You can buy 'Remember - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of John Lennon and Yoko Ono' in e-book form by clicking here!
All musicians’ careers tend to go in cycles. Heroes one minutes,
zeroes the next, now that Alan’s Album Archives has been running a wee while
itself now (a decade or so as I write these words) it’s interesting to note how
much these patterns of popular thought have changed since we first put pen to
paper (well ‘laptop to website’ technically, but that doesn’t have the same
ring to it somehow). One of the biggest changes perhaps has been in the
reputation of one Dr Winston O’Boogie, known to his enemies as Beatle John,
known to his friends as Johnny, known to strangers he wished to avoid as The
Honourable John St Johnson and known to his drinking buddies as the Rev Fred
Gherkin. Naturally when John died so young and so suddenly he was revered as a
patron saint of music and peace, an activist that nobody appreciated until he was
gone. With his legacy left unfinished people flushed to appreciate what was
there and hailed it as the Beatles solo catalogue that mattered, even though
there was far less of it than that made by Paul, George or even Ringo. There
was a bit of a spike of interest around when Lennon’s seventieth birthday would
have been in 2010, but otherwise there’s been a feeling that Lennon’s legacy
has been slightly overspent, with Lennon best-ofs and anthology box sets
following Beatles sets doing the same into the shops. The last ten years have
seen the rise of reputations of Paul (with his expensive but classy deluxe
re-issues offering new comers a chance to hear his music afresh), George (his
albums out on CD en masse at last) and Ringo (the most prolific Beatle decade
for any of them since Paul in the 1970s, who saw that coming?!), but John’s
career has been slightly parked. Even Oasis, Lennon’s disciples bar none, don’t
have the clout they once had anymore.
Biographies have tried to look at the ‘saint’ lurking behind the
‘sinner’ (and to be honest didn’t have to scratch all that far below the
surface) and as Lennon biopics become more and more common there’s a general
acceptance that Lennon wasn’t quite the ‘working class hero’ the way he
presented himself to be.
That is, however, to true fans, stuff and nonsense. Lennon would
have been the first to be horrified at just how canonised he has become in
death. In life part of what made him so fabulous, so brave, so pioneering, was
the fact that he had so many contradictions and was so open about his failures,
even while he dreamed of being rid of them. Technically he wasn’t working class
and his Aunt Mimi was rich indeed as Liverpool families went, but then John
never really claimed to be; it was a Southern-Northern divide prejudice that
lumped The Beatles together as working class poor because Lennon had ‘that’
accent. What made Lennon unique was that when the papers said it he didn’t
write to them in protest or anger, started talking with a received
pronunciation accent or started hanging round with ‘posh’ celebrities, but
instead delighted in his new role. The Beatles, he once said, were the first
working class band who didn’t sell out their working class roots and became
posh the minute they ‘made it’ and he has a good claim, even if he himself was
rich for all of his life (bar a brief period in Hamburg when all The Beatles
were penniless and Aunt Mini figured keeping money from John was the best way
of teaching him some ‘sense’ in the hope he’d get a ‘proper’ job). Lennon
delighted in being ‘working class’ from his earliest schooldays, most of his
friends astonished to go round his house and learn that it was bigger than most
of theirs: he loved the idea of getting by on cheek and charm, living by his
waits, succeeding because of what he knew rather than who he knew. Aunt Mimi
despaired of Lennon bringing his ‘poor’ friends round to ‘play’, including Paul
and George, but John hated it more: he yearned to be like them, to escape the
molly-coddling of his background and be ‘authentic’ driven rather than ‘money’
driven. John was the last person who would ever ‘sell out’ his supposed ‘roots’
even if they weren’t actually his; he’d worked too hard for most of his life to
be a tough Liverpool worker and felt far more comfortable with similar people
than posh arty types (that will, err, change after meeting Yoko!) Lennon was
still one of our biggest working class heroes, even if technically he wasn’t
working class, because he helped show people that there was a pride to be taken
in who they were and – combined with the very Beatles-driven change of social
climate in the 1960s – being true to who you were was more than enough to
change the world.
