Birthday No. 1 Blues #10 - Imagine - John Lennon

I am ten years old, and a recently murdered Beatle is top of the Pops.

The Beatles were not part of my childhood till this point. My parents were young enough to have been huge fans, but they were soul kids and their small record collection was mostly Motown and Stax etc. Radio didn’t play them much and their films were never on. It was as though, having dominated the Sixties, it was time to move on. The Fab Four were the Covid of their day.

The only exposure to the Beatles I had up until this point was the occasional rendition of Yellow Submarine by one of our guitar-wielding primary school teachers at the end of the day.

At school, we had been given a project to report on something in the news and draw a picture. Being nine years old, the boys got very excited at the chance to draw a bearded rock star being assassinated in New York. On realising this, our teacher removed the drawing element of the task.

I stuck with writing about John Lennon’s murder. I put something like “and this murder is particularly sad as it has happened just before Christmas.” I was pleased with this observation and waited for the approval of my teacher. Much like John Lennon’s Boxing Day turd, it never materialised. Just a massive red “? !” next to it. My first editorial hammering.

How do I feel about Imagine? It’s one of those perfectly competent but inescapable songs. It’s a bit like Angels by Robbie Williams, a lighter in the air song for the kind of cunt who has a lighter in the air mentality. The kind of meant to be optimistic anthem for positivity a long removed from reality pop star might write if the mood took him. Or the drugs had.

Anyway, it was number one. Beatles movies were all on telly. Suddenly everyone was talking about them. The Beatles were the new Beatles.

Hitting double figures did not prove to be a good omen. In March, I suffered a horrific facial injury at school which changed my life, or at least the next few years of it. In May we all nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning on holiday and on the very last day of my being ten, my beloved grandad finally succumbed to the old cancer.

Still, we did get to avoid 1981’s big event, the Royal Wedding. Where we lived was having a massive street party. I would probably have been mildly excited about it but instead of sitting amongst the local rabble amongst jelly and Union Jacks, my republican minded parents took us to the grave of Bobby Sands where we sat dolefully and read out passages from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist in between mouthfuls of Smash.

They didn’t really. Instead we went to see Clash of the Titans at a practically empty Maidstone Odeon. Whilst our future King was reading vows that he didn’t really mean to a woman that he would one day have assassinated* for getting knocked up by an Egyptian playboy, I was eating popcorn and watching Laurence Olivier sharing screen time with Pat Roach and a mechanical owl. Lennon was on the wrong drugs clearly…

* I jest. 

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 7

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week - Too Nice to Talk To - The Beat

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