John Lennon

A million years ago I produced and directed the music for an American television film rather unimaginatively entitled "John and Yoko - a love Story". Sitting in an edit room at Abbey Road Studios transferring actual Beatles master tapes,(and what a lot of edits there were) was an existential experience. As I recall, the film was quite good, although, like most Lennon bio-pieces it tended not to dwell on Lennon's undoubted darker side - although it didn't airbrush his "lost weekend" with May Pang and a gun toting Phil Spector in California.

Like most people of my generation, I can remember what I was doing when Lennon was shot as clearly as I can remember, (as young child!), Kennedy's demise. Watching the documentary "The US v John Lennon" last Friday served to underline the importance of a man who used his fame to promote his cogent but naive theories on world peace. Cynics then were dismissive,as they now are of our honorary Irish knights Geldorf and Bono. True, Lennon didn't raise millions for a starving third world, but his clarion call for a simple objective, whether from a bed in Amsterdam or a concert in Ann Arbor, resonates down the years. The urgent simplicity of songs like "John Sinclair," performed at Ann Arbor, masked a musical sophistication that is often overlooked. The cynics can hardly gainsay the romantic eloquence of "Beautiful Boy" or the power of the four bars of "Give Peace a Chance", which became the anthem for the international peace movement.

Lennon's opposition to the Vietnam war was focused enough to bring him to the unwelcome attention of J. Edgar Hoover, the spiritual guide to the present gang of neo-cons who run the White House, and thus the world. Where is today's John Lennon, someone driven enough to be a fool to fight the foolishness?