People sometimes take umbridge at the word ‘hero’ too. Look,
they say, at the way John is said to have beaten up first wife Cynthia on
occasion when drunk and frustrated, the way he abandoned first son Julian when
Yoko came along, the ‘lost weekend’ when he ran around America drunk insulting
bar maids with a tampon on his head or when he was making sniping remarks about
somebody (anybody) all day long. Surely, people say, this drug-addled musician
who went a ‘bit weird’ after meeting Yoko (and who was always a bit weird
before in retrospect) can’t possibly be heroic? Well, my definition of being
heroic isn’t just doing heroic things but standing up and being brave even when
you don’t want to or have to – and facing up to the things you get wrong when
you try. On that score Lennon is one of the biggest heroes that ever lived, not
because he never got things wrong or was entirely flawless, but because he
faced up to the things he got wrong, tried to change them and embraced his
flaws without being proud of them. It’s easy for rich kids with perfect
families who end up working in daddy’s company to get the perfect family and
job. It’s a lot harder when you’re a born cynic with a broken home, surrounded
by multiple deaths in the family, that leave you feeling hurt and betrayed and
who everyone has dismissed as ‘thick’ from childhood, when really all you are
is curious (and not very keen on rules). Everyone dismissed John from birth:
his aunt was secretly proud but his it well, his teachers thought he was awful,
even his fellow musicians didn’t always see John’s talent in the way that they did
for George (a hot guitarist) or Paul (a hot multi-instrumentalist). Yet John
got there, by sheer nerve, creative talent, charisma, a refusal to back down
from anything people threw at him. When the tough got going, Lennon got
tougher, at least at first, ploughing his own furrow despite the people lining
up to tell him ‘no’.
And yet, the even more remarkable thing is that Lennon got
softer too. Not soft as in ‘weak’, but a whole different idea of soft to the
one he grew up with. Back in the 1940s and 1950s if you grew up in Liverpool
you had to be tough: you’d been born in a war when Germany had dropped bombs at
you and where men had to be macho. At first Lennon lived the part superbly,
out-macho-ing anybody around him, even in Liverpool and playing the role of a
Northern Working Class Man, including the bits that, with retrospective eyes,
he got ‘wrong’. There comes a change, though, one of the biggest in rock. By
the mid 1960s Lennon had gone from a Liverpool drunk always waging war and
skirmishes to one of the biggest peace advocates the psychedelic movement ever
had. Lennon risked his career early on, denouncing the Vietnam war from almost
the minute he stepped onto American soil in 1964 and The Beatles in general
proving that they were better read about it than most Americans. Even before
Yoko came along Lennon became one of the peace movement’s most erudite and
learned intellectuals, arguing for a change to the inevitable ‘war every
generation’ trend of the 20th century this far. What Yoko did was to
encourage Lennon to use his platform to promote peace as a main even not just a
subsidiary to what he was saying, with the couple even turning what should have
been private (their honeymoon) into a publicity campaign for peace (because ‘if
people wanted peace as badly they want a TV set then the world would have
peace’, an idea that still sadly rings true today). He even wrote the peace
movement’s most famous song [1] ‘Give Peace A Chance’, his first ‘statement’ as
a solo act, promoting philosophy more than music, before hoping for a better
future in [20] ‘Imagine’. In less than ten years Lennon went from being the
Beatle you would least want to meet down a Liverpool alley in his working class
leathers to the celebrity most people thought of when the word ‘peace’ was
mentioned. Lennon never lost his inner temper, his inner rage or his
uncontrollable frustration when things went wrong, but he tried to, every day,
for most of his life to the point where his nicer tendencies are most of what
people remember about him now. That’s one hell of an achievement.
