John Lennon Was ‘Agonized’ With Guilt Over ‘Fifth Beatle’ Stuart Sutcliffe’s Death

John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe met at art school and came up with the name for The Beatles together. The pair were very close friends and maintained their relationship after Sutcliffe left the band. In 1962, while The Beatles were playing in Hamburg, Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage. Lennon was devastated by his friend’s death and, according to his first wife, felt guilty about it.

John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe met at the Liverpool College of Art

Sutcliffe and Lennon met at the Liverpool College of Art, where Sutcliffe was studying as an exceptionally talented painter. He helped Lennon with his painting courses, and Lennon taught him about music. While Sutcliffe didn’t know much about music, he used the money he earned selling a painting to buy a guitar and joined Lennon’s band alongside Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

Lennon and Sutcliffe moved in together and came up with the band’s name. They wanted to reference the Beat Generation and Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets. The result was The Beatles, a name that stuck even after Sutcliffe left the band. 

He felt guilt over his death

In 1961, Sutcliffe was kicked in the head during a fight. Not long after, he left the band to pursue a career as a painter. He began complaining of worsening headaches, and on April 10, 1962, he died of a brain hemorrhage.

When Sutcliffe’s girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, broke the news to the band, she said that Lennon went into “hysterics.”

“We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once,” she said, per The New Yorker. “I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.”

Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, said that he had a difficult time talking about Sutcliffe’s death. When he did discuss it with her, though, he said he had an overwhelming sense of grief about it.

“He found it so hard to talk about, or show, his true feelings,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Later he talked to me sometimes about Stuart and about the awful sense of loss and guilt he felt. He agonized over why he had lived and Stuart had died, and whether there was anything he could have done. But these glimpses of his real feelings were rare. Most of the time he kept it all deep inside himself. In that letter he also told me that he had lost his voice — perhaps a symptom of unexpressed grief.”

John Lennon referenced Stuart Sutcliffe in ‘In My Life’

Lennon did not often discuss Sutcliffe, but he did incorporate his friend into his music. Sutcliffe is one of the people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Lennon reportedly referenced his old friend in the song “In My Life.”

“All these places have their moments/With lovers and friends I still can recall/Some are dead and some are living/In my life I’ve loved them all.”