Named after the Liverpool street where John Lennon spent his formative years with Aunt Mimi, the 1986 posthumous collection brought together recordings from two very different periods of his solo career. With Yoko Ono overseeing the release and Andy Warhol supplying the artwork, Menlove Ave. remains one of the more personal chapters in Lennon’s posthumous catalogue.
John Lennon’s Menlove Ave. turns 40 in 2026, bringing renewed attention to an unusual posthumous album that connected the music of his mid-1970s solo career with the Liverpool childhood that shaped him.
Released in the United States on 27 October 1986 and in the United Kingdom on 5 November 1986, Menlove Ave. was assembled from previously unreleased recordings, alternate performances and rehearsal material. Supervised by Yoko Ono, the collection drew primarily from the sessions surrounding Rock ‘n’ Roll and Walls and Bridges, two albums that documented very different sides of Lennon during the 1970s.
Its title carried a more personal meaning than most retrospective compilations. Menlove Avenue was the Liverpool road where Lennon grew up, at 251 Menlove Avenue, the house known as Mendips. It was there that Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George from the age of five, after his mother Julia arranged for him to be raised by her sister.
The house became an important part of Lennon’s personal history. Mimi provided the stable domestic environment that was largely absent from his early family life, while the surrounding neighbourhood became the setting for his formative years before Beatlemania transformed him into an international figure.
The address also connects directly to the beginnings of The Beatles. Lennon attended Quarry Bank School and became involved in the Liverpool music scene before meeting Paul McCartney at the Woolton village fete in July 1957. That meeting would eventually change popular music.
Yoko Ono later secured the future of Mendips by purchasing the property in 2002 and donating it to the National Trust. The organisation restored the house to reflect its 1950s appearance, allowing visitors to experience the domestic surroundings of Lennon’s childhood.
The choice of Menlove Ave. for the album title therefore placed the recordings within a much larger personal story. It was a collection of unfinished business from Lennon’s recording career, named after the place where his life as a musician had yet to begin.
The album’s ten tracks draw on different stages of Lennon’s solo recording history.
The opening material comes largely from the Rock ‘n’ Roll sessions of late 1973, a difficult recording period involving producer Phil Spector. Lennon had originally intended to record an album of the rock and roll songs that had influenced him as a teenager. The sessions became complicated by Spector’s unpredictable behaviour and the eventual disappearance of the original session tapes.
The project was eventually completed with Lennon taking control of the recordings, producing the album himself and releasing Rock ‘n’ Roll in February 1975.
Menlove Ave. revisited that period with material that included Here We Go Again, co-written by Lennon and Spector, Rosie Hamlin’s Angel Baby, Arthur Crudup’s Since My Baby Left Me and Spector’s To Know Her Is To Love Her. Rock ‘n’ Roll People, recorded during the earlier Mind Games period, provided another connection to Lennon’s interest in the music that had first inspired him.
The second side moved into the world of Walls and Bridges, recorded in 1974 during Lennon’s separation from Ono.
The rehearsal performances of Steel and Glass, Scared, Old Dirt Road, Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out) and Bless You offered a different perspective on the songs. Rather than presenting the finished studio recordings, the material revealed Lennon working through the arrangements and performances.
The musicians involved in these later recordings included Jesse Ed Davis on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Jim Keltner on drums. Lennon handled the lead vocals and contributed guitar and piano.
The contrast between the two sides gives Menlove Ave. its character. One looks back towards the American rock and roll records that had shaped Lennon as a teenager. The other documents a more introspective songwriter working through the material that would become one of his most personal 1970s albums.
Ono’s liner notes provided the clearest explanation of why the collection was given its particular identity. She recognised that the recordings reflected two different musical influences in Lennon’s life: the American rock and roll that inspired him to become a musician and the British cultural environment in which he was raised.
She wrote, “John’s American rock roots, Elvis, Fats Domino, and Phil Spector are evident in these tracks. But what I hear in John’s voice are the other roots of the boy who grew up in Liverpool, listening to Greensleeves, BBC Radio and Tessie O’Shea.”
It was an important distinction. Lennon had become one of the most influential figures in American and British popular music, but his musical imagination was formed long before The Beatles, in a Liverpool household where radio, records and popular entertainment provided an escape into another world.
The album artwork added another significant name to the project. Artist Andy Warhol was responsible for the Lennon portrait used on the original release. Warhol and Lennon had occupied different corners of the same cultural universe, with both becoming major figures in their respective disciplines. The striking portrait gave the collection a visual identity that separated it from a conventional archive release.
Commercially, Menlove Ave. had a relatively modest reception. It failed to enter the UK album chart and reached number 127 on the American Billboard chart. Its limited promotion contributed to its lack of commercial impact, particularly when compared with the attention surrounding earlier posthumous releases such as Milk and Honey.
The album nevertheless preserved material that offered an alternative perspective on Lennon’s recording career. Some of the Rock ‘n’ Roll session selections subsequently appeared as bonus tracks on the 2004 remastered edition of that album. Here We Go Again also found an audience through the 2006 soundtrack to The U.S. vs. John Lennon and the 2010 box set Gimme Some Truth.
That later circulation meant parts of Menlove Ave. continued to reach listeners beyond the original 1986 release, even as the album itself remained a less familiar entry in the Lennon discography.
Forty years on, its significance is not that it contains a lost masterpiece or changes the accepted history of John Lennon. It is the way the collection brings together two important aspects of his life: the young Liverpool boy discovering the music that would define him, and the established songwriter revisiting the sounds and emotions that had shaped his career.
The name Menlove Ave. makes that connection explicit. Before the worldwide fame, the studio experiments and the extraordinary cultural influence, there was a house in Woolton, a young boy being raised by Aunt Mimi and a future musician discovering rock and roll.
That is the history sitting behind this particular Lennon album.
John Lennon – Menlove Ave. (1986)
Side One
1. Here We Go Again (John Lennon, Phil Spector) – 4:50
2. Rock ‘n’ Roll People (John Lennon) – 4:22
3. Angel Baby (Rosie Hamlin) – 3:43
4. Since My Baby Left Me (Arthur Crudup) – 3:48
5. To Know Her Is To Love Her (Phil Spector) – 4:38
Side Two
6. Steel and Glass (John Lennon) – 4:11
7. Scared (John Lennon) – 4:19
8. Old Dirt Road (John Lennon, Harry Nilsson) – 3:54
9. Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out) (John Lennon) – 4:30
10. Bless You (John Lennon) – 4:04
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