My Mummy's Dead

"My Mummy's Dead" is the closing song on the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon. The song was also released on a Mexican EP that also contained "Mother", "Isolation" and "Look at Me".

Writing

It is one of the songs Lennon wrote concerning his mother, along with "

Unlike the primal screams on "Mother", the opening song on Plastic Ono Band, "My Mummy's Dead" ends the album with John singing without emotion with a monotone delivery.^[3] Author John Blaney suggests that Lennon's delivery "evokes a sense of Lennon's long-held emptiness".^[3] Music critic Johnny Rogan finds that the song "captures the menace of childhood fears through adult remembrance in a most disturbing fashion".^[2] Rock journalist Paul Du Noyer claims that the "blankness of John's delivery" makes the song one of the scariest and most chilling of Lennon's songs, despite being one of the simplest.^[1] Lennon himself stated that the plain, short, childlike lyrics are due to him trying to write the song as a form of haiku.^[1][2][3]

Recording

Two takes of "My Mummy's Dead" were recorded in

Authors Ben Urish and Ken Bielen describe "My Mummy's Dead" as "brief but powerful", stating that it produces a "memorable and chilling" effect and appropriately ends John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by "capturing the essence of psychological pain and intimating at its persistence".[7] Blaney finds the song to be "a concise expression of Lennon's primal experience".^[3] Music critic Wilfrid Mellers describes it as a "sickening cross between nursery rhyme...and TV commercial jingle" that takes us back to childhood in a "disabused and disillusioned" fashion.^[4]

Mellers sees Lennon's later song "

• John Lennon – vocals, acoustic guitar

Cover versions

The song was covered by The Minus 5 on The Lonesome Death of Buck McCoy.^[8]

References