lunes, 9 de octubre de 2017

Happy birthday John Lennon! Remembering the star's most poignant lyrics





www.liverpoolecho.co.uk
Happy birthday John Lennon! Remembering the star's most poignant lyrics
The Beatles' legend's words are as relevant today as ever
Kate Lally
9 OCT 2017
Beatles legend John Lennon would have been celebrating his birthday today.
Lennon was shot dead outside his New York apartment in 1980.
He packed a lifetime into his 40 years, forming the most famous and successful group the world has ever known, becoming dad to two sons and promoting the idea of world peace.

John Lennon in New York's Central Park, for a photocall on 9 February 1964, during the group's first tour of the United States.
John Lennon in New York's Central Park, for a photocall on 9 February 1964, during the group's first tour of the United States.

His life, although short, influenced an entire era as he became an inspirational figure through his political activism efforts.
His post-Beatles track, “Imagine” was his most critically acclaimed solo work and was named number three on Rolling Stone’s “All-Time Best Songs” list.
Today, on what should have been his 77th birthday, we look back at some of his best lyrics - both as a solo artist and as part of The Fab Four.

"Life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend"

Recorded over two days in sessions amounting to 11 hours - The Beatles' longest time spent completing a song to date - We Can Work It Out bore the distinctive hallmarks of both its songwriters.
But this poignant line was all Lennon .
He said of the song: "You've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out, we can work it out' - real optimistic, y'know, and me impatient: 'Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.'"

"War is over if you want it"

As relevant now as ever, John and Yoko's Christmas song echoed the earlier peace and political messages of songs like Give Peace A Chance and Power To The People
Lennon said of the song; "It's still that same message - we're just as responsible as the man who pushes the button.
"As long as people imagine that somebody's doing it to them, and that they have no control, then they have no control."

"Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup; They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe"

John Lennon wrote Across The Universe in the early hours one morning.
But he didn't even intend to. He said: "It's not a matter of craftsmanship; it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed.
"It's like being possessed; like a psychic or a medium. The thing has to go down.
"It won't let you sleep, so you have to get up, make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. I's always in the middle of the bloody night, when you're half awake or tired and your critical facilities are switched off."

"Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see"

An undisputed Beatles masterpiece, Strawberry Fields was first released alongside Penny Lane .

John Lennon with wife Yoko Ono at the Apple offices in Savile Row, London circa November 1969.

This lyric is a classic Lennonism - not seeing the truth makes life easy because you don't have to think about it and deal with it, you can just pretend that everything is fine.
Deep.

"We all shine on! Like the moon and the stars and the sun"

Lennon wrote Instant Karma! in less than an hour.
He boasted his third single with the Plastic Ono band was "written for breakfast, recorded for lunch and would be put out for dinner"
And we absolutely have to mention its refrain 'We All Shine On' - which is almost too catchy.

"All You Need Is Love"

Lennon said: "I think if you get down to basics, whatever the problem is, it's usually to do with love. So I think 'All You Need is Love' is a true statement.
"It doesn't mean that all you have to do is put on a phoney smile or wear a flower dress and it's gonna be alright. Love is not just something that you stick on posters or stick on the back of your car, or on the back of your jacket or on a badge.
"I'm talking about real love, so I still believe that. Love is appreciation of other people and allowing them to be. Love is allowing somebody to be themselves and that's what we do need."

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans"

This paradoxical phrase from Beautiful Boy resonates with so many of us.
We want to enjoy our life now but we can't help but make plans for the future.
Lennon doesn’t say we shouldn’t make plans, but that the true experience of being alive is beyond those plans, and “happens” to us.

"Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun... If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain"

With no obvious rhyme or reason, I Am The Walrus was written in three parts.
More than a decade after he composed it, Lennon said of the song: "The words didn't mean a lot. People draw so many conclusions. What does it really mean?"
Not a lot, apparently.
He went on to say: "'I am the Eggman?' It could have been 'The pudding Basin' for all I care. It's not that serious."

"All we are saying is: Give Peace A Chance"

Another that's as needed now as it ever was, the 1969 single by (John Lennon's) Plastic Ono Band became an anthem of the American anti-war movement at that time.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono appear on Thames Television's 'Today' programme with Eamonn Andrews. Eamonn started the programme in a bed and was joined by John and Yoko who emerged out of a bag at the bottom of the bed. 1st April 1969.

When asked by a reporter what he was trying to achieve by staying in bed, Lennon answered spontaneously "Just give peace a chance" - and it stuck.

