I don't believe in Beatles

As you may have noticed, a lot of people have been marking the 25th anniversary of the shooting of John Lennon. Mostly this takes the forms you would expect. Vaguely nauseating essays about "What John Lennon Taught Me."

Look, Lennon is a hero. He's one of my heroes. And I understand his place as an icon of the '60s. But what I can't stand is the Ono-approvoved, "Imagine"-documentary and "Rolling Stone" style deification of the man.

You may say he was a dreamer, I say he was also a woman-beating, family-abandoning drug addict. How do I know that? Because he was quite open about it in interviews and his own songs. I may be wrong, but I believe that a man who talked so much about insisting upon the truth would want the whole truth told about himself.

Those parts of the truth seem to get left out in all the attempts to enshrine Lennon and declare his songs "hymns" and "anthems". Even though that truth doesn't, to me, lessen his creative or personal accomplishments.

When I say he was and is a hero, I mean it in both senses. Artistically, obviously. If I could write one thing that meant as much to somebody as "Strawberry Fields Forever" has meant to me, I'd be a happy man.

But personally, too. This was a man who saw where his thinking was screwed and his behaivor was bad, and strove to correct them. That's fucking impressive. To paint a picture of his life with nothing bad or nasty in it, that's what lessens his creative and personal accomplishments.

And that's what seems to get lost in all the glory and tribute, as though he were placed on earth by angels, a Liverpool urchin whose feet never quite touched the ground.