Indeed, Lennon was largely responsible for The Beatles’ flirtation with the more far-out elements of the counterculture. As their renown grew, he increasingly took a performative, Warhol-esque approach to their fame. While McCartney chucked buckets of water over the press, Lennon preferred to tease them with cryptic pronouncements. 

His apparent belief in numerology was a favourite topic. Lennon claimed he was haunted by the number nine: he was born at 6.30am (6+3 = 9), on October 9, on a Wednesday (which has nine letters); The Beatles played the Cavern Club for the first time on February 9, 1961; they made their America-breaking debut on the same date three years later. And, most significantly, there’s The White Album’s Revolution 9, an eight-minute musical flim-flam that consists of snatches of voice, music, static – and a dry, crisp British accent repeating “number nine”. 

Lennon explained that, for this song, he took “an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine.’ I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number-nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn’t realise it – it was just so funny.”

When John met ET (and Uri Geller)

Lennon’s extraterrestrial encounters are harder to dismiss. He appears to have sincerely believed that he was visited by aliens at least twice. In 1974, four years after the events of The Beatles: Get Back, Lennon had moved to New York. One summer night, he spotted a UFO hovering outside his window. It was so close, he told an interviewer, that “he could have hit it with a brick”. 

According to a sketch Lennon drew of the visitation, it was a classic flying-saucer shape, with a ring of blinking white lights “like normal light bulbs on a billboard around its edge, and a red light on top”. The saucer was completely silent; Lennon could hear the sound of the motorway below. It hovered for a few more minutes before it zoomed off down the Hudson and “turned right at the United Nations building”. Lennon recorded the moment on the cover of his album Walls and Bridges: “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.”