And it’s not the only one as, closer to home, Lennon’s views of
feminism changed considerably. From a culture where he was encouraged, nay
expected, to beat up his significant other during his life Lennon began
thinking and questioning what was expected of him and people like him. Lennon,
remember, was surrounded by tough female figures throughout his life and had a
sneaking respect for them – he didn’t really know his dad and his ‘father
figure’ Uncle George was a sweet soul (compared to his harridan aunty anybody
would have been!) Even so, the change in Lennon’s (indeed The Beatles and all
their peers’) attitudes to girls wasn’t certain. The 1960s rock and rollers
came together out of a love for 1950s music – and as a very wide generalisation
there was no more misogynistic genre than 1950s rock and roll. Did Elvis ever
care about his girl once he’d seduced her or wiggled his hips at her? Did Chuck
Berry ever think about what would happen after he got his girl across state
lines and his lust was spent? Did even the seemingly sweet Buddy Holly think
about Peggy Sue as much as he thought about himself and his own pleasure? Jerry
Lee Lewis treating his beloved with kindness? Great balls of fire! The Beatles, though, were different and
kick-started a tradition of being kinder to girls than characters in the 1950s
had been – even if it’s a tradition that starts slowly – and as usual its
Lennon leading the way. In The Beatles ‘Girl’ (Rubber Soul, 1965) starts seeing
women as being not just the equal but in many ways the superior of men.
‘Getting Better’ (‘Sgt Peppers’, 1967), though started by McCartney, is in many
ways a Lennon breakthrough song: ‘I used to be cruel to my woman and beat her
and kept her apart from the things that she loves, man I was mean but I’m
changing my scene...’, a middle eight that’s meant to be John’s contribution to
the song. ‘Julia’ (White Album, 1968) finally stops trying to win a girl over
and accepts her for who she is (and she, clearly, is Yoko the ‘ocean child’ of
the song). By 1969 and ‘Let It Be/Abbey Road’ Lennon is howling out his
dependency on a girl, revealing a vulnerable side a million light years away
from where he started (‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘I Want You’ particularly). Yoko’s
feminist friends lead him to pen a song that still sees jaws drop today ([36]
‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’) – it would have made Lennon’s old Liverpool
drinking buddies faint! By the end of his life Lennon has embraced his teenage
polar opposite, becoming to all intents and purposes a ‘house husband’,
bringing up second son Sean ‘properly’ as a very hands-on daddy while Yoko went
to work. Lennon may not have been a hero at the beginning – and he probably
burnt the bread occasionally and shouted at Sean occasionally and did all the
rubbish things parents do every day without meaning to, never mind a ‘lost
weekend’ where he acted like a complete jerk in pubs and clubs in a repeat of
his wild early days – but he tried and in the end he came through it all. That
too is one hell of an achievement.
It’s worth remembering also how brave Lennon had to be to do all
of these things. He wasn’t just some two-bit musician nobody paid attention to:
he had the world’s eyes focussed on the back of his head at all times. Every
small mistake he made was front page news. But Lennon was content to make big
mistakes, talking his philosophies out loud to a public so far removed from
them they couldn’t understand them. The Lennon’s first concert appearance
wasn’t in an arena singing old Beatles hits for millions but a Cambridge art
party with John playing feedback behind Yoko’s squawks. Whatever you think of
it as ‘music’, its certainly not playing things ‘safe’. Lennon’s first
mainstream concert? It’s at a peace festival in Canada organised at such a last
minute rush that the ad hoc Plastic Ono Band hadn’t even met each other until
the plane ride over. On television Lennon never took the easy way out to sell
records: he talked about peace, about political prisoners, about working class
men who wanted to do nothing more than smoke a joint or riot about prison food
or the Irish kicking out the English for invading their Sceptered isle,
sticking up for the working classes of the world whether the world wanted him
to or not. He talked up radicals who would never have appeared in the national
consciousness any other way, spoke up for feminists who were a punchline for
bad jokes when discussed by other musicians and promoted new ideas against
racism (I still say the ‘bagism’ idea of everybody being in bags is the best
solution to job interviews, boycotting prejudice of gender, colour and class
and focussing on ability, all that ever mattered to Lennon). People often
laughed at John and Yoko doing ‘nutty’ things that seemed a bit daft, but it
was a brave crusade all the same that neither John nor Yoko had to do: it
wasn’t for a career (indeed it hurt their career) but was done in the name of
‘peace’, whether people ‘got’ it or not. Personally I love the many weird
developments in the John and Yoko story – the acorns sent to every world leader
to plant in their gardens, the balloons with hopeful messages inside released
to everyone in, er, Suffolk and the self indulgent avant garde videos and
records that tried to make their pop-loving public think in a different way.
