22 Dreams

I bought an i-Pod recently. I've discovered it to be a most useful toy. It's fun to be able to listen to music in the car shuffled, so that you hear songs out of context with each other. Somehow you tend to listen better to each song, hear it fresh and new, and not take it so much for granted as you do when you're listening to it as part of an album. Besides, you get to hear songs you haven't heard in ages, songs from albums that you don't usually think to bung into your stereo, and that can be delightful to the musical senses! On the flight home from Cairns, as I was gazing down 10,000 metres onto the Queensland hinterland, I had the headphones of my i-Pod firmly entrenched into my ears. Only I didn't shuffle the songs this time, instead I was moved to listen to the Beatles' Abbey Road . As all my close friends would testify I'm a beatlemaniac if ever there was one. The Beatles are in my blood, so much so that I don't really need to listen to...

(The following is an article I wrote up some 3 years ago for a friend's magazine. I haven't rechecked for typos, there are likely to be many. Nor have I checked for obtuse expressions and grammatical anomolies of which I'm the master... Nevertheless, John Lennon has always been one of my greatest heroes.) 25 years on from the death of John Lennon finds his light shining as strong as ever. His impact as a songwriter remains untarnished and continues to grow in stature with each passing decade, along with his persona that has taken on iconic, legendary status. There is no doubt that Lennon is one of the greats of the modern era, but the question is, what was that which made him so particularly great?? For about 15 or so years after Lennon’s passing in 1980 at the age of 40, Paul McCartney has had to suffer the ignominy of being seen as the tawdry, wimpy Beatle in contrast to the deceased Lennon, who in turn was deified as the true creative genius of the Beatles. Perhaps it wa...