Andrew Sarris, doyen of auteurist film critics, dubbed A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”. Wild over-praise, or sly, back-handed compliment?"Jukebox musical" connotes the sort of "exploitation film" Elvis churned out. Corporate suits with Dollar sign eyes may have wanted to exploit The Beatles, but the band were too savvy. Despite the fact that pop phenomena tended to fizzle out fast, meaning their time in the spotlight might be limited, The Beatles had refused several film offers before A Hard Day’s Night, holding out for something real, something, in John Lennon’s Read more ...

Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”Gould is more than good enough, and he spent nearly two decades writing his book; whereas Ian Leslie has worked his up from a Covid-era blog post paean to Paul McCartney that went, as they say, viral. Leslie attests to Read more ...

Purporting to be a documentary about John Lennon in the 1970s, Borrowed Time is no such thing. Instead, we have a lot of fan boys stating the bleeding obvious and covering a much longer period of time. On the other hand, there are some really interesting and illuminating details here, so the film is an absolute must for fans.Touring plans for 1981 were afoot when Mark Chapman changed the world. And it was going to be extraordinary technically (Lennon’s brief was "to give Mick and Elton ulcers"), a glimpse of which is recreated here. Tariq Ali, Bob Harris, Earl Slick and many, many others ( Read more ...

When first I clicked on the stream for this album, I really wasn’t sure about it. In fact, I thought I wasn’t going to like it, much as I had wanted to. But I’ve had it playing almost continuously while I’ve been dealing with mindless stuff – and I’ve come to like it.Not without reservations of course – there are always reservations – but it’s got under my skin and I’m now properly in the groove, appreciating what Lucinda Williams is doing, delving into this most hallowed of song catalogues and bravely tackling numbers that are rarely, if ever, covered. As is her way.Take “Yer Blues”, and “I’ Read more ...

At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...

Its more than 50 years since Yoko Ono first presented Mend Piece at the Indica Gallery, London in the exhibition through which she met John Lennon. The piece is currently being revisited at the Whitechapel Gallery and, in the intervening years, its meaning has subtly shifted. Strewn over four tables are dozens of broken cups and saucers along with everything you need to attempt a botched repair – glue, sellotape, scissors and string.According to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired using lacquer mixed with precious metals like gold and silver that are clearly visible Read more ...

Back in the mid-Eighties, BBC television started broadcasting The Rock'n' Roll Years, one of the first rock music retrospectives. Each half-hour episode focused on a year, with news reports and music intermixed to give a revealing look at the development of rock culture against the context of current affairs.That is more or less the basic template employed by the makers of Apple TV+’s new eight-parter, 1971 - The Year that Music Changed Everything,  ballooning that half-hour to around about six hours of great music, incredible footage, and more great music. It’s loosely based on David Read more ...

Not just a mere rock star but spiritual guru, peace campaigner, political icon, thorn in the flesh of Richard Nixon and the CIA, and ultimately martyr. John Lennon, who would have been 75 today (9 October), has proved an impossible act to follow. Even his former songwriting partner Paul McCartney, who's hardly been deprived of adulation over the last few decades, can't get over the fact that Lennon has achieved that mythic status known only to a rarefied handful. "The fact that he's now martyred has elevated him to a James Dean, and beyond," Macca moped in a recent Esquire interview. We can Read more ...

Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Since his big break in the harrowing Let Him Have It (1991), playing Derek Bentley who at 19 was the last man to be hanged in Britain, Eccleston has played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kate Winslet (Jude, 1996), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Nicole Kidman (The Others, 2001).However, his best work has undoubtedly been reserved for the small screen. He is, of Read more ...

December 1980 "Our life is so precious together/ We have grown - we have grown/ Although our love is still special/Let’s take a chance and fly away somewhere alone".The first words of "(Just Like) Starting Over" weren't bad but they weren't that good either; a bit mawkish, a bit sentimental, but plain, honest, unambiguous. They were a very long way from Lennon's anguished recollection, in an interview shortly before 8 December 1980, of how things had been when he and Yoko had first got together:"I couldn’t understand why people wanted to throw rocks at her or punish me for being in love Read more ...

The couples profiled in the series included the likes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Monroe and Miller, and remoter figures from the German 19th century. Pop hadn’t made it onto the list, though I learnt, once embarked on the commission, that Lennon-Ono had been considered but no author found. In 1996, I happened to be in the right place (Berlin) at the right time.John Lennon und Yoko Ono - zwei Rebellen, eine Poplegende (the last four words mean “two rebels, one pop legend”: the publisher's, not my, subtitle) went on to be one of the series’ bestselling books. My Read more ...

The BBC just can't stop showing that flipping Lennon Naked drama. No sooner have we emerged from the Fatherhood Season, where it first appeared, than we're into a John Lennon Night on BBC Four, featuring Lennon Naked again under a new temporary flag of convenience. Chances are it'll ricochet back into the schedules for another encore when they do a Motherhood Season, Lennon being better known for writing songs about his mother Julia than about his unreliable dad.But earlier in the evening came the Classic Albums documentary about Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, his post-Beatles solo debut Read more ...