Even if some of it, maybe a lot of it, failed, The Lennons tried to stamp their
own personal brand on the gigantic coat-hook of peace and did more to make
being nice to each other and kind to people who ‘weren’t like you’ popular than
any other couple.
John also wore his heart on his sleeve, speaking for ‘us’ every
time he opened his mouth, refusing to play the showbiz game of singing about
‘us’ before becoming one of ‘them’, amongst the first truly uncontrollable
celebrities with enough of a following to make the institutions really scared.
Of course they were going to come after him (he should have been warier over
the fake drugs bust in 1969 or the Nixon FBI infiltration of his political
rallies of 1972 and though Lennon never spoke about it he clearly got scared
off by someone circa 1973 when his songs got softer and he stopped talking
about politics in his interviews) – Lennon was a threat, in a way no ‘musician’
had ever really been a threat before. Because Lennon was in a unique situation:
he was one of the most famous people on the planet, with a guaranteed platform,
who was always brave enough to speak from the heart, no matter how stupid or
petty or wrong it very occasionally made him sound, with an erudite voice that
people would always listen to, even if they didn’t always follow.
That’s what made it all the more devastating when he was taken
from us. Not by someone who got cross at him. Not by a Government who felt
threatened by him (or did they?...There is evidence that the FBI were involved
somewhere along the line). Not by a war-mongerer or a chauvinist sticking up
for their rights, but by a fan. One of the reasons Lennon was so canonised
wasn’t just how he lived but how he was taken away, so needlessly, so horribly.
Lennon hadn’t coveted celebrity in the same way as most celebrities: he hadn’t
used it to promote empty pop records (though, you know, some of his comeback
singles weren’t that great), he hadn’t used it to promote a self-less cash-in
ghostwritten book he probably hadn’t even flicked through before printing,
there were no Lennon brand anything until after he died and he most certainly
didn’t have a fitness video out. He used his celebrity to promote peace and
tolerance and whatever radical crusade was flavour of the month that month.
Even at his worst, even at his most big-headed and mean-mouthed, Lennon had
never ever used his celebrity against ‘us’ – instead he used it to ‘help’ us,
to make the world a fairer safer place. It also hurts that a man who had
already known such violence in his life, yet had overcome it to promote peace,
died in such a violent way. I think a lot of the monumental out-pouring of
grief over Lennon’s death in the 1980s was a combination of shock, grief, loss
that we wouldn’t have Lennon around to speak for ‘us’ anymore and a little bit
of guilt at laughing at someone we should have taken more seriously.
The end result is a fascinating contradictory character who
wasn’t a Working Class Hero and yet most certainly was; who would make mistakes
repeatedly but then talk about them and try to overcome them; a war baby who
was frustrated and violent who turned into a giant peace advocate; a Northern
male working class misogynist who did more to help the feminist movement than
any man before him; the timid and shy introspective songwriter who still yelled
his unpopular ideas to the world because he cared about them so. Lennon never
shied away from being a collection of glorious contradictions – the violent
drunk who could drink anyone under the table before singing songs about peace
from the heart, the lost little boy pretending to act like a tough guy, the
down-to-earth cynical realist who embraced avant garde art or the man who’d
never really known love who enjoyed one of the greatest love stories of the 20th
century. What made Lennon more special than anything, though, was that he
managed to stay authentic and true to himself, despite the fame, despite the
attention, despite the groupies, despite the money, despite the endless posh
people trying to make him ‘one of them’, despite the rockstar culture of keeping
your missus at home in the kitchen instead of up on stage in a plastic bag
howling while you backed her on guitar in some giant art installation madness.
Every word Lennon sang (except, perhaps ‘Cookin’ In The Kitchen Of Love’) was
always from the heart, whether it made him look like a saint, a sinner, a loser
or a winner. Lennon expected the truth from all people and always tried to give
it himself, no matter the cost to his career, his marriage or to his fanbase.
