John Lennon
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50 free John Lennon trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
John Lennon packed several lives into forty years: art-school rebel, founder of the Beatles, chart-topping solo artist, anti-war campaigner, author and adopted New Yorker. Few musicians have been written about as much, and fewer still left behind so many stories that sound invented but are true. This quiz follows him from a wartime childhood and a teenage skiffle group through the Beatles years, the bed-ins and protest singles, the solo albums of the 1970s, and the comeback cut short in December 1980. Along the way you will meet the family, friends, collaborators and places that shaped him. It is written for casual fans and Beatles obsessives alike. Every question comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess leaves you with a story worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1966, John Lennon set off American record burnings by calling the Beatles more popular than whom?
Jesus
Jesus was the comparison, made to a London newspaper with little reaction in Britain. Southern US radio stations organized public burnings of Beatles records after an American teen magazine reprinted it.
Q 02Which singer did Lennon join on stage in 1974, as promised if their single reached number one?
Elton John
Elton John had played piano on Whatever Gets You thru the Night, a song whose prospects its writer doubted. It became Lennon's only solo US chart-topper in his lifetime, so he turned up at Madison Square Garden.
Q 03Which honor did John Lennon return to the Queen in 1969 in protest over Biafra and Vietnam?
His MBE medal
His MBE medal went back with a note that also, perhaps jokingly, protested his single Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. The gesture changed nothing officially: only the monarch can annul the award.
Q 04In which city did John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their 1969 honeymoon bed-in for the world's press?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam hosted the first week in bed for peace, in a Hilton suite open to reporters from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. A second followed in Montreal after the couple were refused entry to the United States.
Q 05Which Beatles ballad was written to comfort John Lennon's son Julian during his parents' divorce?
Hey Jude
Hey Jude began life as Hey Jules, sketched on a drive to visit the five-year-old. Its writer swapped the name simply because Jude sounded a bit better when sung.
Q 06Which wartime prime minister was John Lennon's middle name chosen to honor when he was born in 1940?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was leading Britain through the Blitz when John Winston Lennon was born that October. In 1969 the singer added Ono as a second middle name by deed poll.
Q 07Which capital's graffiti-covered Lennon Wall became a place of free expression under communist rule?
Prague
Prague gained the wall after 1980, when an unknown artist painted a portrait of the murdered singer on it. Others kept adding to it, and the Knights of Malta, who own the wall, let the graffiti stay.
Q 08Which John Lennon home demo was finished in 2023 and released as the last Beatles song?
Now and Then
Now and Then was shelved in 1995, partly because a noisy piano kept drowning out the voice on the cassette. Machine-learning audio restoration finally lifted the vocal clear nearly three decades later.
Q 09Which make of car did John Lennon have repainted bright yellow with Romany-style motifs in 1967?
Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce delivered the Phantom V limousine in matte black; two years later it was a moving piece of psychedelic art. The couple gave it to a New York museum in 1977 for a tax deduction.
Q 10Which anti-war anthem did John Lennon record in a Montreal hotel room during his 1969 bed-in?
Give Peace a Chance
Give Peace a Chance was taped with four microphones while a room full of friends sang along. It became Lennon's first solo single, issued while the Beatles were still together.
Q 11Which John Lennon ballad, his best-selling solo single, gained Yoko Ono as a co-writer in 2017?
Imagine
Imagine drew on poems in Yoko Ono's 1964 book Grapefruit, a debt its singer admitted shortly before his death. He blamed his own selfishness for leaving her name off the credits.
Q 12Outside which Manhattan apartment building, his home since 1973, was John Lennon shot in 1980?
The Dakota
The Dakota stands at 1 West 72nd Street, and the couple had moved there looking for better security. After the shooting its entrance became a makeshift memorial for grieving fans.
Q 13Where did John Lennon first meet Yoko Ono in London in November 1966?
At an art exhibition
Q 21Which novel was Mark David Chapman reading when police arrested him for shooting John Lennon?
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye had become an obsession for the gunman, who wanted to model his life on its narrator, Holden Caulfield. He stayed at the scene with the book until officers arrived.
