John Lennon in Conversation with Tony Taylor

A previously unpublished interview with John Lennon conducted during The Beatles’ 1964 tour of New Zealand. At the time Tony Taylor, as a young lecturer in psychology, became interested in the mass-hysteria that The Beatles generated, and used the topic as a class-exercise to get some facts when the ‘fab-four’ performed in Wellington. Included in this publication, alongside the interviews with Lennon, are some of the methodology and results of Dr Taylor’s research and how it was dismissed as being trivial by the academic fraternity because it was about ‘pop culture’. Now, 50 years on, attitudes have changed and Taylor’s work has assumed a degree of significance not envisaged in the 1960s. Also featured in this volume is the poem Flipside to the Ballad of John and Yoko written by Michael O'Leary at the time of Lennon’s murder in 1980.