Yoko
Ono "Take Me To The Land Of Hell"
(Chimera Music, September 17th 2013)
Moonbeams/Cheshire Cat Cry/Tabetai/Bad
Dancer/Little Boy Blue Your Daddy's Gone/There's No Goodbye Between Us/7th
Floor/NY Noodle Town/Take Me To The Land Of Hell/Watching The Dawn/Leaving
Tim/Shine Shine/Hawk's Call
CD Bonus Tracks: Story Of An Oak
Tree/Ai
"If
one day we slip away - and that may be
in the cards - we will know deep in our hearts that there's no goodbye between
us"
Yoko's
most recent record at the time of writing, 'Hell' is nicely upbeat and positive
despite the title. The record opens with new age style sound effects that 's
only missing the whale to become the sort of thing that plays when you're
getting a massage and much of the record feels like unwinding in a hot bath,
far calmer and gentler than Yoko usually is. Overall it's another strong album
that shows off Yoko's range and features a 'revival' of the Plastic Ono Band
name again (with Sean on guitar). 'Cheshire Cat Cry' is Yoko's best non-ballad
in decades, a witty surreal song with Yoko returning to her theme of her
reserve holding her strong emotions in check with some cracking guitar, bass
and drum work. Other highlights include the playful 'Tabetai' (translation:
'excuse') and the title track which is another strong Yoko piano ballad. Lennon
is still Yoko's favourite subject though and her latest batch of songs for her
husband are truly moving: the indescribable contemporary dance track 'Little
Boy Blue Your Daddy's Gone' about trying to tell Sean his dad had died (a song which
starts with a long sigh that speaks volumes), the sweet 'There's No Goodbye
Between Us' about John and Yoko’s last walk through Central Park together which
sounds very much at one with the gritted-teeth-strength of Yoko's 'Season Of
Glass' album and the powerful 'Watch The Dawn' in which Yoko asks John to wait
for her up there because she's still got a bit more to do back on Earth first.
Admittedly there isn't much happening on the rest of the LP, but considering
how quickly Yoko released this album after her last and how often she's gone
down these roads before this is still an impressively inventive and moving
listen. Yoko seems to be getting better with age, returning to the promising
career that got cut short by the 'lost weekend' era and the poor reception to
her lesser 1980s work. Lennon would have been very proud and it will be
fascinating to see where Yoko might go from here.
The
album opens in the most slow-moving way possible, with six minutes of the new
agey ‘Moonbeams’. There
is some gorgeous guitarwork on this atmospheric song and this is one of the few
times I want Yoko to be quiet so I can hear trhe backing.
‘Cheshire Cat Cry’ is fabulous, a slinky funky song where the Cheshire Cat is (I
think) our subsconscious, taking us out into imagination and escape every time
life gets too nasty. You don’t quite know whether to pet this pussy or give it
a wide berth as The Plastic Ono Band hit a groove that’s cute yet scary all at
the same time.
‘Tabetai’
is about greed, with a long list of food-stuffs standing in for other kinds of
mankind demanding things it really doesn’t need. This is an intriguing,
rule-breaking song as Yoko remembers where she and John made love against a
sparse funky backdrop.
‘Bad Dancer’
is unfortunately a truly awful club song. Yoko is a bad writer of dance tracks
too it seems, though her self-deprecating lyrics about being hopeless and how
her partner will have to ‘watch their step’
is a great accompaniment to the usual club 18-30 beat!
‘Little Boy Your Daddy’s Gone’ is awful, but in a good way. Yoko remembers having to tell
five-year-old Sean his daddy’s not coming home so she tries to turn it into a
nursery rhyme that’s dumb yet uplifting all at the same time. The sigh which
continues throughout the song speaks volumes before Yoko tumbles into a whole
long jumble of words, desperate to convey the meaning to go with the sigh that
strikes all children everywhere with fright that something really bad has
happened.
Yoko’s
latest John ballad is ‘There’s
No Goodbye Between Us’. Building on ‘Never Said Goodbye’ Yoko has been
worrying all this time that she never got to have a final word with her husband
– and yet she now realises that the rest of her life has been one long goodbye.
She’s poorly, fearing she’ll never be well enough to walk their beloved Central
park again, but strangely at peace as she looks forward to being with John again. The backing and melody aren’t as
strong as other Yoko songs on the same theme, but these poetic lyrics are
beautiful.
