Sean Ono Lennon has said he is working to ensure young people don’t forget about The Beatles.
The musician and producer was born in 1975 to the late music legend John Lennon and the avant-garde artist Yoko Ono.
In recent years, he’s taken over from his mother, now 92, in protecting the material the couple and the band made during their careers.
Earlier this year, he helped to produce The Beatles Anthology, a remastered version of a 1995 documentary series that expanded it from eight episodes to nine.
He has also overseen the production of ‘Mind Games’ reissue boxset, an album originally released during what he described as a “really terrifying” period for his parents, and the documentary film One To One: John & Yoko.
He spoke about the responsibility in a new interview with CBS’s Sunday Morning, where he said that “obviously the world is also the custodian of his legacy, I would say”, before adding, “I’m just doing my best to help make sure that the younger generation doesn’t forget about The Beatles and John and Yoko. That’s how I look at it.”
He was then asked whether he fears that one day his father’s material could be forgotten, to which he admitted, “To forget about it? I do, actually. And I never did before.”
He went on to explain why he chooses to work on these projects, saying: “My parents gave me so much that I think it’s the least I can do to try and support their legacy in my lifetime. I feel like I just owe it to them. It’s a personal thing.”
Lennon then stated that he views their legacy as “peace and love”, before adding, “But it’s not just peace and love. It’s an attitude towards activism that is done with humour and love.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Lennon provided an update on his mother, Ono, who has taken a step back from public life in recent years.
“She’s good. I mean, you know, she’s 92, so she’s slowed down a lot, and she’s retired. That’s why I’m kind of trying to do the work that she used to do,” he explained.
Lennon also explained that he wants to carry on the legacy set by his mother of protecting the work, saying: “That’s why I feel a lot of pressure, actually, to do my best, because she set a high standard for the way that she dealt with my dad’s music, and the Beatles stuff.”
He has previously opened up about his father’s lasting impact on his mother, saying that she “never has moved on from that relationship”. He reflected on the “legendary love” between his parents too.
Last year, Lennon asked fans not to compare him to his brother Julian, while insisting that there’s nothing but love between them.
He also opened up about the reasons he believes his father came to “resent” being a Beatle, saying: “I don’t feel that he’d fallen out of love with music. I think he’d fallen out of love with a certain kind of fame. I think he’d fallen out of love with having to be a part of a machinery, of a pop machine, you know.”
NME gave the rerelease of The Beatles Anthology a four-star review, describing it as “a familiar but fab nine-episode deep dive” and adding: “Anthology has a somewhat stitched-together quality, given that the archive clips are interspersed by contemporary footage of Paul, Ringo and George seemingly filmed wherever they happened to be at the time.
“This entire rerelease, though, is more than justified by the genuinely eye-opening final episode, which sees the lads work up ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, the Lennon demos put out as Beatles tracks alongside the original documentary. There is, Macca hints, a third that they may complete someday.”
Ahead of its release, NME spoke to Giles Martin, son of the late and legendary George Martin, who remastered the three double albums released as part of the collection.
“What’s great about this whole process – the album, the TV series, the music – is that it reveals how human it was and they were. It was four mates,” he told us. “More so now, you realise in this world of process that we live in with marketing, TikTok, re-imagination, teams of songwriters and the music industry being this behemoth of mediocre repetition of things to try and burst through this waterfall that was once a stream – The Beatles just basically came up with stuff, sang it, recorded it and released it. There was so much scale around it, but that’s all it was essentially.
“The stuff I curated and mixed made me realise that: it’s just four of them in a room. That’s what the ‘Anthology’ is all about,” he added.
In other news, social media influencer Ed Matthews livestreamed a recent chance meeting with Ringo Starr, whom he didn’t recognise.
