Why Lennon’s message of peace remains so potent
The weekend on television Gerard O’donovan
The spirit of revolution was alive and well in John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (Channel 4, Saturday), a documentary celebrating John Lennon’s peace, love and occasionally anger-laden 1971 album Imagine and, in particular, the much-admired title track.
This wasn’t so much the untold story of the making of a classic album as a fascinating addendum to an iconic story which had already been told in the companion film released by Lennon, Yoko Ono and director Steve Gebhardt in 1972, and fleshed out even more in Andrew Solt’s tribute Gimme Some Truth.
Here director Michael Epstein took the story further. He had access to Lennon and Ono’s personal archive and, for obsessives, unearthed previously unseen film footage of recording sessions, interview material, and early run-throughs of Imagine, Jealous Guy and How? But what this film really did was provide context. Not only in the words and memories of people who contributed musically to the album – drummers Jim Keltner and Alan White, bassist Klaus Voormann among others – but also friends, hangers-on, assistants, photographers and journalists who captured a precise moment in the personal and creative lives of Lennon and Ono.
Despite being only eight at the time, Julian Lennon was particularly good on the bubble that existed at Tittenhurst Park, the Surrey mansion where the album was recorded. Also captured, by Voormann and others, was the extent to which Lennon Snr felt trapped by the overwhelming fame of the Beatles, and how his emotional attachment to Ono was linked to that – throwing fresh light, in turn, on his radical change in musical direction following the band’s break-up a year earlier.
More than anything, though, this film sought to give Ono the equal credit many (including Lennon in a 1980 interview replayed here) said she should have had for her contribution to Imagine’s title track. As a result, what emerged from what might otherwise have been just a gentle retrospective was a remarkably rounded picture of two emotionally fused and radically engaged talents working together to condense their thoughts on art, politics, love and music into one of the best-known and commercially successful protest songs ever.
In so doing, it also reminded us of how and why Lennon’s – and Ono’s – central message of peace, love and people-power remains so potent to this day. The fraught politics of the early Seventies also underpinned the altogether bleaker A Great British Injustice: the Maguire Story (BBC Two, Sunday). This was the highly emotional story of how Annie Maguire, her husband Patrick, and sons Vincent, 16, and Patrick, 13, were arrested along with three others in December 1974 and convicted of involvement in the Guildford and Woolwich IRA pub bombings, which killed seven people and injured dozens more.
What became known as the case of the “Maguire Seven”, alongside that of the “Guildford Four”, quickly coalesced into one of the major causes célèbres of the Eighties – until their convictions were quashed in 1991, followed by full exoneration in 2005. It’s a case that’s been explored in many reports and films before. But what this programme did was convey a visceral sense of the incomprehensible horror of being the victim of such injustice; of being one of an entire family arrested, torn apart, abused, publicly vilified and imprisoned for years for a crime they did not commit.
“At its heart,” said BBC Northern Ireland presenter Stephen Nolan, “is what it has done to a 13-year-old child who is damaged to this day, tormented by his wrongful conviction.” And 44 years on, Patrick Maguire wept through large parts of his interview with Nolan in which he described terrifying interrogations, and he claimed to being repeatedly punched by investigators, and even having a gun held to his head and his life threatened. Of how, on conviction, even as a child, he was treated as a Category A prisoner and kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.
“People say move on,” Patrick said. “But when I tell the story, I see it, and I feel it. I actually relive it and that’s why it hurts so much.” Annie Maguire had similarly disturbing stories to tell, as did others. By the end of the interviews even Nolan was visibly wrung out – a feeling many viewers will have shared. This was not an argument, more a raw cry from the heart. You could only watch, be horrified, and acknowledge the injustice done.
John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky
A Great British Injustice: the Maguire Story