Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.