John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band: revisited

Actually, I kind of resent being called a peasant - but thanks anyway!

It’s the winter of 1970 and The Beatles are history. Rumours that they will reform will follow all the ex-members until a hail of bullets in New York put the final kibosh on the notion a decade later, but for now the fab 4 are letting it all hang out and the sense of relief in their solo efforts is palpable. McCartney has already stepped back from any pretence of art to follow the homely, chummy path that will eventually lead him into ghastly muzak territory. George Harrison, cut loose from the shadow of his fellow Beatles is creating sprawling soundscapes with all the discipline of an 8 year old left in a sweet shop. Ringo is planting his flag firmly in the funny yet somehow  maudlin corner of the field. And Lennon? Lennon is exorcising his demons on a record that still astonishes today.

Perhaps most people who make music find that that at some point they end up not actually sounding like what they want to sound like. For my part, all I’ve ever wanted to do is hit a triangulation point between The Beatles, the Beta Band and the Stone Roses. And yet, for all my striving, my songs very rarely venture into that kind of territory. Fuck alone knows why. Somehow a gap nearly always develops between what you want to sound like and how it all finishes up. In a group, this is magnified inescapably. The bassist doesn’t play the bass part you’ve got in your head. The production doesn’t emphasise the things you wanted to hear the most. In short: it’s a compromise unless you want to be a twat about it and start imposing your ideas on your bandmates.

That feeling is what I hear when John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band finds its way periodically back into my CD player. McCartney and George Martin, allied to the internal dynamics of the Beatles as a unit had created an idiom all of their own. Even when falling apart, they still produced Abbey Road, ferchrissakes – one of the most immaculately produced records ever. Sure, a few rough edges made it into their oeuvre, but instinctively everything always fell just so on their records.

JL/POB (for the sake of brevity) takes all of that history and image and craft and wrenches it brutally apart. If McCartney, Paul’s eponymous solo album, gingerly stuck a toe in the lo-fi waters, that was hidden by the blandly facile nature of the songs and McCartney’s inability not to turn every single fucking thing he plays into a hook. By contrast, Lennon’s own effort is a stark, wintery musical landscape in which every flaw and bum note is put centre stage, for better or for worse. This is exactly the record he wanted to make: no more compromises here.

To me, this record is fucking aces on all kinds of levels. On the one hand you’re rooting for Lennon because he’s out there trashing the very things that made him – from friends to family, Beatles to God. If the lyrics aren’t explicit enough, the woeful bass playing, shitty guitar sound, sloppily double tracked vocals merely hammer home the point. On the other hand, some of the tunes are fucking killer. If you can’t dig “Mother” or “Isolation” or “Love” for their tunes alone then you probably should go snuggle up with your Keane records and some toffees and stop pretending that you like music.

A lot of people slag off Working Class Hero on the basis that it is Lennon playing the prole revolutionary when he was really a pampered rock aristocrat from a middle-class, art-school background. I read it differently. To me it’s a song about the (first world?) war – “you must learn how to smile as you kill if you want to be like the folks on the hill” and the cheapening of life that goes with it. I don’t see Lennon proclaiming to be a working class hero – the “just follow me” pay-off is just him observing the irony of someone like him becoming a ‘hero’ to working class people who can’t see beyond their TV sets. The “you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see” line is, like a lot of Lennon lyrics, couched in a zone that hovers between empathy and ridicule.

There’s a couple of shit tracks on there. I wouldn’t cross the road to listen to Well Well Well (which runs into dull repetition far too soon) or Look At Me (which is a pale retread of Julia from The White Album) and the uncomfortably personal nature of something like “My Mummy’s Dead” hardly catapults the album into easy listening territory. Despite that, if you need to clear your head of the glossy pap that is pumping on a stereo near you then this is Ground Zero. Beating punk to the punch by fully 6 years, JL/POB sounds as fresh and vital as it ever did.