john lennon just like starting over — john lennon just like starting over

JUL 01 1980 · 12:00

john lennon just like starting over — john lennon just like starting over (1980) Era: New Wave / Post-Punk Transition Era (1980) - Lennon's return from a five-year hiatus with Double Fantasy, filmed just 12 days before his assassination on November 26, 1980; a cultural watershed moment at the dawn of the MTV age. Exceptionally high. This is one of the last filmed documents of John Lennon as an active musician, shot less than two weeks before his death. Its value transcends the conventions of music video as a format — it constitutes primary historical evidence of Lennon's final creative period and public artistic identity. The warm, analog visual texture, moderate pacing, and intimate performance framing make it a technically instructive artifact of the pre-MTV promotional clip era, while its biographical weight ensures permanent canonical status in any archive of 20th-century popular music history. Context: Filmed on November 26, 1980 — 12 days before John Lennon's murder — this promotional video represents one of the final documented moving-image records of Lennon as a working artist. The song marked his return to music after five years of self-imposed retirement to raise his son Sean. Released on Geffen Records as the lead single from Double Fantasy (his collaborative album with Yoko Ono), the track was chosen by Lennon not as the album's strongest song, but as the most symbolically resonant statement of artistic renewal after a prolonged absence. The video's warm, retro-romantic visual language deliberately mirrors the song's musical homage to Lennon's 1950s rock-and-roll heroes — Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Gene Vincent. The assassination transformed this piece from a promotional artifact into a profound historical document, with the single reaching number one posthumously on both the Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart. Director notes: The promotional video for '(Just Like) Starting Over' was filmed on November 26, 1980, as documented by on-set photography archived at Morrison Hotel Gallery (photographer Allan Tannenbaum). The song was released as a single on October 24, 1980 in the UK and October 27, 1980 in the US. Given Lennon's murder on December 8, 1980, the video was never commercially promoted in his lifetime in the conventional sense; it gained its widest broadcast circulation posthumously as the single climbed to number one in both the US and UK. No directing credit has been publicly confirmed in any contemporaneous press, label documentation, or scholarly discography consulted.