I remember on a beach in Nassau during the making of the film Help, John Lennon looking at me demonically.
Now as time passes you wonder was John Lennon a bull looking for China shops, footing through the East Side in those embarrassingly tight jeans. In conversation he became a kind of predatory Eagle, or a Hawk who went direct for the eyes rather than forage for the more nutritious liver.
We recall him now staring confrontationaly from behind those smoky glasses with his mentor Yoko as ever by his side. There he was, a child man beside her. Oh Yoko, Oh Yoko.
He was gloriously incapable of time wasting circumspection, he became a sermonising public solipsist, a Universalist, (Imagine),
Obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin
yet equally convinced of a redemptive universe which has delivered him safe and sound into the arms of Yoko Ono, who served his purposes in serving her own. The other Beatles may have felt that he, (John) was the groom stripped bare by his suitor (Yoko).
His union with Yoko was extraordinarily stagey
and public. And ‘the public’ – that’s us – was part of the baggage. Yet this clever man did profit from his
relationship with Yoko Ono,
But a confused figure was Lennon waging several wars at once and taking no prisoners.
He was a medium to al dente subversive and when in 1966, the press got hold of Lennon’s ‘bigger than Jesus’ remark, he became someone
whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the US of A. In the UK – he rose in our esteem.
Yes, in good old blighty he was an attractive figure and a model of frankness. 'Good on yer John.'
Obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin
yet equally convinced of a redemptive universe which has delivered him safe and sound into the arms of Yoko Ono, who served his purposes in serving her own. The other Beatles may have felt that he, (John) was the groom stripped bare by his suitor (Yoko).
His union with Yoko was extraordinarily stagey
and public. And ‘the public’ – that’s us – was part of the baggage. Yet this clever man did profit from his
relationship with Yoko Ono,
But a confused figure was Lennon waging several wars at once and taking no prisoners.
He was a medium to al dente subversive and when in 1966, the press got hold of Lennon’s ‘bigger than Jesus’ remark, he became someone
whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the US of A. In the UK – he rose in our esteem.
Yes, in good old blighty he was an attractive figure and a model of frankness. 'Good on yer John.'
Around this hazy memory Paul, lovable Paul, who last said something of interest circa late 60s. And the Harpo Marxian figure of Ringo, ever affable, ever accommodating with his know-nothing bonhomie, a trait which could be said of all the Beatles.
And George his spirituality spiced with dashes of venom against the 'other two'. They truly were a group in need of group therapy.
Looking back now, as Jeremy Hardy points out, in our comforting knowingness, the 60s were when America found an R and B too funky for its clean earlobes but not when re-synthesised by those four white boys, the Beatles who came ricocheting out of Hamburg's Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA.
And Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, under the tutelage of Yoko, used the idiom of Art and Politics and mixed them with feminism to become, in a swift series of transmogrifications, a cynic who spoke for Utopian socialism,
He was a kind of roughneck who pleaded for peace, an anti-sexist sex symbol.
Sadly self-exiled in the USA which idolised him - he was treated to that great nation’s highest reward for achievement – assassination.
Sic transit gloria mundi
(there passes the glory of the world)
Strange, very strange.
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