"Picture yourself on a boat in a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies"

Shortly after the release of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds , speculation arose that the first letter of each of the title nouns intentionally spelled "LSD"
However, Lennon simply said: "My son [Julian] came home with a drawing of a woman flying around and I asked 'What is it?' and he said 'It's Lucy in the sky, with diamonds' and it was beautiful, so I immediately wrote a song about it."
The song's fantastical imagery is said to have been inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland.

"All these places have their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall; some are dead and some are living - in my life I've loved them all"

According to Beatles Bible , In My Life was written mostly by John Lennon, and started out as a nostalgic set of memories of Liverpool.
In My Life has topped each of our readers’ polls of favourite Beatles songs in the last few years. John Lennon’s poignant song of love and loss appeared on the 1965 album Rubber Soul and is frequently played at Merseyside weddings.

"A working class hero is something to be..."

"As soon as you're born they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.
"Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all: A working class hero is something to be."
Lennon's political ditty is a comment on the difference between social classes.
He told Rolling Stone it was about working class individuals being processed into 'the machine'.

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one"

Last, but by no means least, John Lennon's Imagine was the best-selling song of John Lennon's solo career.
The lyrics encourage listeners to imagine a world at peace - without the barriers or borders of religion or nationality, without the need for material possessions.
When asked about the song's meaning during a December 1980 interview with David Sheff, Lennon said: "If you can imagine a world at peace, then it can be true."












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20 Underappreciated John Lennon Solo Songs





www.rollingstone.com
20 Underappreciated John Lennon Solo Songs
A batch of tracks, from Lennon's official studio albums, that deserve extra limelight
By David Fricke
December 10, 2010



John Lennon's solo career was as rich and turbulent as his years in the Beatles, a whirl of hits, adventure and emotional crisis. On the 30th anniversary of his passing and in conjunction with Rolling Stone's landmark publication of "The Lost Lennon Tapes" – Jonathan Cott's epic interview just days before Lennon's death – here are twenty tracks from the official studio albums that deserve extra limelight.

 John Lennon recording Double Fantasy, NYC 1980.
"Hold On," John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970
Even as he swore "I don't believe in Beatles," on his solo debut, Lennon drew from that body of brilliance, as a bridge into the record's raw confessions. This brief diamond opens with a melancholy run on tremolo guitar, echoing the R&B sigh of "Don't Let Me Down," his '69 B-side to "Get Back." The lyrics are a simple prescription, sung with comforting poise – a rare moment of assurance on a record wracked with pain and self-discovery.
"Remember," John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970
Lennon charged back to the dashed ideals of childhood and abandonment by his father ("Remember how the man/Used to leave you empty handed/Always, always let you down") with stark fistfuls of Little Richard-like piano across Ringo Starr's strident beat. The cryptic reference at the end to "the 5th of November" – the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day – with an A-bomb-like explosion was Lennon having a last laugh: recalling a teenage prank involving his Quarrymen pal Pete Shotton and a bonfire that got out of control.

"Isolation," John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970
Amid the blunt pronoucements about maternal need, renounced faith and eternal love for his wife and creative partner, Yoko Ono, unleashed by the couple's experiences in primal-scream therapy, "Isolation" was Lennon at his most afraid, confronting his post-Beatle freedom with paranoia and insecurity. It's "Help" without the electric-guitar chime, stripped to the barest piano gestures and, right before the bridge, a silence broken only by Ringo Starr's kick-drum thump, sounding like the loudest heartbeat in the world.
"Crippled Inside," Imagine, 1971
Lennon followed the opening peace anthem on his second album with this grenade wrapped in rockabilly rhythm and prairie-saloon piano, with a slinky country-boy solo on dobro by George Harrison. The chorus – "One thing you can't hide/Is when you're crippled inside" – may have been a slap at ex-bandmate Paul McCartney (who would get it full blast on Side Two, in "How Do You Sleep?"). But when Lennon wrote in the second person, he often did it staring into a mirror.

"It's So Hard," Imagine, 1971
This funky march is like "Yer Blues" from The Beatles, with an ironed-out beat and hearty blasts of tenor saxophone by King Curtis. "Sometimes I feel like goin' down," Lennon sings in a bitter growl. But the shove of the rhythm section and Lennon's distinctive hammering on piano sound anything but defeated.


Una foto poco conocida de John Lennon. Bien sonriente sale.
"I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier, Mama, I Don't Wanna Die," Imagine, 1971
This chant of refusal was barely a song – a couple of chords and variations on the title line ("rich man," "lawyer," "church man," "failure"). The jamming was rare on a Lennon record – more like an outtake from a Rolling Stones session for Sticky Fingers, with Nicky Hopkins on piano for added authenticity. But King Curtis disrupts the churn with strafing peals of sax, and George Harrison's slide guitar courses through the track like jungle vine.

