Out to buy: On DVD

John Lennon died a year before the launch of MTV in 1981. So how do you upgrade his legacy to meet the high-tech demands of the DVD era? You get Yoko Ono to trawl her extensive archive and deploy modern digital techniques to cut and paste ancient celluloid into a bunch of sharp new videos to accompany 20 of Lennon’s greatest songs.

Those who still ludicrously believe that Ono is the devil woman who broke up the Beatles will probably cry “sacrilege”. More open minds will concede that she has done an impressive job: the new videos accompanying Working Class Hero, Mother and Happy Xmas (War is Over) are particularly moving. The sombre film of Lennon performing Imagine at a white grand piano in the whitened-out ballroom of his Tittenhurst mansion is familiar enough, as is the stirring Top of the Pops film of Instant Karma! But both have been given stunning makeovers via the wonders of digital transfer.

There’s a lot of tear-jerking footage of the vigils that followed Lennon’s untimely death and a tendency towards sentimentality in the home movies of John and Yoko playing happy families with their son Sean. Yet even that’s forgivable under the circumstances.



DVD extras

A handful of live performances that includes his final appearance on stage, some terrific animations of his comic drawings that he surely would have applauded, and a photo gallery.

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