JOHN LENNON – "Woman"

Phil Collins may be a figure of fun but In The Air Tonight was a fine record, standing head and shoulders above anything else he did solo.

While Woman was number one I made a trip from Hull to Cambridge and took a step which would have irrevocable consequenses – for better or worse – for my life in the decade to come. It was the effective end of my first marriage.

As 2 said – marshmallow production. Utterly sacharine, although there’s at least the nice ‘do do do do do do’ bit, which I’m quite fond of, although the lyrics are pure shite.

Still, it’s not as awful as ‘Imagine’.

Since I’m feeling generous, 3.

Wearing bare feet is very Fluxus.

Probly.

The packaging of Dead John and Yoko really began in earnest with this one. It was amazing they had the good grace to wait 8 weeks! The video shows a couple at ease with each other and the world and totally in love. John and Yoko, peace, love, forever and all that. Read the Goldman book, the Seaman book or even the Norman book and you get a completely different picture.
Clever woman Yoko, although she’d probably have attributed it to the power of numerology while chasing a very large dragon out of the Dakota, where would she have ended up if it weren’t for Mark Chapman?
The song is typical of late Lennon. If he’d have brought this into Abbey Road he’d have been slung out of The Beatles. Another mind numbingly dull entry in his catalogue, the sooner forgotten about the better.1

And I’ll take Phil Collins’ “Face Value” album as an honest portrait of adult relationships over “Double Fantasy” any day.

Apparently, it started life as “Yoko”.

Right, continuing from “Starting over”

… My opinion? That this would quite probably still have made number one anyway.

The John mourners had this, Imagine, and the album. After that, they were getting over it.

Maybe “watching the wheels” would have been a bigger hit if he’d still been alive to promote/perform it.

Tom: re “non-pop news and the charts” linking up, are you referring to the events of late 1984 as the starting point? It occurs to me that during 1981 the Pope, the Queen and President Reagan all had near-misses – any of them might have brought about in-memoriam chart action if they’d died violently.

I used to really like this, I can’t for the life of me think why – even for solo Lennon, this is poo.

U2 were making records by now so they could have done one.

What always struck me about photos of Lennon from this time – like the one on the sleeve – is how gaunt he looked compared to previous pictures – and how ‘styled’ his hair looks. Was he on some macrobiotic diet or something?

Right, great another chance to do a bit more sacking of the Lennon temple… ah, hang on I actually quite like this one. I think my ability to zone out on the lyric and let the melody wash over me helps. It’s a pretty melody.

I really don’t mind it at all. 6 for me, 7 on a very good day.

I’m prepared to admit the lack of baggage probably helps. I’ve had a bit of a reflection on my “Imagine” bashing. It was a good discussion – I do think my irritation that this big totem from my parent’s generation was getting in the way of the normal course of the Top 40 and stopping my favourite acts from getting more attention, has stuck with me from 1981.

I’m more forgiving of “Woman” although at the time it’s residency at the top of the chart irritated me, and at this point I was starting to wonder when this Lennon barrage would be over. However, there was so much else going on in the Top 40 by February to take pleasure in.

Ahhhhhh, this is a harmless one. The dullness of “Imagine” has to stem in good measure from the fact that lots of people think it quite profound, which means we’ve all had to hear it forced upon us in inappropriate contexts as something important. This on the other hand nobody talks about ever, so despite Lennon’s tendency here to make The Song about women, it comes across as refreshingly lightweight and pleasant.

Agreed that if McCartney had written this he’d never ever have been forgiven – thankfully, though, Paul at this time was doing much better for himself with “Coming Up” and “Temporary Secretary.”

As a person who at the time thought most “contemporary” guitar-based music was mediocre shit (as opposed to my love of synth pop/new romanticism, soul, funk etc) I really enjoyed the John Lennon take over of the charts – but it also made me realise how the guitar-based stuff from the second half of the 60s and early 70s was so much better than the rubbish we had to put up with so much so that even a 40 year old not on his top form could piss all over it. I didn’t think ‘Woman’ was outstanding or anything, after all I was only 15 and it wasn’t really made for teenagers, but now being Lennon’s age myself I see it as a pretty well written, unpretentious and mature take on the love song. ‘Grow Old With Me’ is far more poignant though.

And re the Goldman and Seaman books surely no-one takes seriously as a commentary on the state of the Lennons’ relationship in the former case a thoroughly disreputable ‘biographer’ who was a byword for the worst type of truth-twisting scurrilousness and a desperate and embittered former-employer who whould have sold his own gran to make a few quid.

