“Can you play an Instrument”?… The first question asked by our music master,  at my first class, in my first year at the “big school” (where at 11 years of age I had to wear long trousers).

With enthusiasm my hand shot up. “What can you play”? He asked, “The Banjo, Sir” ….He looked surprised…”That’s unusual, OK stand at the front of the class with the other boys.”

I was a young teenager during the 1960′s and one of the first questions posed in the school playground was; “Do you like the Beatles or Rolling Stones?” Being independent minded I always replied “Neither, I like the Kinks”.

In 1968 I bought my first album and it was Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. I played this very loud, much to the annoyance of my brother who was an Elvis fan. The next year however I “discovered” the Beatles.

The 1970 breakup of the Beatles was a traumatic time for John, George, Paul and Ringo. Each dealt with it in their own way. Paul lived the life of a recluse on the Mull of Kintyre, whereas John resorted to psychoanalysis to get rid of his demons. His first, brilliantly stark album, is the direct result. 

John consulted the American psychoanalyst Arthur Janov and subjected himself to the extreme ‘Primal Scream’ therapy. Janov was a follower of Freud and Jung, believing that adult problems can be found in a child’s formative years. His therapy stripped away all the protective psychological barriers to determine where the childhood problems lay.

Nowhere Boy is a great new film dealing with something rarely covered in books, and never portrayed in film – John Lennon’s childhood. It brilliantly manages to evoke the atmosphere of suburban life, circa 1960.

The Director Sam Taylor-Wood manages to avoid the obvious cliche of telling Lennon’s story through his and the Beatles songs, instead there is plenty of the 1950′s music that inspired the Group during their formative teenage years.

The last album written by Roger Waters for Pink Floyd was ‘The Final Cut’. The title had a number of meanings, including the fact that Waters would leave the band after this album.

I have all Pink Floyd’s albums on vinyl, but unfortunately I no longer play vinyl records, which meant I had to replace them with CDs. (What a great thing new formats are for record companies, they keep reselling the same music, to the same customers, but in a different form)!

Leamington Spa is a beautiful town with a lot of night life, however for too long it didn’t have a large capacity, live music venue. Groups were confined to local pubs that had the space and the enthusiasm to host a live band.

This has thankfully changed! For the past 12 months Leamington Spa has a brand new live music venue called the Assembly. Although the venue is new, the building is not – it’s a beautiful 1926 Art Deco construction that has been lovingly restored by its new owners.

Leamington Spa has a brand new live music venue called the Assembly. It’s a beautiful Art Deco building, and I try to go to as many concerts as possible. Recently I bought tickets for ‘Gong’. I had never heard of them before, but I liked their description as “Music for Pothead Pixies”.

Gong were great. The music was really spacey as promised, and the concert had a lovely feel-good party atmosphere. At one point the lead singer of Gong came on stage with a giant pixie hat on his head. It was very funny.
 
Gong reminded me of another ‘new group’ (they have actually been around since the 1970′s), I discovered at the Assembly; ‘Enid’, though Enid had a more classical music base, whereas Gong were firmly into progressive rock. 

John Lennon was always trying to capture the moment of artistic creation. His idea was to go into a studio with a song, rehearse it and record a final version, all within 24 hours.

This appealed to the lazy part of his nature, but it was also a reaction against the laborious studio work that the Beatles did with George Martin, after they finished live touring.

The first time Lennon tried this was during the recording of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. The Beatles had ignored this film project at first, but when they saw early rushes of the surreal cartoon, they realised how good it was and wanted to contribute some new songs.

1) Go into your WordPress Dashboard and look for ‘Users’ click on this and then go to ‘Your Profile’

2) When you are in ‘Your Profile’ you need to tick the first box you see which says “Disable the visual editor when writing”. Click ‘Update Profile’.

3) Go to You Tube to get the code for your video. When you have found the video, you need to select ‘Embed Code’ and copy it.

4) Paste the code into your draft post, in the position where you want the video to show.

Finally, 40 years after first having the idea, I have completed a painting of John Lennon based on the psychedelic poster issued in 1967.

It’s only thanks to Google Images that I have been able to fulfil this ambition, as  the posters sold out on the day of issue, and I didn’t have anything for reference.  However I was able to download a jpeg photo via Google, and used this as the basis for my canvas.

John Lennon is my favourite Beatle and because of that I was actually quite scared to commit any paint to canvas. If I was going to paint Lennon it had to be good, and I wasn’t sure how it woud turn out.