"Working Class Hero" by John Lennon (1970) - A guest post by Kev Nixon
The protest song series
Today I’m pleased to share a guest post by Kev Nixon on his favorite protest song.
Since October he’s been the author of Kev’s substack, but he also has a long and distinguished career in the music industry as a songwriter, musician, producer, artist manager, and educator.
Coming from a musical family — a bandleader grandfather and four jazz musician uncles — he was signed and dropped by EMI twice in his late teens but gained valuable recording experience, enabling him to embark on a career in 1977 as a session bass player and songwriter based in London and touring Europe.
In the mid-80s he became founder of Powerstation Records, which led to him becoming an artist manager, producer, and co-songwriter and developing such artistically and commercially successful acts as hard rock band Little Angels, which he signed to Polydor, and psychedelic rock band Kula Shaker, which he signed to Sony’s Columbia Records. He then established a new management division and ran A&R at V2 Records after being headhunted by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.
During the first 20 years of this millennium, he co-founded the Brighton Institute of Modern Music (now BIMM University) with wife and business partner Sarah Clayman, which grew to campuses in four cities, including Dublin, and more than 2,000 students. After selling that to private equity, Kev and Sarah launched the Detroit Institute of Music Education (DIME) in 2014.
Visit his website to learn more and watch him play his Takamine. My thanks to Kev for writing this guest post about his working class hero, John Lennon.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed here are those of guest poster Kev Nixon and do not necessarily reflect the views of this substack author.
My favorite protest song
by Kev Nixon
When The Beatles quit touring in 1966, the by now fabulously wealthy John Lennon spent his days stoned out of his tree from dusk till dawn and back again, thus masking the dissatisfaction that success and fame had brought him.
His epiphany came on November 7th 1966 when he met Yoko Ono, a Japanese avant-garde artist and divorcee, who was seven years his senior. It was she who drove John’s decisions to clear an unhindered path towards fixing himself, and having dumped his teenage sweetheart wife Cynthia, and son Julian, he promptly did the same with his band of brothers. All six of them were replaced by Ono, who became his cure-all mother figure.
Heavily influenced by a book called The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov (who then became John and Yoko’s therapist for five months) John put his insecurities and consequential behavioural difficulties down to the disruptions of his childhood. In particular, his biological mother Julia Lennon’s decision to let her elder sister Mimi adopt him when he was seven. Julia’s early death in 1958 aged just 44, then saw 17-year-old John embark on a mission to make the world pay for his misery. With childhood events like these, there’s really little wonder that he wrote such a heartfelt negative lyric as this…
As soon as you're born they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all 'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool 'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years Then they expect you to pick a career When you can't really function you're so full of fear.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
There's room at the top they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill.
If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me
Being born in 1950’s northern England myself, albeit 16 years after John, when I first heard this song on its day of release, I instantly recognised the theme of protest against the damage that this particular environment could inflict upon the aspirational young. Being disadvantaged, poor, or working class was shameful, and you were brought up to hide such things whenever possible. There was a subliminal obligation to strive for more, for a higher status, and to believe that the rags-to-riches stories, whether true or not, were everyone’s ultimate dream. In fact, in post-war Britain, the possibility of being poor and genuinely happy, let alone rich, successful, and depressed occurred to no one.
It was John Lennon’s ultimate rebellion that he saw himself as leading the crusade to be rid of such oppression and hence, he anointed himself as a working-class hero. It was on a Sunday, September 27th in 1970 that John recorded this song at The Beatles beloved Studio Two at Abbey Road Studios, and for many, including me, it is considered as his greatest work.
Any recording featuring just voice and acoustic guitar is downgraded by many to be ‘just a demo’, but like Bob Dylan’s first couple of albums, this recording is as far from that. Here is a performance of shocking sincerity. Rather than being broken, John is numb and dejected at the pointlessness of complaint, and as he pours out his most naked self into the microphone, and across his guitar strings, he creates a confessional masterpiece, the simplicity of which pierces the heart of everyone who ever loved him.
Today, protest songs are rare outside of black music, and tend to get noticed only when they can achieve something specific, like the now formulaic but still useful Live Aid fundraiser, otherwise the protesting is really just commentary. But with “Working Class Hero”, John Lennon became the whistle-blower to the world on the realities of the damage inflicted on individuals by the Class System of Great Britain. Britain’s history is documented through rose-coloured specs, so don’t be fooled by its PR. There’s a reason why America speaks English, why India has generational resentment towards us, why Germany's failure to occupy us signalled the end of the war, and why Canada still can’t make up its mind who its parents are.
Great Britain has an overwhelming sense of self-importance. A superiority complex that you barely notice until you go and live somewhere else, and then wonder why the locals think you are struggling to integrate, when you are delighted by your sociability. If you grew up in the northern English working classes that John and I did, oppression can be buried deep in your DNA, and it’s not a good thing.
In his crazy period of the mid-seventies, John saw himself as a citizen of the world, and once he settled in the Dakota Building, he had no desire to return to the UK. I too lived in America for a long time, and I understand how he felt. Britain is a tough ask and if you are ‘different’, it can be very challenging to exist here. Still today you are obliged to conform to its permanent state of subliminal misery. Sound your car horn to a Brit and they will want to stab you. Smoke marijuana and you might go to prison (even though they are so full, we now let bank robbers go free) while in 80% of America, weed is in high street stores, next to the carrots and spuds of the supermarkets. John’s incredible song is desperately saying “hey Britain, chill the fuck out”.
We get one life, or sometimes less than that as in the case of John Lennon. It was his understanding of our plight that made him such a massive influence on so many, including me and my life’s work, but even more so in my attitude to life. Sadly, all I can do now is say thank you for being articulate enough to speak for several million of us who grew up like him.