Sean steps out of the shadows

Oct 12 2006 By Kate Mansey, Liverpool Echo

In 1998 he released his album Into The Sun.

But it’s only now, after an eight-year hiatus from the recording industry, that he’s releasing his second record.

Entitled Friendly Fire the album was not designed, Sean says, to win chart success.

After stepping away from the limelight for so long, save for paparazzi photographs of him with his ex-girlfriend Lizzie Jagger, Sean is back under the scrutiny of critics and commentators.

He says: “The process of promoting myself is not tortuous, it’s not a terrible thing, it’s not impossible, but it is something that makes me very uncomfortable.

“I don’t even think of myself as having that much commercial potential anyway – I’m not playing that kind of game.”

Speaking slowly and deliberately as if trying to choose the best words to explain what he means, Sean talks of what it’s like to have John Lennon as your dad and Yoko Ono as your ‘mom’.

A lot of people may see them as very big shadows to grow up in.

“I honestly don’t feel pressure to be like my dad. I don’t know how to explain it – the only time I encounter people’s prejudices against me is when I’m reading some critic who can’t get past the idea that I’m Lennon’s son.

“But in terms of my daily life of writing and playing music, that’s just what I do, I don’t feel pressure to live up to something.”

As a young child Sean, born and raised in America during his early life before attending school in Switzerland, says he had no real knowledge about his father’s home city.

His mother Yoko first took him to Liverpool in the 1980s to see the place where his father’s story – one of the greatest tales in musical history – all began.