JOHN LENNON did his bit for world peace by penning antiwar ballads and indulging in public “bed-ins” with Yoko Ono.

Now George Michael has drawn inspiration from the late Beatle and plans to take the piano on which Lennon wrote Imagine on a “tragedy tour” of Britain to protest against violence.

The pop singer wants to send out a symbolic message of love and harmony by placing the piano close to the four sites in London where the 7/7 suicide bombers struck two years ago.

The Steinway upright could also appear at the spot in Eltham, southeast London, where Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager, was murdered by racists, and in the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, central London, where a nail bomb exploded in a fatal homophobic attack in 1999.

At each site, passers-by will be encouraged to play Imagine or other songs on the piano which might have a personal poignancy.

The idea for the tour came from Michael, 44, who bought the piano at auction for £1.5m, and Kenny Goss, his long-term boyfriend.

Caroline True, a music video producer and the tour’s creative director, said: “We’d like to take it everywhere we possibly can. Our intention is to go to places in England [next year] where bad things have happened.”

While many applaud the tour as a powerful artistic statement, some critics accuse Michael - whose stage show has featured an unsubtle attack on George W Bush for the Iraq war - of being naive and intruding on victims’ grief.

The touring piano - complete with cigarette burns - has already caused controversy. It appeared at Waco, Texas, where 80 members of a religious cult died in a blaze following a stand-off with police, and outside a prison on the day a convicted murderer was executed.

Administrators at Columbine high school near Denver, where two students killed 13 others in a shooting spree in 1999, refused to have it on their campus.

One of Lennon’s most eye-catching stunts to promote world peace involved him lying in bed with Ono in front of the world’s cameras during their honeymoon at the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam in 1969. Lennon bought the Steinway upright in 1970 and wrote Imagine a year later at his Tittenhurst Park home in Berkshire. The song originally got to No 6 in Britain, but became a No 1 after Lennon’s death in 1980. Michael, a multi-millionaire, acquired the piano at auction in 2000, reportedly outbidding Robbie Williams and Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis.

Last year Goss decided to take the instrument to his gallery in Dallas, Texas, where it stood incongruously alongside an exhibition of war photography.

“It seemed like the obvious thing to do to take the piano and put it in among these photographs of carnage and war and use the piano as a symbol of peace,” said True. “That’s really how the whole tour came about.”

Since then it has appeared outside the Ford Theatre in Washington, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; at the Memphis motel - now a museum - where Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968; and at Virginia Tech, where 32 students were massacred in April.

There are plans to take the piano to New York later this year and to place it near ground zero, in memory of 9/11, and also outside the Dakota building in Manhattan where Lennon was assassinated.

Additional reporting: Joe Lauria

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