I’m Not The Only One

Katyboo has been tackling a meme:

Think of 20 albums that had such a profound effect on you that they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world.

I tried this, and failed miserably because of my inability to be concise. Before I knew what was happening, I had written an entire post about one single song, so I had to abandon the meme for now. Maybe I’ll compile a list of twenty songs instead, but even at that, I’ll have to post them one at a time if they each provide me with a post of this length…

My No. 1 song of influence: Imagine – John Lennon

You can picture my mother’s horror when I came downstairs one afternoon as a twelve-year-old and said I just heard this COOL song on the radio, do you know it? and proceeded to sing a few lines from Imagine. She looked at me, her hands frozen in motion amongst the plates in the kitchen sink, and I felt the waves of disappointment and disbelief emanating from her. That is John Lennon, she said very slowly and deliberately. I completely understand how she felt. If a twelve-year-old came up to me today and didn’t know who John Lennon was, I would be just as outraged. It’s unacceptable.

John Lennon meant a lot to me from that point on. I became fascinated by the Beatles, but John, with his cute round glasses and messy long hair and scruffy beard and hippy-dippy ethics and radical beliefs really captured my… well, imagination. I loved him. I still do. The Parents lost custody of all their Beatles albums and Lennon cassettes from that day forth, and I was increasingly to be found in my bedroom reading conspiracy theories and becoming angry about the state of the world and singing along passionately to Working Class Hero.

When things started getting really silly in Northern Ireland again during my teens (the Omagh bomb; the Drumcree protests; the Harryville chapel protests that meant our home was in the middle of a ridiculous swarm of local thugs and entire defence lines of riot-geared police every weekend), I started to hate the place. We studied Irish history at school, and I hated it. I had a serious falling-out with my best friend over the head of it all, and I started actively avoiding Northern Irish news stories and dreaming of living elsewhere. It made little sense to me. I was brought up in a very peaceful home by very easy-going, live-and-let-live parents, and all the bitterness and fighting and pettiness seemed absurd to me, a dreamy teen who would rather have lived through the Sixties and gone to Woodstock and smoked dope, with flowers in my hair.

John Lennon was a huge source of comfort and inspiration to me. I clung to the line You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one as proof that it was OK to not want to get sucked into the politics and insanity of my home country; that it was OK to dream of peace and love and harmony; that it was OK to hate hatred. When I left NI for university in Scotland, my love for Lennon accompanied me, along with several CDs and posters of him, a passion for attending peace rallies and anti-war demonstrations, and a ban the bomb sign tattooed on my shoulder. I can quite honestly say that of all the songs that have affected me and influenced me throughout my life, none has done so more profoundly and significantly than John Lennon’s Imagine. It shaped who I became and gave me hope that most people did just want peace, despite how things appeared to me. It may not be my favourite song, or the best song in the world. In fact, it’s fairly simple and uncomplicated.

But for me, that’s the beauty of it. Live in peace. Simple. Uncomplicated.

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one