"Woman Is the Nigger of the World," Sometime in New York City, 1972
Before Patti Smith wrote "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger" and black rappers claimed the racist epithet as a signifier for ghetto brotherhood, Lennon tested his privileges at Top 40 radio with the chorus of this feminist manifesto, written with Ono, as the first single from Sometime in New York City. For extra perversity, Lennon set his soapbox vocal and underground-wire-service lyrics to a hearty retro blast of American Fifties R&B. Nevertheless, the single made it to Number 57 on Billboard's Top 100 – which means itdid get on the air. Mission accomplished.

"New York City," Sometime in New York City, 1972
A delightful break from the protest rhymes and billboard-pop writing on this album, "New York City" combines the sunny-boogie autobiography of the '68 Beatles single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" with Lennon's enthusiasm for his adopted hometown. David Peel, Lennon's new house band Elephant's Memory and the Staten Island Ferry all get name checks, and the production, with Phil Spector, is what Rock 'n' Roll might have sounded like without the booze and excessive reverb.

"Tight A$," Mind Games, 1973
For a record made on the eve of his greatest personal crisis – his estrangement from Ono and the so-called "Lost Weekend" – Mind Gameshas surprising jolts of fun, like this country-bar-band romp. The song and gait are Sun-era Elvis Presley, while the skidding pedal-steel guitar is L.A.-cowboy rock played by an expert – Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers.

"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)," Mind Games, 1973
Much of Lennon's solo career was an ongoing examination of his relationship with Ono – the constant cycle of affection, passion, guilt and reconciliation – and he often wrote directly to her, as in this torch-soul song, partly sung in Japanese. "Darling I promise I won't do it again," Lennon swears, between splashes of ivory-rain piano and Kleinow's short pedal-steel sighs, although it would be another year before Lennon could make that promise stick.


John Lennon
"Out the Blue," Mind Games, 1973
The opening seconds – just Lennon's voice and acoustic guitar – are like a deep breath before the dramatic exhale of this strangely underrated ballad. It is another song to Ono, and the desperation is rising: "All my life's been a long slow knife/I was born just to get to you." More fascinating and moving is Lennon's rapturous production, an uncanny echo of Spector's pocket-symphony arrangement of "The Long and Winding Road" on the Beatles'Let It Be – but with the emphasis on poignance.

"Scared," Walls and Bridges, 1974
Lennon's painful exile from Ono was still in effect when he recorded this frank assessment of how far he had fallen. It was as if he had turned the bleak-R&B ire of "How Do You Sleep?" on himself. "No bell book or candle/Can get you out of this," he sings, an allusion to excommunication in the medieval church, mocked by the weeping volume-knob effect on Jesse Ed Davis' guitar fills. Lennon's idea of salvation – reunion with Ono – was just a few months down the road. Here it sounds a million miles away.

"Bless You," Walls and Bridges, 1974
In this overlooked Walls and Bridges song, Lennon makes no secret of his stubborn anticipation of a return home: "Some people say it's over/Now that we spread our wings/But we know better darling/The hollow ring is only last year's echo." A revealing rehearsal take, issued on the 1986 compilation, Menlove Avenue, may be the better performance: Lennon singing in a charged quiet with the spare jangle of his and Davis' guitars and the click of drummer Jim Keltner's stick on the rim of his snare, like time passing slowly but surely, in the right direction.

"Steel and Glass," Walls and Bridges, 1974
Whatever admiration and gratitude he had for Allen Klein – the New York executive who ruthlessly fixed the Beatles' runaway finances at Apple in the early Seventies – was gone, with extreme prejudice, by the time Lennon recorded this song for Walls and Bridges. Ultimately, "Steel and Glass" was less about Klein than Lennon's accumulated loathing for the businessmen and con artists who had been feeding off him and his old band since Beatles lunchboxes. The strings are scored like piercing needles, and the phasing on Lennon's voice makes him sound like a hissing snake.

"Cleanup Time," Double Fantasy, 1980
Lennon obviously had the radio on while he was cooking and caring for his son Sean at the Dakota. This playful rendering of the daily routine in his house-husband years – "The queen is in the counting house/Counting out the money/The king is in the kitchen, making bread and money" – rolls like a Chic single, with a cocky disco-rhythm bridge and a brass section that sounds like it just got off work at a burlesque house.


John Lennon and Yoko Ono // August 20th 1980.Love this photo - almost gives an insight into a much more mature man
"I'm Losing You," Double Fantasy, 1980
Domestic life did not come without complications: "Can't even get you on the telephone," Lennon sings in this worried blues, written while he was vacationing with Sean in Bermuda and Ono was in New York, attending to business. The harmonized guitars come with a dirty sting, and Lennon's vocal turns from seething frustration to frantic command – "Stop the bleeding now!" – just before the instrumental break.

