POP
Burtons of hip
DUNCAN FALLOWELL
The Lennons are with us again. You can tell because the pollen count drops and average Englishmen everywhere purse their thin lips waiting for a meteoric shower of genitalia and four-letter words to hit their ever-ready frontal lobes. Hotfoot from a kid-tugging contest in the Balearics and after considerable time in America — I mean, the States — John and Yoko return to a country which adores and reviles them, genuflects and spits as our couple drive down an avenue of craning necks and pull faces through blacked out windows, REVOLUTION spilling into the gutter from the exhaust pipe of their Rolls. Why are they disliked? Because they've made it from nowhere — John from Liverpool, Yoko from Japan — and they've made it by breaking all the rules about breaking all the rules. Why then are they fondled and loved? Because people like having their noses tweaked. And because anyone who has made a million can't be all bad.
Nonetheless, without ever suggesting that the fire has gone out Of their protest, they do seem to have struck an attractive vein of amiability at present. Did you pop into Selfridge's the other day for a signed copy of Yoko's ingenious book, Grapefruit? Service with a smile indeed. If you had hung around long enough, and I don't know anyone who did, you might have caught Papa Wilson at it too with his latest, For Whom the Division Bell Tolls. Or what about television's Parkinson? It is always worth watching if only to see how the tremendous mingle with the trash. Michael Parkinson, actually, seems to have accepted the kiss of death by taking on a chat programme (tragi-comic shades of Frost, Dee and Nimmo) but he jollied along nicely with the Lennons, despite being put in a bag for mentioning the Beatles, who, it was re-emphasized, are Just Four Men of considerable talents doing their multifarious things, not a high school team of bobbysockers beloved by Mums and Dads because they were — or appeared to be — safe. To survive, the Beatles had to break out. A society in which young people do not show a bit of muscle (long live Oz!) is not one to inspire confidence. Unlike caution, timidity never did anything.
As for Yoko, she is looking so chi-chi these days, in a take it or leave it sort of way, that Liz Taylor would call her brother, though one hesitates to think what she would call Liz Taylor. In fact, even if they are both now in the dreaded thirties, the dynamic duo have virtually become the Burtons of Hip. Soon to be released on Apple is Yoko's new album, Fly, which was devised with the assistance of the Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Company (Joe Jones's collection of electronic devices and automatic instruments based in New York). Her previous album was probably the most sinister record of the year, something like an abortion with pickaxes, and were it not for fear of ending up yet again in Pseud's Corner, I'd call it a classic of psycho-rock. The new one promises to be more fun.
The same goes for John Lennon's imminent offering, also on Apple. Having gone through the therapeutic catharsis bit, he is at the moment "fairly happy, quite In love and having a nice time." Apotheosis, a film of his shown at Cannes and included in this year's Edinburgh Festival, records the slow ascent of a hot air balloon above the English winter countryside, very peaceful, very silent, very magical. So perhaps he has realised that it is fine to bellow about interior and exterior messes but that if you stop there, mess is what you are left with.
Previous page