‘7th Floor’
picks up where ‘Memory Of Footsteps’ left off, but this time its Yoko staring
down from the Dakota to the pavement below. She sees a body chalked on the
pavement as a crime scene and wonders if it’s her own and she’s somehow died
but stayed in her favourite place. This narrated song isn’t as good as it would
have been if she’d sung it and the backing is very weird even for Yoko.
‘Ny Noodle Town’ is a love song to Yoko’s adopted home city and a long list of
all the things she loves and hates side by side: ‘confusion and depression bred
by manipulation’ and yet the citizens ‘drink and dance’. Yoko sounds much
happier than she did on ‘Midsummer New York’ and it sounds to me as if she’s
healing the wounds of what was said after Lennon’s death, that it was the
danger in the city that killed John rather than an individual who actually came
from Hawaii.
‘Take Me To The Land Of Hell’ has Yoko again remembering the day John died, most specifically
the moment she gazed into John’s eyes and ‘knew’ that he’d gone. She recalls
the ‘fivers of blood’ on the pavement, her choked cries, her tears – and most
of all her realisation that they would never ever be together again. This
ballad is hard to take, though Yoko’s vocal (reserved but not as detached as on
earlier songs) is haunting.
‘Watching The Dawn’ is a return to the classical ballads that ended ‘Between My Head
And The Sky’. Another of Yoko’s better songs, this is a philosophical tale that
wonders what happens to us as adults. Everyone is born out of some form of love
and ‘dream’, even if its lust and yet by the time we’re ready to have children
of our own most of us are having offspring ‘born into neglect’. Yoko mourns
everyone who ever had a messed up childhood like her own and the result is
another powerful haunting ballad.
‘Leaving Tim’
is awful, though, a return to the cod music hall of [98] ‘Yes I’m Angel’. Yoko
recalls not her third husband as normal (Lennon) but her first and how badly it
ended, ‘always in despair, no way to repair’. Yoko realises that her husband
expected her to ‘put him on a pedestal’
and that’s not the way she works at all! This song too is about the defining
moment when Yoko ‘knew’ definitively that their love was over, but the jaunty
backing isn’t right for this sad song.
‘Shine, Shine’ is four minutes of noisy modern music with Yoko squawking over
the top which is every bit as hard going as it sounds. I would rather listen to
Yoko being a fly for an hour or twenty minutes of [4] ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ than
this – at least that song came with 1960s sounds beneath the screams!
The
album ends with ‘Hawk’s Call’, fifteen seconds of silence that recalls [54]
‘The Nutopian National Anthem’ and seems a bit pointless without explanation at
the end of a CD when most people assume their player has just picked up a fault
and hasn’t stopped yet.
A
horrid beginning and ending, then, but much of what’s in the middle is actually
rather good and there’s a run of four songs towards the end that’s the best
Yoko’s come up with since at least 1974. Brave enough to talk about growing
older whilst still being young enough to take chances, this is an often
brilliant set that’s far better than any set released after someone’s eightieth
birthday has any right to be. I await the next Yoko album with baited breath –
and a hand out for the CD player skip button admittedly – but there’s a lot of
worth here and the tributes for Lennon are heartbreakingly good and worth
owning the CD for alone.
“Lennon:Icon”
(Apple/Capitol, September 14th
2014)
Imagine/(Just Like) Starting
Over/Instant Karma/Stand By Me/Watching The Wheels/Mind Games/Jealous
Guy/Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)/Love/Happy Xmas (War Is Over)/Give Peace A
Chance
"I
want you to make love not war, I know you’ve heard it before…”
How odd that the first Lennon compilation on a
budget – the Working Class Hero for the Working Classes you could say – is the
softest, most gutless Lennon set on the market, Heaven forefend there should be
any controversial moments here like ‘Working Class Hero’ ‘Woman Is The Nigger
Of The World’ or even ‘Power To The People’. Instead we get Lennon’s ten least
controversial hits plus the sweet ballad ‘Love’, which is just daft. Anyone
intrigued enough by talk of Lennon as the ‘brave Beatle’ who feels compelled to
try this album for a fiver or so is unlikely to be converted, while the ‘Icon’
of the title doesn’t really fit either: ‘Lennon: Autopilot’ would be a better
name I fear. Even so, the price offers a valuable beginner’s guide and the
‘Icon’ series as a whole is a good one, offering fans on low budgets a taste of
an artist’s wares before having to commit to a whole pricey CD. The Lennon set
though is one of the weaker entries in the series and even the cover picture of
Dr Winston O’Boogie looks really cheap and tacky. Even on a budget fans deserve
better.
