Music Arcades: John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band

Thinking back, it was probably via Johnny Rogan's first book on Neil Young, in the early eighties, that I heard about this phase of John Lennon's career. Rogan compared Neil's post-Harvest "ditch trilogy" (Time Fades Away, On the Beach, Tonight's the Night) to Lennon in 1970, with both men turning their back on past success — notably with Lennon proclaiming "I don't believe in Beatles" on God.

Towards the end of the eighties — further influenced by its inclusion in NME's top ten albums of all time^* — I thought I was buying this album, but I got the wrong Plastic Ono Band album by mistake. It wasn't until the end of the next decade that I corrected this error and picked up this CD, for under a fiver from Fopp.

By then, I'm afraid, the moment had passed for me. If I cared about the curve of Lennon's career, or his biography, the way I care about Neil's, then I'm sure this album would hold a lot of significance for me. But it's the only one of his that I've ever heard, and, stripped of all context, the main thing I hear is the bitterness.

^* N.B. There were no Beatles albums in the top ten, and Sergeant Pepper wasn't in the Top 100. Hurrah for 1985! If you published a list like that in 2010, millions of twitterers would denounce you, within hours, as part of some Sino-Iranian axis of censorship hell-bent on denying free-thinking liberals the pleasures of the Hey Jude fade.