The 1981 song Jeff Lynne wrote as a goodbye to John Lennon: “He still exists”

faroutmagazine.co.uk

The 1981 song Jeff Lynne wrote as a goodbye to John Lennon: “He still exists”

Tim Coffman

Far Out Magazine

Thu 20 August 2026

Credit: Far Out / Jeff Lynne

You aren’t going to find a bigger Beatles fan on this Earth than Jeff Lynne.

The guy has seen the Fab Four as one of his heroes for as long as he’s been playing music, and even though he has delivered some of the greatest pop albums of the 1970s with ELO, there’s a good chance that he knows the subtle bits of Beatles songs that not even Paul McCartney would bother figuring out these days. He’s always been keen on making something that could measure up to them, but that didn’t prepare him when he needed to say goodbye to the people who built his childhood memories.

If we’re being completely honest here, though, Lynne has had more than his fill of great moments with his favourite band. The thought of anyone being able to step into the studio and work on what would become the final Beatles tracks with the surviving members standing in the room with him was already heavy enough for him, but George Harrison was one of the few people that he could call a friend from around that time.

It wasn’t easy for him to shoehorn his way into having a stop at the Fab table, but there were more than enough chairs around for him at Harrison’s place. He got to the point where he could know exactly what Harrison was looking for every single time he worked on one of his records, and even if not every one of their songs together became a hit, that wasn’t the point. They were playing what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.

In fact, that same mentality is one of the reasons why John Lennon was so taken with some of their songs as well. ‘Showdown’ was a tune he counted among his favourites of the year when it first came out, and there were more than a few times when he felt that Lynne was carrying on what The Beatles had started in terms of studio tampering. So when Lennon was assassinated in 1980, it hit Lynne especially hard.

Here was one of the leading forces in his youth, and to see him taken so soon was one of the worst things that anyone could have seen. This was the equivalent of losing a family member for most Fab fans, but Lynne felt that the only way to do justice to Lennon was to celebrate how he lived whenever he worked on a song. And without needing much research, Lynne turned ‘21st Century Man’ into the kind of tribute that only he could deliver.

It still has all of the ELO bells and whistles, but Lynne emphasised that the whole tune was describing the kind of person that Lennon would be if he were a time traveller, saying, “He’s listening in the present time, but he still exists in the other time. And it also is that if he could get back to 1981 he’d be like the biggest celebrity ever known ’cause he’d know all this stuff that nobody else knew.”

And since The Beatles Anthology was still firmly in people’s minds, it was almost like Lennon was the kind of friend that they still loved having around when Lynne talked about him. The world was already nostalgic for him, so having a song all about him looking down on us and seeing what the next generation is usually the way that most fans would like to remember him these days.

But that only begs one question: why can’t there be more songs written like this about the best musicians that ever lived? I mean, if Lennon were a time traveller who is looking through different points in history and seeing what the world is like, can’t there be someone doing the exact same thing with someone like David Bowie?