On 19 October, Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones will celebrate as his band is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. But long before Foreigner hit big in the ’70s and ’80s with iconic songs such as Cold As Ice, Hot Blooded, Waiting For a Girl Like You and the worldwide number one I Want To Know What Love Is, Mick befriended The Beatles in the ’60s when he was working as backing musician for French rocker Johnny Hallyday. And this led to a long association with John Lennon.
As Mick recalled to Outlaw magazine in 2019: “The Beatles played at the Olympia in Paris in 1964, and also on the bill was the singer I was backing, Sylvie Vartan, who became Johnny Hallyday’s wife.
“One night we did our thing, the curtain came down, and as we were changing over on the stage for The Beatles to go on, John Lennon was running and we almost bumped into each other and my guitar swung round and fell to the floor.
"I said, ‘Oh f*ck!’ I was cursing away, and John came up behind me and said, ‘Hey lad, I didn’t know you were English! Come and have a bevvy with the boys afterwards!’ So I went back with them to their hotel, and they ended up taking me under their wing for a week.”
He described the excitement of witnessing Beatlemania at its height.
“I was living A Hard Day’s Night – swanning around Paris with The Beatles, screaming girls everywhere they went. And I would take them out to the hot R&B clubs in Paris. It was a crazy few days.”
In the late ’70s Mick had an apartment in New York adjacent to the Dakota Building, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono were living.
“I saw Yoko more than John,” he recalled. “They were in their own kind of world. I’d seen John here and there in studios. But our kids used to play together, my stepson Mark [Ronson] and John’s son Sean. They hung out a lot at our place, getting up to mischief. I had to straighten them out a few times.”
On December 8, 1980, the day John Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota, Mick was just a short distance away, recording with Foreigner at Electric Lady studios.
As he remembered: “We were working on a song called Woman In Black [from the album 4]. That was sort of eerie. We were right in the middle of doing vocals, and somebody rushed in an announced the sad news. I’ll always remember that.”
Mick described Lennon’s death as a devastating loss.
“John was the one who had invited me to have a drink with The Beatles,” he said, “so to me he was special. And he had a big influence on me as a songwriter. I can’t say I favoured one or the other, Paul [McCartney] and John – they were both unique. I was inspired by their music, as so many other people were too. But for me, there was something stronger in there. John’s death had a huge effect on me.”