"Dear Yoko," Double Fantasy, 1980
Lennon loved singing his wife's name. The treat here is the Buddy Holly effect he puts on his voice as he goes into this love letter – a cheerful strut with perky buzzing guitars – and the exhilaration in his voice all the way through, a remarkable show of the pleasure and security Lennon still found in Yoko's company.

"Borrowed Time," Milk and Honey, 1984"Good to be older/Would not exchange a single day or a year," Lennon sang in this pop-reggae outtake from the Double Fantasy sessions, written by Lennon in Bermuda with a title inspired by Bob Marley's "Hallelujah Time." The comic recitation in the middle might have been something to fill the instrumental break until someone played a proper guitar solo. But Lennon's impromptu stab at Jamaican-DJ patois – in a harsh Liverpool accent – is a warming snapshot of the ex-Beatles in his middle years, aging far but gracefully.

"I'm Stepping Out," Milk and Honey, 1984
"One more ... Hold it down": You can hear Lennon calling out instructions to the studio band on this unfinished song from the Double Fantasysessions. But the attitude in all there: the spoken opening, about a house husband itching to bolt the premises and get some action; the impatient stride and Lennon's edgy singing, skipping up to falsetto in the chorus. "After all is said and done/You can't go pleasin' everyone/So screw it," he sings, stretching the last line with dismissive relish. Long hours at the oven had not dulled that acerbic charm.

"Grow Old With Me," from Milk and Honey, 1984
This song was Lennon's half of a pair of songs he and Ono wrote near the end of the Double Fantasy sessions, inspired by the poems of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browinig. The imminent deadline for finishing that album forced Lennon and Ono to hold both tunes (Ono's was called "Let Me Count the Ways") for a followup LP. Lennon's death ensured thar his cassette demo of "Grow Old With Me" would be his only recording of the song. Beatles producer George Martin later created a version with new orchestration, draped over that tape, for The John Lennon Anthology. But Lennon's simple plea for the only kind of long life that matters is best heard the way he left it: a fragile high-pitched vocal, piano-lesson-like accompaniment and a cheap rhythm machine, counting the minutes like a hallway clock – one that, in a perfect world, had never stopped.


 John Lennon and Yoko Ono in front of The Dakota, 72nd st. and Central Park West, September 1980. Photo by: Kishin Shinoyama


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sábado, 7 de octubre de 2017

Liam Gallagher has a brilliant story about the last time he saw Paul McCartney










www.nme.com
Liam Gallagher has a brilliant story about the last time he saw Paul McCartney
By Andrew Trendell
Oct 6, 2017

 Liam Gallagher and Paul McCartney
Liam Gallagher and Paul McCartney
Credit: Getty

 He got confused as to whether he was being offered a cocktail or a pizza

 Liam Gallagher has hailed Sir Paul McCartney as ‘an absolute dream’ – sharing a tale of confusion from when the pair last met.

 The former Oasis and Beady Eye frontman had previously said that he preferred John Lennon to McCartney, comparing him to his brother Noel for being ‘too nice‘. Now speaking to NME for this week’s cover feature to launch his acclaimed debut solo album ‘As You Were‘, Gallagher had nothing but fond memories of the legendary Beatle.

 “I’ve met him a few times he’s been absolutely a dream,” Gallagher told NME. “The last time was at the Royal Albert Hall. He goes, ‘Why are you always in a rush? Sit down, sit down’. I sit down and he goes, ‘Do you like margaritas?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I had something before I come out, I don’t eat at this time of night’.
“He said, ‘They’re fuckin’ drinks, you stupid prick’. I thought he was offering me a pizza.”

“John Lennon means everything to me,” Gallagher told NME back in 2012. “I wouldn’t say he’s a better songwriter than McCartney, I’d say they’re both different but great. But I like Lennon’s stuff more because it’s a bit more beautiful, and it’s more mad.”

 He added: “McCartney’s like Noel – he’s too nice. Lennon was twisted and I like that kinda shit. His voice is the main thing I love. I like his speaking voice! That’s pretty fucking mega. But his voice when he sings is the one. Political voice? Don’t give a shit, couldn’t care less about politics. But everything else – his singing voice, his songs, and his words – means the world to me.”



Today also saw Gallagher announce the support acts for his upcoming UK arena tour.

 ‘As You Were’ by Liam Gallagher is out now.
Image result for paul mccartney liam gallagher
Paul And Liam Gallagher At Beatles Film Screening

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