It took me a long time to understand what it was about the domestically content, thirtysomething John Lennon that got up critical noses. In 1980, aged 11 and with little Beatle baggage to bring to Lennon’s pledges of devotion to Yoko, I persuaded my mother to let me buy
(Just Like) Starting Over. It didn’t matter to me that the woman on the sleeve was said to have broken up the Beatles, because I barely knew who the Beatles were. But sometimes a song can fast-track you to a feeling that you have yet to experience first hand. Whatever received wisdom would like to think,
(Just Like) Starting Over was one of those songs and still is.
So when Mike Read imparted the terrible news on his Radio One breakfast show, I didn’t need to know anything more than (Just Like) Starting Over to feel a little of the world’s grief.
Like most people of my generation, my relationship with John Lennon started with his death. His story was one I quickly traced backwards from that song: the subsequent chart ascent of Woman and Happy Christmas (War is Over); the radio ubiquity of Give Peace a Chance and the January 1981 reissue of Imagine.
Put all those songs together — along with, perhaps, All You Need is Love — and you’ve got the composite of the über-hippy world citizen, socio-politically ahead of his time, that still governs people’s perceptions of Lennon 25 years after his death. If Lennon was a brand, these later songs would almost certainly represent its core values.
However, according to Fred Rowan, chairman and CEO of the American baby apparel conglomerate Carters, it’s inappropriate to talk about “branding” in the case of the Lennon imprint. In 1998, shortly after securing from Yoko Ono the rights to use Lennon’s name in connection with a range of “room décor items and related accessories for children newborn to age six”, Rowan explained: “We are marketing a lifestyle, one based on imagination and creativity.” And certainly some could argue that it does take imagination to create a multimillion-pound merchandising line out of a load of old doodles that Lennon left knocking around in his pad.
Should we mind, though? Isn’t it the fate of all icons — that they are moulded in the selective memory of those who survive them? Whatever excesses of sentimentality he has succumbed to in his solo work, it’s to Paul McCartney’s credit that his view of Lennon has never yielded to the airbrush of hindsight. As early as 1985 McCartney bravely averred that “he could be a manoeuvring swine, which no one ever realised. Now since his death he’s become Martin Luther Lennon, but that wasn’t him either, he wasn’t some sort of holy saint.”
Of course, the mythical John Lennon is a far less interesting person than the one you can find by listening to his records, or reading old interviews. It’s the real, vital, slightly dodgy Lennon of How do You Sleep? and Woman is the Nigger of the World you’ll hear if you tune in to Radio 4’s Archive Hour tomorrow. Edited from hours of hitherto unaired interviews with Rolling Stone magazine’s co-founder Jann Wenner shortly after the Beatles broke up, this is Lennon as a tangle of complicated contradictions. His comments on George Harrison’s songwriting border on unforgivable arrogance. Harrison, he says, should have counted himself lucky to be an a band with two great songwriters. McCartney’s eponymous solo debut is unfairly dismissed as “crap”.
And yet he isn’t unlikeable. The longer you listen, the more pronounced his vulnerability. He concedes that his interest in other people’s work is aroused only “if they’re a danger to me” — explaining why his post-Beatle feud with McCartney was by far the most vituperative of his career.
Lennon is at his best, however, with his witheringly incisive portrayal of the Rolling Stones: “I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren’t. But they are not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise, never were. Now [Mick Jagger’s] in his old age, and he’s beginning to knock us.
“I resent it, because even his second f****** record, we wrote it for him. Mick said: ‘Peace made money.’ We didn’t make any money from peace.”
Wouldn’t Lennon have allowed himself a quiet chuckle of vindication if you showed him a crystal ball of the Stones, 35 years later — a Volkswagen-selling, AmEx- sponsored stadium-packing “legacy brand” of absolutely no artistic consequence? He almost certainly would, until you took him to www.babiesrus.com, with its John Lennon Elephant Blankie, John Lennon sports bottle and John Lennon Musical Bunny — the soothing strains of Imagine are yours for a tug on the string hanging from its backside. From being a product of his generation, Lennon has become a product for a generation that barely remembers him.
In truth, it was happening before Yoko Ono — trading name: Bag One Inc. — sought to keep his memory alive by assenting to a series of carefully chosen merchandising deals. It’s not surprising that Lennon was the favourite Beatle of Britpop, with its proletarian pretensions and faux-inclusivity. Liam Gallagher incessantly referenced him as the soul of the Fabs. The Oasis frontman even went as far as to name his son Lennon — and yet, pressed by his brother in an interview to match famous Lennon songs to albums, Liam barely knew where to start. Did it matter? Perhaps not.
In 2000, when I had occasion to interview Richard Ashcroft, his appraisal of celebrity was: “You’ve got a choice. You can either embrace the working-class hero side, fulfil it and try and make it worthwhile — or you can pretend you’re invisible.” Ashcroft’s lexicon had absorbed a phrase that — before Lennon’s use of it — had no wide useage, and he didn’t even appear to have noticed. That Lennon had written Working-Class Hero was enough to crown him as one.
But whatever fuelled the inarticulate speech of his heart, it wasn’t his lack of social status. Lennon was the only Beatle to grow up in, as he described it, a semi with a small garden “and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around”. Nevertheless, last month a new Ono-compiled CD was issued to tie in with the anniversary of his death. Its title was Working-Class Hero.
In calling the album that, at least Ono was obliged to include the track. Which leads you to wonder, what exactly is she hearing when her husband’s tirade spews out of the speakers? How does she reconcile a song about being institutionally broken and co-opted into the status quo with the enterprises to which she consents on his behalf?
Quite easily, it would seem. On the website of the Nike subsidiary Converse, a blue sky materialises, rather like the one on the sleeve of the Imagine album. Hanging suspended in the middle is a single white trainer.
“What do your shoes say to the world?” runs the accompanying blurb. “In this case, they say you believe in peace. No matter where you go, the John Lennon Peace Chuck needs no translation. It transcends global, cultural and socio-economic boundaries and represents the pursuit of individuality and self-expression.”
Yours for $60, your Lennon trainers bear an imprint of another line drawing obtained from Yoko Ono’s personal archive, in which the former Fab depicts his naked self locked in embrace with the planet. Whatever the pursuit of individuality and self- expression amounts to, it’s probably safe to assume that it doesn’t extend to imagining no possessions.
Lennon: the Wenner Tapes, Radio 4, tomorrow (8pm)
