With the wonders of YouTube, Vimeo and other video internet platforms now at our fingertips, it’s hard to recall (or for younger people, imagine) a time when footage of John Lennon after The Beatles was harder to find than hen’s teeth. John never really engaged with promo films during his solo career in the way that his fellow Fabs did, and of course he missed out on the MTV age. The plethora of films he made with Yoko during and immediately after The Beatles’ split were long out of circulation by the 1980s, and likewise his many TV chat show appearances were consigned to dusty archive rooms. And concerts and candid home movie footage? Forget it. This began to change in the decade following his death, as Yoko began (in a very measured fashion, I think) to release such material onto the market, notably the 1971 Imagine film made to promote the album of the same name and the 1972 ‘One to One’ charity gig in New York, plus a motherlode of footage in the terrific Imagine: John Lennon documentary which emerged in 1988. But in early 1984, when the first posthumous ‘new’ Lennon recordings appeared, it must’ve been thrilling to see a bona fide pop video – for ‘Nobody Told Me’ – which was crammed with clips spanning his entire run as a solo artist.
‘Nobody Told Me’ was the lead single from 1984’s Milk and Honey album which – like its predecessor Double Fantasy – was divided evenly between alternating John and Yoko tunes, though Lennon’s material comprised mainly of unfinished studio rehearsals from his final recording sessions in the summer/autumn of 1980. Curiously, all but one of his songs were laid down early in those sessions but left uncompleted while he focused his attention on the seven numbers which made the cut for Double Fantasy. It’s not really clear if he’d have gone back to these tracks and used them as the basis of a follow-up album; and it’s widely held that ‘Nobody Told Me’ was in fact earmarked for Ringo, who was then cutting a host of tracks for what became 1981’s Stop and Smell The Roses and had already bagged contributions from Paul and George. The tragic events of 8 December meant the planned studio reunion with Ringo never took place, so the tune eventually surfaced as a fully-fledged Lennon number. And, while I’m sure Ringo would’ve done a decent enough job with it, hearing John performing it with such unbridled zest is an absolute joy. A wry, playful rocker, it’s got an unforgettable chorus hook reminiscent of ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Instant Karma’ and the kind of fun-but-profound lyrics he was so adept at. I love how he ends each verse with a non-sequitur, whether entreating his son Sean to finish his meal or recalling his own sighting of a UFO during the 1970s, which knocks you off guard and sends the song spinning into its bemused but irresistible chorus.
As opposed to the urgent pronouncements he made as an impassioned peacenik a decade before, this song is very much the more reflective view of a man entering middle age, seeing the humour as well as the sadness in the pointless scrambles of modern life (one can only guess at what John would’ve made of today’s social media-dominated world). My first memory of hearing it is on the radio during a family holiday in 1985 – around the dawn of my Beatles awakening, as it were. I had no idea it was an unfinished recording; in fact, I assumed it was a hit from his 1970s solo heyday, it seemed so instantly familiar (as so many Lennon/McCartney songs do). And while he might have fleshed it out a little more had he lived and decided to put it out under his own name – perhaps a few overdubs or harmonies here, a extra guitar part there – it still sounds great exactly as it is, and more than worthy of a place in the upper echelons of the Lennon canon.
And a few months after hearing it, as my new Fab Four obsession began to gather pace, a friend of mine showed me the video for the song, recorded when it was shown on the UK’s Top of the Pops (ah, those were the days, strange or otherwise). It was certainly my first exposure to a lot of John’s solo footage, and so was completely fascinating. It’s all been recycled in different formats many times since, of course, but then it seemed like lost treasure back then – especially as any film of John was finite, and we didn’t know how much there really was. While Paul was still regularly making videos and appearing on TV, any material of John taped up to 1980 was all we would ever have. And there was virtually no professionally-shot footage of him during his ‘househusband’ years in the second half of the 1970s. So the montage put together for ‘Nobody Told Me’ was a real feast for the eyes.
It draws heavily on the aforementioned Imagine film made in 1971 and aired on US TV the following year. You get to see John and Yoko larking around in New York’s Battery Park and on a beach elsewhere in the city, but many of the clips come from their final months at their home in Ascot, England. In particular, there’s a lengthy focus on John’s rather hapless attempt at rowing a boat around a lake in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park (he ends up laughing at his own ineptitude), plus the surreal images of the pair playing chess with all-white pieces and John shooting pool blindfolded (when he takes the blindfold off, he looks so much like Beatle John circa 1965). There are also excerpts from the Bed-In documentary documenting their high-profile peace campaign of 1969, replete with long hair, white outfits and pyjamas, as well as charming family home movie clips from years later, with the semi-retired Lennons teaching toddler Sean to swim. Curiously, there is also footage of John and Yoko from their early days, including the famous overlaying of each other’s faces on film in the summer of 1968 and a snippet of John goofing about during the Let It Be sessions a few months later. I say curiously, because John was still very much a card-carrying member of The Beatles at this point, though I guess you could argue his solo career began soon after he hooked up with Yoko (which I suspect is the very point the inclusion of these clips is trying to make).
Watching it now, the composition of the video seems a little amateurish in places. It’s certainly not as slick or fast moving as similar posthumous videos would be later on; there are some real longueurs (particularly the rowing sequences) which seem to indicate the people putting it together were too entranced with certain moments or didn’t have much else to work with. And when you consider what else was surely available in the Lennon vaults – even just other parts of Imagine or the Bed-In film – the amount of different clips on display now seems somewhat parsimonious. There is no footage of John at work in the recording studio, for instance, or playing live. In that respect, the videos for the follow-up singles from Milk and Honey, ‘Borrowed Time’ and ‘I’m Stepping Out’, were much better, utilising more film from all corners of his solo career (though sadly, as they didn’t do as well in the charts, far fewer people would have seen them). There are also some real head-scratching insertions into this video, including a nuclear bomb going off (which somewhat jars with the perky nature of the clip as a whole) and someone climbing and then jumping off a stepladder. The latter bit may have been a reference to John and Yoko’s first meeting at London’s Indica art gallery in 1966, when one of her exhibits invited guests to look through a magnifying glass as a word written on the ceiling, but without any context it seems a totally random (and very grainy) inclusion here. Some of the footage does work well when set against the music though, particularly the shots of the pair cavorting in New York and facing up to the massed ranks of the world’s media during their legendary peace promotions of 1969. Strange days indeed.
Whatever its limitations by today’s standards, the video must have ticked the boxes for a public hungry for film of the recently-martyred Beatle in 1984. And the song was deservedly a big hit, his last solo effort to crack the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic (#5 in the States and #6 in the UK) as well as several other territories. It has made the cut on all of the many Lennon compilations released since then. Likewise, the video has cropped up on a few accompanying video or DVD releases of John’s solo promotional films, such as Lennon Legend and Power To the People. As is Yoko’s wont, however, I’m wondering if the original clip has been tweaked slightly; I seem to remember it fading out over camcorder footage of John and Sean on a boat circa 1979, with Lennon giving an ‘OK’ gesture to camera, though that is missing from the version you see now (a new video for the song was also produced for 2020’s Gimme Some Truth compilation album, but it simply offers even less imaginative rehashing of scenes from Imagine). But no matter. While it seems a little thrown together in retrospect, the video holds a lot of nostalgia value for those of us who were around when post-Beatle film of John was relatively scarce and still does a fair job of capturing a multi-faceted life lived a full pelt, as well as illustrating a song which showed his wit, lyricism and ear for a great pop tune remained fully intact until the end.
The original 1984 video for the song
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