John lennon

When the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar first met David Bowie, he didn’t think a man could turn a whiter shade of pale. The singer looked emaciated; his complexion teetered on translucency, and weighing only 95 pounds, the only signs of life were a pulse and a mop of orange hair. It was the mid-Seventies, and Bowie was touring America deep in the throes of addiction — the “darkest years” of his life — surviving on a paltry diet of red peppers, cigarettes, milk and cocaine. Yet somehow, through the haze of these drug-fueled years, Bowie underwent a chameleonic reinvention of self and sound — and finally broke America. Bowie had cast a sheen of suspicion over America as an aspiring artist, even admitting to hating it initially.

In the Sixties, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones  — even if it was more of a hype battle dreamt up by their respective publicity departments — meant that whenever one band released an album or single, the other was never too far behind. Sometimes, they even explicitly referenced their competitor’s work; the Stones’s 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request was “inspired” by the Beatles’s LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released earlier that year. Yet after the Beatles split up in 1970, the rivalry seemed to be at an end, and the deaths of John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison in 2001 apparently put paid to any possibility of the Liverpudlian band continuing in any form. Oh, how wrong we were.

There's a new film out about the Beatles. It's about them being in the studio doing stuff that you do in studios. It's really good. Have you heard about it? Of course you have. I am referring to the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Get Back, Peter Jackson's reanimation of the Beatle Band’s last days in the bunker. It's a bit like Downfall, but without Hitler. As a middle-aged doctor of rock 'n' roll, I am required to take the cultural temperature of what we now call Heritage Rock. This is the music that middle-aged (and rising) men like when they can't keep up with young people’s music anymore. Think Neil Young, and that pretty much covers it. And when Neil Young is not re-releasing live albums from his pomp, then think the Beatles.

If you’re a diehard Beatles fan, it’s been a pricy year. And it’s going to get much worse. Within the last 12 months, those of us unable to resist new or repackaged product from John, Paul, George and Ringo have wrestled with sense and reason over whether to splash out on one of the numerous limited-edition, pre-release colored vinyl copies of McCartney III, the mega-box set reissue of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band from 1970 or even, dear old Ringo’s recent EP, ‘Zoom In’. And there’s more to come; expect a cascade of marketing hoopla around August’s Get Back, the Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson’s reworking of the band’s 1969 misery-memoir movie Let It Be, as well as a lavish tome of McCartney lyrics and memoirs in November.

How should we measure the value of a work of art or, failing that, a pop song? Take for example John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which was recorded exactly 50 years ago. It certainly scores on the sales front, having shifted about 21 million copies worldwide according to the Chartmasters service. That’s a healthy revenue stream in anyone’s book, particularly for a tune whose lyric urges us to envision a world without possessions. The ‘ubiquitous’ box gets ticked, too, because ‘Imagine’ has been covered by more than 200 other artists. It’s the unifying song we all seem to turn to at moments of crisis, as when the pianist David Martello performed it in front of the Paris Bataclan the morning after the November 2015 terrorist attacks there.

When the Beatles’ first authorized biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be...part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’But here in the recently released statistics for the Top 10 global recording artists of 2019, among the Taylor Swifts and the Ed Sheerans, 50 years after they broke up — let me introduce you to the band you’ve known for all these years.

The White Album is one the greatest works of 20th century art, executed by the greatest exponents of the 20th century’s greatest popular and unpopular art: pop music. Which is why connoisseurs of this work of high magik know that there is nothing new to say about The Beatles, which, as everyone also knows, was The White Album’s official title. The minutiae of The Fabs’ mind-boggling State Of The Universe address from 1968 have been dissected and analyzed so completely that armies of middle-aged divorced male White Album necrophiliacs now roam the pub and bars of the West, clashing over the rallying cry, ‘But should it have been a single album?