John Walsh: What Lennon's sexual fantasies have to do with Gandhi and Keats...

Do we need another book on John Lennon? In the 28 years since his death, a tsunami of Beatles history, biography, song analysis and memorabilia has engulfed fans of the Working-Class Hero. Lennon's own family have joined in; only last year Julia Baird, his half-sister, published a harrowing description of the tug-of-love between their mother Julia and their aunt Mimi, with whom John grew up. Can there be more to find out? And can Philip Norman, the author of the new 300,000-word John Lennon: The Life, be serious when he tells The Word magazine, "[Lennon deserves a] real biography, as if he were John Keats or Mahatma Gandhi. Not a pop person, but a major towering presence in his century"?

The answer to both questions is emphatically Yes. Norman is perhaps going a bit far with the Gandhi comparison, but it's undoubtedly time we started taking the architects of the cathedral of rock more seriously, before the rest of them (Chuck Berry, Dylan, Jagger and Richards, McCartney, Ray Davies, the remainder of Pink Floyd) are mown down by Time. They presided over a revolution in human sensibility more profound and lasting than anything engendered by politics in the Sixties and Seventies.

And yes, Norman has unearthed startling things. We knew, for instance, that Lennon adored his mother, Julia: she was exuberant, headstrong, red-haired and musical, and taught him his first instrument, the ukulele, standing behind him with her hands on his (she also did a fine George Formby impression). We didn't, however, know that Lennon fantasised about having sex with her, and told many people. At 14, apparently, he lay down beside Julia during her afternoon rest, "and wondered how far she would let him go". He also, according to Norman, flirted with the idea of having sex with Paul McCartney. Norman also reveals that the short-lived girlfriend in "Norwegian Wood" wasn't Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, but Sonny Freeman, the German wife of his friend Robert Freeman who lived downstairs from John and Cynthia, and whom John used to visit when Robert was working and Cynthia was changing the infant Julian.

Hints that John Lennon could be a prize shit to his intimates are amply borne out by Norman. He tells the story about Lennon's father, Alfred, a chronically absent merchant seaman who reappeared from time to time to say "hi" to his son. Once he visited the grown-up Lennon, bearing a gift of some aftershave. Lennon by then was sporting a beard and the gift (which showed how much his father knew him) sent him into a fury. He threatened to have Alf killed. His father took the threat seriously enough to contact a lawyer.

You might argue that this is mere smut and family tittle-tattle. That would be to misunderstand a) what we like to read in biographies and b) the importance to Lennon of his problematic childhood. It lurks behind so many of his world-changing songs. His half-sister Julia told me: "John once said in an interview, 'I'm not one for doing autobiography, I'll never do anything like that.' And I thought, 'John, all your songs are autobiographical.' Didn't he see it?"

The making of bacon?

Francis Bacon admirers who visit his centenary retrospective at Tate Britain and gaze at his bleak, isolated figures may wonder where he found inspiration. Two weeks ago, I suggested he was thinking of the denizens of Soho's Colony Room; now I'm not so sure. On a visit to Dublin, I popped in to the Hugh Lane Gallery to see their recreation of Bacon's London studio. Inside a plastic "room" with a glass inspection panel, an army of artists have painstakingly deployed the 7,000 items found in his studio at Reece Mews, South Kensington, where he lived for his last 30 years. It's a magnificent chaos, with a single tall easel surrounded by piled-up paint tubes, rags, pots, books, photographs and towels. It's good see so many empty boxes that once contained bottles of Krug, and to learn that Bacon couldn't bear to throw away the box that once housed a new Magimix food processor. But what startled me was the floor, on which Bacon tried to keep some semblance of tidiness by strewing copies of the Independent everywhere. One of the broadsheet pages on the floor featured lovely monochrome photographs of ballerinas; another displayed an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. Can it be that the newspaper you hold in your hand unwittingly helped Bacon develop his vision of a bleak, cruel, nightmarish, monstrous world without hope of salvation? I'd like to think so.

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