Shaun de Waal CD of the week
Despite the recent lionisation of (Sir) Paul McCartney, mostly on the back of a bunch of old Beatles leftovers, he is still less interesting than the other half of pop’s most famous songwriting partnership. John Lennon’s post-Beatles output was uneven (blame Yoko!), but at least he kept pushing at the boundaries of traditional pop songcraft.
The raw emotion that bleeds through Mother (“You had me, but I never had you”) and the pain that shrieks, literally, out of Cold Turkey took the Sixties/Seventies pop ditty places it had never been before.
Hearing such songs today (as collected on a new, expanded “very best of” package from EMI titled, a la Bob Marley’s, Legend) is still a bit of a shock — and a reminder that gut-wrenchers such as Kurt Cobain and Alanis Morrisette stand in Lennon’s shadow.
Songs of devotion to the beloved are not rare, but his paean to Yoko Ono, Woman, is so patently heart-felt, so clearly without artifice, that one almost feels a pang of embarrassment for the poor chap. Of course it is still superbly well-made in its very simplicity, but this is a defiantly grown- up song, one filled with human frailty, a whole lived-in narrative underneath it. No need for romantic stylings.
Between the harrowing and the touching moments are all Lennon’s myriad moods: gently utopian on Imagine, bitingly bitter on Working Class Hero, ruefully reflective on Jealous Guy, dreamily mystic on the gorgeous Mind Games.
Where were you when you heard he’d been shot?