A conversation with John Lennon
Caught on a recording that has sat in a garage for 50 years is a chat with John Lennon that is a bit different than most. The interview, by New Zealand academic Dr Tony Taylor, has come to light in a newly published book and Carly Thomas sat down with the man who talked Beatlemania with John Lennon... twice.
Times change, that's a given. Years pass, decades pass and things that felt so immediate become history in the blink of an eye.
But some things, people, times, stand out more than others. They make an indelible mark and they become a yesterday that we hang things from. . Their memory lingers long after the fact. The Beatles have done just that. Think about the sixties and there they are: dapper suits, lyrics about young love, the hair and screaming fans.
It's those fans, the hysteria, the extreme reaction, that was new. It got given the title Beatlemania. It worried parents, made fans faint and it got Dr Tony Taylor, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Victoria University in Wellington, thinking. "I started to look around just to see if anybody had written anything about this," he says.
"Nobody had, I was very surprised. The consumerisation and the cluster of revolutions - the youth revolution, the sexual revolution, the theological revolution, the racial one they were all going on at this time and somehow this made, in still a post war period, this made the rising generation restless."
Source: Manawatu Standard
