Now I’ve no idea why anyone would want to be possessed by John Lennon. He had appalling taste in glasses for one (have you ever tried to read with glasses like that – its like watching a television inside a washing machine). He wrote Imagine, a shoe-in for the worse piece of metaphysical hippy claptrap beyond the writings of Timothy Leary. Perhaps it is because he was the self styled intellectual Beatle: have you seen his poetry and those really rubbish line drawings of his? Whatever, in the years after this particular day the music died there seemed a never ending stream of people trying to steal his thunder. Never get in bed with Yoko though. Funny that.
To become John Lennon is simple. You duet with Paul McCartney. Michael Jackson not only bought the rights to all Beatle songs, he wrote one too – Say Say Say. Touched by the hand of Quincey Jones (not the pathologist) it was an insipid piece of nonsense which proved that Paul was so far from having an edge that he was positively a Klein Bottle. (I paid attention in topology). Stevie Wonder chipped in too. Admittedly the cod philosophy knocked up in Ebony and Ivory almost parallelled that of Imagine, but Stevie forgot to put on the little round specs. They probably would have fallen off when he did his little head spack thing anyhow.
Paul has dragged his own dirty name through the dirty dirt incessantly for the last thirty years. But he pales next to Elvis Costello’s turn at Lennon. Even Costello (what does he want to be Presley or a Beatle?) has nothing on the corpse re-animator general, the man who’s producerly touch is death to all who get near him. But Jeff Lynne I am leaving til another day.
In truth there is only one McCartney collaborator who has ever reached the genius of Lennon. Bear in mind I consider Lennon to not be a genius, just a Scouser who got lucky – or at least put out of his misery. Nope, the only good collaboartor was Rupert, skipping through the Frog Song with gay abandon. The frogs were good too – but the check trousered anthropomorphic representative of the conservative press really tagged the spirit of Lennon. And I daresay Yoko would shag him too.