Unlike most rock stars — unlike most people — the life of John Lennon would probably have been a compulsive read whatever he’d achieved as an adult. From the moment he entered the world in 1940 during a German bombing raid on Liverpool, to the point at which he left it 40 years later, shot dead on his New York doorstep by a schizophrenic fan, Lennon was a lifelong stranger to normality.

Emotionally, he was a mess of insecurities. The son of a working-class merchant seaman with showbiz aspirations and a flighty middle-class woman in permanent denial of her genteel background, Lennon fervently believed that he had been, as a child, “never really wanted”. Scarred by a bizarre scene when his soon-to-be-absent father ordered him, at the age of six, to choose which of his separated parents he wanted to stay with, he ended up with neither following the intervention of his mother’s older sister, a strict and childless former nurse, aunt Mimi. Mimi’s motivation for taking John off to live with her and uncle George in the polite Liverpool suburb of Woolton was not maternal or conventionally affectionate: it was driven by her class-bound disapproval of what she regarded as the proletarian habits of John’s mum Julia, a free-spirited fan of pubs, banjo-playing and extramarital relationships.

Lennon’s affinity for his errant mother, whom he visited on a regular basis, extended way beyond her taste for popular music. In the course of his conversations with Lennon’s inner circle, Philip Norman heard several reports of an incident when John was 14 in which he accidentally touched his mother’s breast one afternoon while lying next to her on a bed. “I was wondering if I should do anything else,” Lennon later told a journalist from the Daily Express. “I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.”

Feelings of intimacy were, for this extra- ordinarily unlucky man, often a prelude to bereavement. When Lennon was 17, Julia was run over and killed by a speeding off- duty policeman, a tragedy that left him, he said, “in a blind rage for two years”. He had barely recovered from that when the Beatles’ first bassist Stu Sutcliffe — whom Lennon worshipped with a quasi-sexual intensity and to whom he wrote letters similar in length and tone, he claimed, to the ones he later sent Yoko — died sudd- enly of a brain haemorrhage. (Norman discounts the possibility that this was provoked by an earlier, drunken attack on Sutcliffe in which Lennon-allegedly kicked him in the head.)

The fatal drugs overdose that did for his surrogate father figure, Brian Epstein, in 1967 hit him much harder than it did the rest of the Beatles. For one thing, Lennon blamed himself “for introducing Brian to pills”.

More to the point, he was devastated to lose the cultivated, sensitive soul he had once holidayed alone with in Spain and who, despite all the cruel jibes about Epstein’s being “a faggot and a Jew”, deeply touched the middle-class sensibility implanted by Mimi. When Epstein first checked into a London rehab centre to try to deal with his problem, Lennon sent him a huge floral bouquet with the message, “You know I love you . . . I really mean that. John.”

The loss of Epstein was a disaster which presaged the end of Lennon’s first marriage to the long-suffering Cynthia, as well as his creative relationship with the Beatles. It seems to have coincided with, if not contributed to, the falling-out with Paul McCartney, another close buddy for whom Lennon, Norman suggests, might have harboured some sexual feelings. He quotes Yoko remembering people in the Apple office referring to McCartney as “John’s princess”. But rather than outing his subject, in the stridently accusatory style of his previous biographer Albert Goldman, Norman is more wisely tuned to Lennon’s wayward intellectual curiosity. He attributes his gay moments to a commitment to “the principle that bohemians should try everything” and concludes that, where McCartney was concerned, Lennon had been “deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality”.

Norman has written about Lennon twice before but he has uncovered much new mat-erial in his research for this impressive and highly readable book. One intriguing nugget concerns the revelation that the unidentified girl Lennon sings about “having” in Norwegian Wood was the German wife of the Beatles’ photographer Robert Freeman, with whom Lennon had a clandestine affair while the couple were living in the flat beneath his and Cynthia’s in South Kensington.

The fact that Norman has had the blessing and full co-operation of Yoko Ono means that he is not short of new things to say about the relationship which, according to popular writ, broke up the world’s favourite pop group. He argues convincingly that, far from being an opportunistic schemer, the high-born, wealthy Yoko was reluctant to take up with the Beatle she regarded as her social and artistic inferior, and whose crude sexual foreplay — employing the Beatles’ roadies to cart her off to a bed in a flat near the Abbey Road studio — she initially rejected.

The most interesting part of Lennon’s complicated life on which Norman sheds fresh light is the troubled relationship with his seaman father, Alfred. Usually seen as an absconding rascal, Alf emerges here as a stoic victim of the caprices of his serially unfaithful wife and volatile son. He tried to hang on to John, offering to take him to New Zealand after Julia walked out on their marriage; and when he finally re-established contact with his Beatle son, he seems not to have expected anything much in the way of help, despite being broke and virtually jobless. Like just about everybody else in John’s family and life, Alf was, in his way, a remarkable man. At 54, he successfully romanced a 19-year-old girl, whom he married and had two sons with. Shortly after this, in what was to be their final meeting, John unleashed the fury he had long nurtured for his hapless dad and threatened to have him killed. The statement a terrified Alf filed with a solicitor in the event of this threat being carried out is one of the most moving and scary pieces of Lennon’s sprawling legacy. It is greatly to Norman’s credit as a biographer that he does justice to all of it in a book whose 854 pages simply fly by.

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