Yoko
Ono “Yes I’m A Witch Too!”
(Manimal Vinyl Records, February 16th
2016)
Walking On Thin Ice/Forgive Me My
Love/Mrs Lennon/Give Me Something/She Gets Down On Her
Knees/Dogtown/Wouldn’t/Move On Fast/Soul Got Out Of The Box/Approximately
Infinite Universe/Yes I’m Your Angel/Warrior Woman/Coffin Car/I Have A Woman
Inside My Soul/Catman/No Bed For Beatle John/Hell In Paradise
"Wind
of now blows off her cool, telling her there’s something she missed”
Yoko’s first remix album had done rather well
nine years earlier – people who would never normally go anywhere near a Yoko LP
but were intrigued by the list of names they worked with discovered a catalogue
that was generally much more musical, innovative and inventive than they ever
realised. This second version may be even more interesting, moving on from
Yoko’s semi-famous songs to her rarer and much more interesting songs and
attracting several bigger names. Highlights here include a marvellous grungy take
on ‘Move On Fast’ by Jack Douglas, Sparks adding their retro-rock-with-1980s
vibe to Double Fantasy’s ‘Give Me Something’ and a modern hand-clapping punk
version of ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ by ‘Blow-Up’. Son Sean appears and
interestingly passes on all the obvious choices for a playful version of his
mum’s ‘Dogtown’, intercut with eerie echoey Yokos intoning ‘No Bed For Beatle
John!’ Not everything here is good – remixes can only enhance what’s there not
create it and the songs from lesser albums like ‘Feeling A Space’ still sound
horrid, while ‘Hell In Paradise’ is a good description of what is going in the
last number as unbelievably Moby (the biggest name here?) takes Yoko’s 1980s
sonic mess and makes it even more unlistenable by taking even the tiny bit of a
tune away! The biggest missed opportunity, though, is the talented John Palumbo
completely missing the point of one of Yoko’s most talent-filled songs ‘I Have
A Woman Inside My Soul’ and turning an exquisite ballad about vulnerability
into a noisy drum ‘n’ bass dance number! Oh well, the cleverly titled ‘I’m A
Witch Too’ casts more magical spells than curses and continues the gradually
re-appreciation of Yoko Ono as an artist in the 21st century, an
icon for so many big names in music even here, at the age of eighty-three.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST
OF LENNON ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-43-john-lennonplastic-ono-band.html
'Imagine' (1971) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/john-lennon-imagine-1971-album-review.html
'Sometime In New York City' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-35-john.html
'Mind Games'(1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-77-john.html
'Walls and Bridges' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-63-john-lennon-walls-and-bridges.html
'Sometime In New York City' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-35-john.html
'Mind Games'(1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-77-john.html
'Walls and Bridges' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-63-john-lennon-walls-and-bridges.html
'Double Fantasy' (1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-double-fantasy.html
'Milk and Honey' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/news-views-and-music-issue-135-john.html
'Milk and Honey' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/news-views-and-music-issue-135-john.html
Non-Album Recordings
1969-1980 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-non-album.html
Live/Compilation/Unfinished
Music Albums 1968-2010 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/john-lennon-livecompilationraritiesunfi.html
The Best Unreleased Lennon
Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-best-unreleased-recordings.html
Surviving TV Clips
1968-1980 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-surviving-tv-clips-1968-1980.html
Essay: Power To The Beatle – Why Lennon’s Authenticity Was So Special https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/john-lennon-essay-power-to-beatle-why.html
Landmark concerts and key cover versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/john-lennon-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Essay: Power To The Beatle – Why Lennon’s Authenticity Was So Special https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/john-lennon-essay-power-to-beatle-why.html
Landmark concerts and key cover versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/john-lennon-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
