BEATLES REVELATION: LENNON ADMITS HE WAS SHOT AT FOR CHILDHOOD APPLE THEFT!
The Legends Unmasked: Six Decades Later, The Fab Four's Bizarre TV Confessions Still Shock
Lennon's childhood scrape with death illuminates his lifelong rebellious streak
McCartney reveals the phantom racing greyhound that never arrived and his creepy sleep disorder
Inside the birth of the Beatles name: "I just thought of it" remains Lennon's enduring claim
THE BEATLES: THE MYTH THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
Sixty-one years have slipped away since that February 1964 Granada TV interview with Dusty Springfield, and yet the footage still crackles with a provocative energy that modern pop culture desperately gasps for. With only two Beatles still drawing breath in 2025, these primary documents of the Fab Four at their peak—irreverent, absurd, and unwittingly profound—are increasingly vital artefacts in understanding the most transformative cultural phenomenon of the 20th century.
The interview lasts barely five minutes, but it's a masterclass in the art of saying everything and nothing simultaneously—a technique that today's media-trained automatons couldn't grasp if they had an algorithm implanted in their prefrontal cortex.
Watching the black-and-white footage now, the most striking element isn't just how bloody young they are—McCartney still babyish at 21, Lennon's acerbic edge only beginning to harden at 23—but how effortlessly they navigate the nascent machinery of fame. Dusty Springfield, trying desperately to maintain some semblance of journalistic inquiry, reduced to asking about racing greyhounds and eyebrow grooming techniques.
"Please could you tell me the name of your racing greyhound?" Springfield asks McCartney with performative seriousness.
"Uhh, I haven't got one, actually," Paul replies, before spinning an impromptu yarn about a fan who promised him one but never delivered. It's classic McCartney—inventing a narrative on the spot, charming his way through nonsense, leaving the audience wanting to send him racing dogs by the thousands.
This incident perfectly encapsulates McCartney's lifelong genius for mythmaking. The phantom greyhound stands alongside "Yesterday" coming to him in a dream and the supposed "Paul is dead" conspiracy as pieces of the elaborate McCartney folklore. The racing dog never materialised—much like the countless promised Beatles reunions that fans clung to until Lennon's murder in 1980 rendered such fantasies permanently moot.
When Springfield asks the bassist if he sleeps with his eyes open, McCartney's response is equally illuminating: "Well you know, I haven't seen myself do it... But actually, the fellas say that I do. They've, sort of, seen me sleeping with my eyes open."
In 2025, this throwaway comment resonates with poignant irony. For six decades, McCartney has indeed kept his eyes open while the rest of the band slept—sometimes literally, as during the infamous "Let It Be" sessions when he alone seemed invested in the group's future, and sometimes metaphorically, as the primary keeper of the Beatles flame through decades of retrospectives, remasters, and reverent anecdotes.
The exchange regarding girls screaming through their performances—"We like 'em screaming, generally, all of us. But it's a bit much all the way through"—reads now as gloriously quaint. In an age where engagement metrics and parasocial relationships are dissected by marketing departments and artists strategise for maximum TikTok virality, the unbridled, organic hysteria of Beatlemania seems almost prehistoric in its purity. The Beatles didn't need to engineer fan engagement; they simply existed and were engulfed by it.
Then comes the name origin question that Springfield acknowledges has been asked "a thousand times before." Lennon's deadpan "I just thought of it" followed by a comically proud facial expression captures everything that made him essential. The mundane truth—that the name evolved from Buddy Holly's Crickets with a pun on "beat"—wasn't nearly as entertaining as Lennon's provocative simplicity. The truth was bendable, malleable, something to be toyed with rather than preserved.
In a 2023 interview, McCartney, then 81, was still being asked about the band's name origin. "John always took credit for it," he said with a wry smile. "But I think it was a bit of a group evolution, really. Though I've told this story so many times now, I'm not sure what's memory and what's just become part of the script."
The most explosive moment from the Springfield interview—which spawned our deliberately sensationalist headline—is the casual confirmation from Lennon that he was indeed "shot at for stealing apples" as a child. This offhand acknowledgement of juvenile delinquency and near-death experience in post-war Liverpool has been largely overlooked in Beatles scholarship, yet it illuminates so much about Lennon's character: his comfort with danger, his disregard for authority, his matter-of-fact relationship with violence.
The cruel irony, of course, is that the man who nonchalantly confirmed surviving being shot at as a child would ultimately be murdered by gunfire outside his New York apartment. Mark David Chapman's bullets accomplished what that anonymous Liverpool orchard-keeper's couldn't. History sometimes writes conclusions too poetic to be believed.
