David Bailey on John Lennon

John wasn’t really a friend. He was just someone I used to see at the Ad Lib [club] all the time. I remember John smoking a joint with me at the top of the Ad Lib and saying, “Shit. I’ve arrived. I’m on the roof of the Ad Lib smoking a joint with David Bailey!”

I didn’t like the Beatles – I liked John. The Beatles were a boy band. I thought they were square as houses. And then -suddenly The White Album and all those records came along and you sort of thought, ah, they are more interesting than I thought… but all that rubbish about Paul McCartney thinking he made the Sixties. It was nothing to do with the Sixties! London made the Beatles! It was happening in London, it wasn’t happening in Liverpool.

John was a f***er. Paul was always the nicest guy in the world. George, he always seemed full of angst. Ringo always seemed Mr Nice Guy. But John was a bit poky; I liked him.

I told John to close his eyes because I could feel this tension between him and Paul. I did them [together] afterwards; I got them looking different ways because there was such a tension. Although I’ve never seen it like those two guys – Oasis. I was doing their first Rolling Stone cover and I did it in ten minutes because I thought they were going to kill each other.

I saw Paul recently and he introduced me to his new woman. He said, “This is Bailey. The first thing he ever said to me was so rude. He said, ‘Michelle, my belle’ – are you f***ing joking, Paul?” When I said that to him he actually told me to piss off, which isn’t a very Paul McCartney thing to do.

I’d like to say for the record that it wasn’t Ringo who came up with [the title] “Eight Days A Week”; it was me. John Lennon was in the Ad Lib one night and he asked me how hard I worked. And I said, “How hard do I work? I’ll tell you, John, I work eight days a week.”

I’m a bit concerned about my work looking like the Sixties. Damien [Hirst] always says the worst insult is, “I like your early stuff.” Because they don’t know what else to say. But you have to live with that. I have to live with John Lennon.

Yoko Ono on John Lennon

In some ways John was a highly complex person, but, in others, he was a person who retained his innocence. On one level he remained the kid he’d been in his home town. The fact that he still kept his childlike character probably saved him and helped him greatly when he was writing songs because he was always able to remember what it was like to be a child.

The first time we met, I didn’t know who he was, but I found him totally, totally attractive – not that he was known as the most conventionally handsome man in the world but he had a charm which was very alluring and endearing . I think it was because he was so honest. Coming from New York, it took me a while to warm to English guys and John was the first one that I related to; there was something so human about him. It’s never easy just to be yourself, but John was very good at that.

I was not very happy about it, but one of my strongest memories of John was the first time he made me laugh. He just grabbed an apple that was in my exhibition [in 1966, at London’s Indica Gallery, Ono showed her avant-garde work which contained an apple on sale for £200] took a bite out of it and just looked at me. I was very, very upset because it was my work. I thought, How dare he, what a rude person! And I just looked at him and he could see that I didn’t like it and he registered this and did a shy little smile and put it back on the pedestal. At the time I was very upset but when I thought about it after he left, it seemed rather sweet.

He had a very warm view of his past. He thought of Liverpool as a place that was incredibly wonderful. I didn’t hear that from many others at the time. Some people who leave the city they were born in or grew up in say, ‘Thank God I left’. But John always thought it was a great place and he loved it.

In the last week of his life he was planning to go visit his England on the QE2. He wanted to go to Liverpool and show the city he was from to his son Sean..

He was making very interesting statements all the time, especially towards the end. As if he sensed that something was about to happen to his life to change it all. But if you listen to his song Imagine, you will see that everything he was trying to tell his son Sean at the time is in there. All of it. He stuck to being himself to the end.

Originally published in the March 2014 issue of British GQ Magazine.