman - but by then had long since made his peace with Tariq Ali, and regained his radical laurels.The American journal Counterpunch four years ago finally published in full a long 1971 interview by Ali and Robin Blackburn, originally for the Trotskyist Red Mole, in which Lennon agreed with Ali that he was becoming "increasingly radical and political". There was nothing new about this, Lennon insisted. "I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere."
Maev Kennedy | Guardian/UK