Q 22Which Christmas single did John Lennon and Yoko Ono record in 1971 with the Harlem Community Choir?
Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) features 30 children aged four to twelve, who sang their parts on Halloween afternoon. Its subtitle came from the peace billboards the couple had paid for two years earlier.
Q 23Which role did John Lennon adopt from 1975 to 1980, during his five-year break from releasing records?
At an art exhibition of her work in the Indica Gallery, he climbed a white ladder and used a magnifying glass to read one tiny word on the ceiling: yes. He later said that positive message won him over.
Q 14Which future bandmate did John Lennon first meet at a church fete in Woolton on 6 July 1957?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney had come to watch the host's skiffle group play the garden fete at St Peter's Church. Its leader asked him to join the band soon afterwards.
Q 15Which section of Central Park, named after a Beatles song, is a memorial to John Lennon?
Strawberry Fields
Strawberry Fields is a two-and-a-half-acre landscaped section across from the building where he lived. Yoko Ono wanted a living memorial there rather than one more statue in the park.
Q 16Which English city renamed its airport after John Lennon in 2001, 21 years after his death?
Liverpool
Liverpool put a seven-foot bronze statue of its best-known son above the check-in hall. A large Yellow Submarine sculpture now greets travelers at the airport entrance.
Q 17Which fellow art student became John Lennon's first wife in 1962, shortly before Beatlemania?
Cynthia Powell
Cynthia Powell shared lettering classes with him at college. Their manager insisted the marriage be kept a close secret so that it would not upset the band's fans.
Q 18Which album by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, out three weeks before his death, won Album of the Year?
Double Fantasy
Double Fantasy took its title from a species of freesia he spotted in a botanical garden. Its name struck him as a perfect description of his marriage.
Q 19Which instrument did John Lennon chiefly play on stage with the Beatles, alongside his lead vocals?
Rhythm guitar
Rhythm guitar was already his role at 16 in his first skiffle group. He went on to lead the Beatles as their founder and co-lead vocalist.
Q 20Which US president's administration began the attempt to deport John Lennon over his anti-war activism?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon's officials cited a 1968 cannabis conviction in London to argue the singer was ineligible to stay. The fight for permanent residency was not resolved until 1976.
Househusband
Househusband was the role he had promised to take on before his son Sean was born, and he later said he baked bread and looked after the baby. He largely withdrew from the music industry for five years.
Q 24In which British territory did John Lennon and Yoko Ono marry in a brief ceremony in March 1969?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar hosted the wedding on 20 March 1969, days before the honeymoon peace campaign. The groom retold the whole trip weeks later in a Beatles single, The Ballad of John and Yoko.
Q 25Which skiffle group did John Lennon form with school friends in 1956, the seed of the Beatles?
The Quarrymen
The Quarrymen took their name from a line in their school song. They played parties, school dances, cinemas and amateur skiffle contests before the classic line-up took shape.
Q 26Which of his mother's four sisters raised John Lennon at Mendips, her house in Woolton?
Mimi
Mimi brought him up with her husband George, a dairyman, as the couple had no children of their own. She warned him that the guitar was all very well but would never earn him a living.
Q 27Which White Album song did John Lennon write about his mother, who died in 1958 when he was 17?
Julia
Julia is the only Beatles track on which he played and sang entirely unaccompanied. It was the last song recorded for the album.
Q 28Which producer, hired to finish the Beatles' Let It Be, co-produced John Lennon's early solo albums?
Phil Spector
Phil Spector could not be reached before the 1970 sessions began, so the singer's manager took out an advertisement in Billboard magazine asking him to get in touch.
Q 29Which personal assistant became John Lennon's partner during his 1973–75 separation from Yoko Ono?
May Pang
May Pang had also worked for the couple as a production coordinator. The relationship lasted more than 18 months, a stretch he later called his Lost Weekend.
Q 30Which David Bowie US number one did John Lennon co-write and sing backing vocals on in 1975?
Fame
Fame was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York and became Bowie's first number one in the United States. Bowie called his guest the energy and inspiration behind it.