Lennon’s first record release after the split of the Beatles revealed a man more pissed off about things than he appeared to be. The most political he’d ever gotten with the Beatles was on ‘Taxman’ where they moaned about VAT and Harold Wilson, mainly because they’d just gotten very rich indeed and were strangely reluctant to part with any of it for all their talk of Love being All You Need. The only time he mentioned his long deceased mother during his Beatles years was on ‘Julia’, the beautiful, wafting, rose-tinted acoustic song off The White Album. But on this record he lets rip with the brilliant bitterness of ‘Working Class Hero’ tearing shreds from the fabric of society like it was an old newspaper he’d found lying in the gutter. Then on ‘Mother’ and ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ he performs some sort of sonic exorcism right before our very ears, primal screaming the memory of his mother’s abandonment and premature death into some kind of psychoanalytical void. If he’d just made this record and quit music forever it would have been perfect. But of course he didn’t. And no, ‘Imagine’ isn’t on it.
Rating: 3 out of 5 (Gold)
Reviewed by Gordon Peppard
Lennon’s first record release after the split of the Beatles revealed a man more pissed off about things than he appeared to be. The most political he’d ever gotten with the Beatles was on ‘Taxman’ where they moaned about VAT and Harold Wilson, mainly because they’d just gotten very rich indeed and were strangely reluctant to part with any of it for all their talk of Love being All You Need. The only time he mentioned his long deceased mother during his Beatles years was on ‘Julia’, the beautiful, wafting, rose-tinted acoustic song off The White Album. But on this record he lets rip with the brilliant bitterness of ‘Working Class Hero’ tearing shreds from the fabric of society like it was an old newspaper he’d found lying in the gutter. Then on ‘Mother’ and ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ he performs some sort of sonic exorcism right before our very ears, primal screaming the memory of his mother’s abandonment and premature death into some kind of psychoanalytical void. If he’d just made this record and quit music forever it would have been perfect. But of course he didn’t. And no, ‘Imagine’ isn’t on it.