Springfield's follow-up question about whether the "beautiful marks" on Lennon's face were from this incident received the dismissive rejoinder: "No, they're scabs." Again, pure Lennon—undercutting any attempt to mythologise or romanticise him, preferring the ugly, scabrous truth to a flattering fiction.
This exchange highlights the fundamental tension that would eventually fracture the group—Lennon's increasing insistence on brutal honesty versus the showbiz machinery that demanded polished perfection. By 1970, Lennon would be giving interviews referring to the Beatles' output as "mediocre" and their fame as "a fucking humiliation." The seeds of that disillusionment are visible even here, beneath the wisecracks and charm.
Harrison's near-complete silence throughout the Springfield interview presages his eventual emergence as "the quiet one"—a reductive label that masked a complex artistic temperament. In later years, Harrison would describe the Beatles period as "a nightmare" and "being somebody else." His absence from the banter in this early footage feels, in retrospect, like a man already planning his escape.
Ringo, ever the adaptable drummer, fits his personality perfectly into the spaces left by the others. His comic timing—as impeccable as his backbeat—would serve him well through decades of self-deprecating solo stardom. While never the songwriter his bandmates were, Starr understood intuitively that being a Beatle was a role to be performed as much as a musical position, and he played that role flawlessly.
What's most striking about the Dusty Springfield interview in 2025 is how it captures four working-class Liverpudlians still processing their absurd new reality. Within a year, they'd be too famous, too wealthy, and too exhausted to maintain this level of spontaneous charm. The 1965-66 interviews show increasingly staged responses and growing weariness. By 1966, they'd stop touring altogether, retreating to the controlled environment of the studio.
The Granada TV appearance captures the Beatles at the precise moment of transition—famous enough to be asked inane questions about grooming habits and nonexistent pets, but still fresh enough to find the whole circus amusing rather than soul-destroying. They hadn't yet discovered drugs beyond uppers, hadn't met Bob Dylan or the Maharishi, hadn't endured the "bigger than Jesus" controversy or the debacle of the Philippines. They were still, essentially, a group rather than four individuals reluctantly sharing a brand name.
In today's fractured media landscape, where celebrity is simultaneously more accessible and more manufactured than ever, the unfiltered quality of this exchange feels almost revolutionary. Contemporary pop stars deliver responses workshopped by publicity teams, filtered through media training, and sanitised for maximum brand compatibility. The Beatles, even at the height of their manufactured moptop phase, remained stubbornly, gloriousy themselves.
Martin Scorsese's upcoming documentary series "Four: The Beatles Complete Story" promises to include enhanced versions of these early interviews alongside previously unseen footage. Producer Olivia Harrison (George's widow) has stated that the series aims to "capture the humanity behind the mythology," a task that becomes increasingly difficult as the actual humans who were the Beatles are reduced by mortality's inevitable mathematics.
As Ringo approaches his 85th birthday this July and McCartney his 83rd in June, the living memory of the Beatles experience grows ever more precious. These primary documents—the interviews, the offhand comments, the moment Lennon comically demands to see the interviewer's "scabs"—become increasingly valuable cultural touchstones.
The Dusty Springfield interview, seemingly inconsequential in 1964, now reads as a Rosetta Stone for Beatles scholars. Before the ambitious studio experimentation, before the spirituality and the disillusionment, before the lawsuits and the reunions-that-never-were, they were four lads answering silly questions with a combination of practiced charm and genuine wit.
In 2025, as artificial intelligence programs can generate convincing simulations of Lennon and Harrison's voices singing new compositions (the controversial "Now and Then" AI completion remains a contentious topic among purists), these genuine moments of unscripted humanity are increasingly precious.
The real Beatles—not the mythologised versions, not the sanctified cultural icons, but the actual human beings captured in grainy black and white footage—continue to fascinate precisely because they were so stubbornly, imperfectly real. Unlike today's celebrities, they weren't perfect; they were something far more valuable: they were authentic.
The final question to McCartney about whether he plucks his "well-shaped eyebrows" would today spark a week-long Twitter discourse about gender norms and male beauty standards. In 1964, it simply elicited a bemused "Umm, no" from McCartney and moved on. The innocence of the exchange highlights how thoroughly the relationship between celebrities, media, and audience has transformed in the intervening decades.
The Beatles remain, sixty-one years after their breakthrough, the gold standard against which all pop cultural phenomena are measured. The Dusty Springfield interview, brief and seemingly trivial, captures something essential about why they endure: beneath the haircuts and the screaming fans and the carefully coordinated suits beat the hearts of four individuals who never fully surrendered to the machinery of fame.
In 2025, as the last witnesses to Beatlemania age and the primary documents become increasingly precious, these five minutes of television remind us that before they were legends, they were just four lads answering daft questions about racing greyhounds and scabs—and doing it with more authentic charm than any focus-grouped celebrity could ever muster.