Picture this.
Receding silver hair tied back in a pony-tail, thick glasses perched on his thin nose, a wiry senior citizen steps into the spotlight, blinking with weak eyes into the space where the audience thunder their affection, appreciation and even love. This is John Winston Lennon, veteran rocker, political activist, acclaimed author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee for his role as figurehead of the anti-war movement that strove so hard to heal global wounds during the turbulent times in which he lived.
What would he have said, what would he have played on this, the occasion of his 76th birthday at Madison Square Garden in his adopted home town of New York? Would the spotlight come up on a white piano, with some sharp words about how this song remains as true as when he wrote it in 1971, while the opening chords to Imagine echo? Perhaps he would invite a surprise guest to share the moment, with Paul McCartney bounding onto the stage, so they could play the first song they wrote together back in 1957, One After 909. Or perhaps this imaginary concert would open with some unwritten classic from the second half of Lennon’s career. Or would he have chosen to mark the occasion by staying out of the public eye altogether with only a pithy comment on Twitter or Facebook?
That’s the infuriating, poignant quality of what if scenarios. It is impossible to know what Lennon might be doing had he lived because he was such a singular character, as unpredictable as the Scouse weather. One of his greatest achievements was surely to break the mould of pop stardom and leave something in its place that was more individualised, encouraging those in his wake to create their own templates for show business careers, not sell out by taking the formulaic path to fame and artistic expression. His supreme talent, extreme fame and tragic end have led to him become lionised, deified and mythologised in much the same way as others who have been taken away from us all too quickly. Yet his music and personality still resonate so strongly because of his honesty, instinct for cutting through the repressive veil of false propriety and political correctness to reveal the real complexities and contradictions of the human condition. Lennon was the first truly modern media star, where there was no distinction between his art and his life, but a blur between art, artifice and existence.
The Beatles changed everything, as actors and catalysts in the Sixties pop cultural revolution. Yet for all the collective talent of that extraordinary band, Lennon was their leader, the rebellious, creative firebrand who ignited the spark. Everyone who knew him pre-fame attests to his charisma, intelligence, humour and boundary-breaking sense of adventure, qualities that the English education system failed to nurture but, in the white hot furnace of the emerging rock and roll culture, facilitated one of the fastest evolving, audaciously accomplished careers in pop culture history.
Following the first rush of glorious harmonic songcraft, Lennon was responsible for some of the most florid, baroque psychedelic pop ever heard, tracks like Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I Am The Walrus, in which new musical palettes underpinned wild, surrealist lyrics. But if we were to speculate about music he might be making now, it would be unlikely to be trendy, experimental or even particularly grand in scale. 1966’s Tomorrow Never Knows may have been a big influence on techno via the Chemical Brothers 1996 homage Setting Sun, but I doubt Lennon would be interested in the synthetic rush of EDM, nor would you find him engaged by the manufactured formulaic polish and trivial content of today’s pop. He might have appreciated the way Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift can craft peppy songs out of real emotional situations but he was searching for something that dug deeper: art as confessional.
Lennon really found his particular groove when he started paring things down, musically and lyrically. Early classics like Help, Girl and In My Life opened up into the almost brutal honesty of Yer Blues and I Want You (She’s So Heavy). He is the first of the truly confessional singer-songwriters. Has there ever been a song as guiltily apologetic as Jealous Guy? As painfully vulnerable as Mother? As angrily demanding as Gimme Some Truth? Or as powerful a call to activism as Revolution?
He might have taken to hip hop, with its wordiness and attack, responding to the bravado, braininess and peculiar vulnerability of Kanye West and tough truth telling of Jay Z. But at heart Lennon was a rocker, drawn to music that reflected his teenage obsessions, so apparent on his joyous 1975 album Rock N Roll. He might have liked Nirvana and The White Stripes, although Oasis might have been deemed too indebted to his own back catalogue. His idealistic nature and love of anthems would have endeared him to U2 and Coldplay and he would surely have jumped enthusiastically into the chorus line of Do They Know It’s Christmas and fired up his guitar or piano at Live Aid.
He would have taken to Twitter, such a robust forum for comment, humour and campaigning with its emphasis on short, piercing content? Social media might have indeed been the perfect medium for him. Lennon was determined to reveal himself as a human being, flaws and all. Some biographers have dwelt on his hypocrisies, his temper, cruelty and early misogynism, but Lennon was harder on himself than any critic could ever be. He could have been an important online presence, wrestling with issues of self-exposure and public shaming, showing new generations how biting sarcasm, searing wit and intellectual substance could puncture the pretentious, pc and manufactured morals.
Had Lennon lived, the Beatles would have got back together, as every band seems to in the end. They were a gang from youth, a musical band of brothers united by friendship, love of music, and good times with enduring affection for each other that survived many strains. Lennon spoke increasingly affectionately about them in his final years and seemed to be seriously considering re-assembling the lads for a hurrah.
There would have been at least one more album, and you have to believe it would have been great because there was too much talent and pride in their ranks to accept anything less. But I doubt they would have become a vintage touring act (no geriatric Rolling Stones gigs for them). Lennon did not have the show business performing flea impulse that has kept McCartney on the road. Five quiet years as a house husband in the late Seventies seemed to suit him, and he was more likely to have become an occasional public figure, rather than a perpetual presence like his friends Bob Dylan and Elton John.
There would have surely been more books. And there would have been more music, not all of it all that memorable. Lennon’s solo career was erratic and impulsive, and some albums are truly terrible, like 1972’s Some Time In New York City and 1975’s Shaved Fish. But just as 1980’s Double Fantasy is a touching evocation of the mundane joy of domestic family existence, who wouldn’t want to hear Lennon’s occasional dispatches from middle and old age?
This is what the world was robbed of, on that terrible day in New York, December 8, 1980, when Lennon was gunned down. Yet in 20 years of music making, he accomplished so much that he can barely be missed today, ever present in pop culture. Perhaps, at 76, we would find him, as he imagined himself, enjoying a quiet retirement with Yoko Ono. “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that, looking out at our scrapbook of madness,” he said in 1970.
It was not to be, and we are the poorer for it.