Feature

Sean Lennon

Despite their unusual bond, mother and son haven’t lived together in a decade: Sean shipped out to a Swiss boarding school at 11; when he returned, at 15, he enrolled at Dalton and moved into his own apartment on the seventh floor of the Dakota, down the hall from Yoko. “It actually kind of ostracized me from the kids I went to school with,” he says. “They’d be like, ‘Hey, you want to go do whip-its after school?’ ‘No, I think I’m going to go home and be domestic with my older Italian girlfriend.’”

For the son of the most influential figure in the history of pop music, working in the indie-rock idiom -- which, even if it embraces certain of pop’s aesthetic choices, eschews stardom, Top 40 hits, and other commercial trappings -- might seem an easy out, a way of escaping inevitable comparisons. And who could blame him? “I read a review of one of my shows,” Lennon says. “And the guy said that I was not a great guitar player, which is fine because I’m not. But they never say Bob Dylan isn’t a great guitar player. Or they never say Beck isn’t. They never say Lou Reed isn’t a great guitar player. None of them are John McLaughlin, but because I’m John Lennon’s son, he has to say it.”

John Lennon had devoted much of his life to being Sean’s father, building world peace from the ground up, when he was shot outside the Dakota. Sean was 5 at the time. “I remember when my dad died,” Lennon says matter-of-factly. For the first time in the interview, he stops fidgeting. “That whole early period of my life became kind of cemented in my mind. I think it was a desperate reaction to him going away that my memories became that much more clear. You don’t really miss anything specific. You just miss them breathing, just being there. I miss the way his skin felt, the sound of his voice. Him tucking me in at night.

“I remember him showing me how to clean the tip of my penis with a piece of toilet paper after I’d peed.”

“That’s nice,” Yuka says.

“I guess that’s the kind of thing dads show kids when they’re 4. I mean, I don’t think it’s that weird. But that’s what I remember.”

He pauses, his eyes still focused on some invisible point above the coffee table. “We went on vacation to the Caribbean, and a lot of that I remember, because he said I could swim like a fish. I was a really good swimmer. I could swim, like, way better than I could walk. And he’d always be like, in his best Liverpudlian accent ‘Sean can swim like a fish. Look at him!’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah!’ Whoosh!”