Just a bit more digression, if I may, on non-pop news-related hits. Your mention of the Royal Wedding brought to mind a track I still have on cassette (taped from the Steve Wright show) called “Now We Know It’s Diana” by Bobby and the Girls Next Door – a pop/punk sound not unlike the Dickies, with the chorus:

“She is nearly 20
And ‘e is 32
But we don’t give a monkeys
Because their love is true…”

Tsk, if only we’d known. Remarkably, it didn’t trouble the chart compilers.

An early example of a news item directly inspiring a hit record was “Ohio” by CSN&Y, top 20 in the US following the Kent State University shootings of May 1970. And there was a memorial album for JFK in 1963 which set a record as the fastest selling album ever in the States.

We can of course discuss the key #1 you refer to when we get there, although it reflected a general atmosphere and was perfectly timed for the events occurring while it was number one.

I think back to this timeframe and I honestly feel, were he alive at the time, his records probably wouldn’t matter. Anyone remember what the tracks on Mind Games or Walls & Bridges are? He was past his prime. Walking On Thin Ice could’ve been IT for him, though. REMEMBER WHAT WAS “HAPPENING” IN MUSIC AT THE TIME!! Post-punk, punk-rap hybrids – hell, rap by itself. I was reading New York Rocker & The Face. Not exactly jam-packed with Fabs articles. I remember 1966, when the charts had not only Gloria by Shadows of Knight but Strangers In The Fucking Night by Sinatra. Parents were still buying records! Maybe that’s how these songs were hits, mom & dad bought the singles at the discount store. I didn’t, but I DID pull out “Rain” and “I Found Out”.

Re 22: The Royal Wedding Album was a number one, and I remember the record counter at Woolies in Croydon being almost entirely given over to the bloody thing (while I looked longingly at a copy of Our Daughter’s Wedding’s Lawnchairs, willing it into the half-price basket).

Re 11: Saw Stardust again the other night and was surprised how the monstrous epic Dea Sancta doesn’t sound half as bad as I remembered – but then maybe I’ve been listening to too much Barry Ryan. On the other hand, I was in a taxi to Barcelona airport a few days later, with my heart playing peculiar and unpleasant tricks on me, and Woman came on the radio. It was far worse than I remembered. How dare he? Simpering, patronising pap.

If Lennon had lived he’d have got the Beatles to reform for Live Aid. With this in mind, I’m retrospectively siding with the line taken by the Manics’ Motown Junk.

And if Phil Collins had been part of the assassination trend of late 80/early 81 – say, while In The Air Tonight was in the chart, possibly drowned in a pot of emulsion by his wife’s new painter-and-decorator-boyfriend -from-Middlesbrough – how would we remember him?

Come to think of it, Ringo was a near-miss early in 1980 as he and Barbara Bach had a car crash (ISTR he collapsed from overwork later in the year too). Wonder how he’d have been commemorated as the first late Beatle?

Mark G #37: no, it was definitely “monkeys”. A variation on the chorus went:

“She is nearly 20
And ‘e is 32
But if you fink there’s sumfing wrong
You know what you can do…”

Sheer bloody poetry.

3 threads! 194 comments! (and counting)…

AND FINALLY SOMEONE HAS MENTIONED MOTOWN JUNK!

re#33 thanks for that recollection billy – I’m tempted to say that I’m ROTFLMAO but I think that would be a faux pas in these parts. I hope we can continue to feed your 8 year old self virtual madeleines if it means quality stuff like this.

having been born in 1980, i obviously did not experience lennon’s death firsthand. i can only surmise that the appeal of songs like “just like starting over” and “woman” comes from the subtle reassurance that *yes, john lennon is trying to come back to us. he is not a crazy radical anymore and he won’t confront or offend you. he’s just like you, he has a wife and a young child and wants to be mellow and positive*.

i don’t think the public understood this one as a message song. i think it was comforting to them because it could easily have been another version of “If I Fell” or “All I’ve Got to Do”.

For those of you who remember this period, can you give a bit more detail about what Lennon songs were being played, besides the number ones obviously? I’ve heard in the inital days following his death it was almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing a Lennon song. Were they beatles songs exclusively? Did they ever play “Mother” or “Working Class Hero” or “John Sinclair”? I don’t like Ono any more than most of you, but I can’t help feeling that the general public was as complicit in the Branding of Lennon as she was. We didn’t want to hear “Woman is the Nigger of the World”, we wanted “Give Peace a Chance”.

Definitely heard a lot of (bleeped) Working Class Hero in Dec 80/Jan 81. I think it might have been the flip of Imagine, so that might have been (pre-cd) due to convenience.

This was a step way too far in weeping for poor old murdered Lennon. I think this song is trite and pointless. It would have been far better to re-release “Stand by Me” instead, which I thought was great. “Woman” is cheesy and self-indulgent, rather like Lennon himself had become by the time of the ill-advised comeback, which almost obliged someone to drop him like a baby deer.