In the new issue of Hot Press, out tomorrow with The Edge on the cover, Kevin Barry tells us how he captured John Lennon’s voice in his critically-acclaimed Beatlebone novel.
“I obsessively re-watched the Dick Cavett Show from the ‘70s, which devoted a whole hour to him and Yoko. He’s so fucking tricky to get down because he’s very, very capricious. His tone changes all the time. He’ll be really funny and charming and fluffy and light and inside a sentence he’s gone kind of prickly and dark.”
Barry also addresses Lennon allegedly meeting and giving money to the IRA.
“There was speculation that he made donations but we don’t know. But he clearly sympathised at a time when it was potentially career suicide, in Britain away, to do so.”
Here’s that Dick Cavett show in full, plus another John and Yoko interview with David Frost, and Paul McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ single which underlined their republican leanings at the time.