(Just Like) Starting Over

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on “(Just Like) Starting Over,” the lead single from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1980 album Double Fantasy, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know why this one still lands like a letter from an old friend. It is the sound of a man who had stepped away from the business for five years, raised a son, patched things up at home, and then walked back into a New York studio with a grin and a Fender Rhodes under his fingers. Zoo Freaks have been requesting it for years, and the reason is simple. It does not lecture. It invites you back in.

The song did not arrive fully dressed. Lennon had been knocking around pieces of it at the Dakota in the late seventies, first under the working title “My Life,” then “Don’t Be Crazy,” then “The Worst is Over.” The finished version came together while he was on a sailing trip and a holiday in Bermuda in the summer of 1980. He later told interviewers that “Starting Over” and “Cleanup Time” were written on the run after the heavier writing was done, the fun after the work. Producer Jack Douglas has told the story more than once. On the last day of rehearsals at the apartment, as the band was heading for the door, Lennon sat down at the Rhodes by the entrance and said they had not heard this one yet. Douglas heard a hit and told him they would cut it first, so he could fall into the groove with the players. The basic track went down at the Hit Factory in early August 1980, with Earl Slick on guitar, Tony Levin on bass, and Andy Newmark on drums. Bassist Tony Levin later said Lennon seemed excited and assured, though a tape of the rundown still carries a little nervous energy. That tracks. Five years off the clock will do that to anybody.

He called the vocal his Elvis Orbison voice, tongue in cheek, a born-again rocker going back to the records he knew. On the stripped-down mix released years later you can hear him dedicate the take: this one’s for Gene, and Eddie, and Elvis, and Buddy. Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly. In his last long interview, given at the Dakota on the day he died, he put it plainly. All through the taping he was doing Elvis Orbison, the way Dylan had leaned into Nashville Skyline, except Lennon had no Nashville. He was from Liverpool, so he went back to Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Sun crowd. The little chiming bell that opens the record is Yoko’s wishing bell. Lennon said he put it there on purpose, to show the long trip from the heavy church bell that opens “Mother” on Plastic Ono Band to this lighter restart. Same man, different weather.

The title picked up its parentheses for a practical reason. Dolly Parton had a country hit that year called “Starting Over Again,” so “(Just Like)” got bolted on before release. The single, backed with Yoko’s “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” came out in late October 1980 as the first new Lennon and Ono record since 1975. He did not pick it because he thought it was the deepest cut on the album. He picked it because it was the right handshake after a long absence. He told people he had come back from where he knew best, unpretentious, no experiments, happy to do it the way he used to. “We’re born-again rockers, and we’re starting over.” Yoko has said they knew it would be the first single, and that hearing it later still catches in her throat, because they really believed they were starting over.

Double Fantasy itself was framed as a heart play, a dialogue between the two of them, not a victory lap. In that same final interview Lennon said the songs were diaries, not a portrait of a perfect couple. They had doubts. They were trying. He pictured himself singing to the people who had grown up with him: here I am, how are you, how’s the relationship, wasn’t the seventies a drag, let’s make something of what comes next. The album title came from a flower. Calling from Bermuda, he told Yoko he had seen a sign in a garden for a freesia called Double Fantasy, and that was the name. The record went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. The single reached the top of the charts after he was gone, which is a hard fact to set next to a song this warm, but the warmth is what he left in the grooves.

None of that restart makes sense unless you go back to a Liverpool schoolboy who could not leave the radio alone. John Lennon was born in 1940 and raised mostly by his Aunt Mimi on Menlove Avenue. Mimi was no pushover, but she finally bought him a guitar, the story goes for about seventeen pounds, from a shop in town, because the Elvis fever would not quit. In 1956, in the middle of the British skiffle boom, he pulled together a loose gang of Quarry Bank High School friends and called them the Quarrymen, after a line in the school song. Washboards, tea-chest bass, cheap guitars, church halls. One of the first gigs was at St Barnabas, and his mother Julia turned up to cheer. The turn that still gets told on this station happened on 6 July 1957 at the St Peter’s Church fete in Woolton. A friend, Ivan Vaughan, brought along a younger kid named Paul McCartney. After the set Paul picked up a guitar, knew the words, could tune the thing, and played a little Eddie Cochran. Lennon was impressed enough, and careful enough of his own status, to invite him in a few days later. George Harrison followed. The name changed, the suits changed, the hair changed, and the Quarrymen became the band that rewired the decade.

That is the long thread in this song. The boy who started a skiffle group because he wanted to sound like the Americans on the records was, at forty, still tipping his hat to Gene, Eddie, Elvis, and Buddy, and still writing a plain love song about trying again. If you want the paper trail, the estate keeps the record straight at johnlennon.com, where the single page carries his Bermuda notes and Yoko’s recollection, and the Double Fantasy album page lays out the heart-play credits. The same office runs the verified pages on Facebook, Instagram, and X, posting in his words and marking the Hit Factory days that became this album. Fans who want the longer conversation gather with Beatlefan, the magazine that has covered his solo work since the seventies, and in The Beatles Official Fan Group. Spin it again if you want. The bell at the top is a wish, and the man meant it.