Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. He currently works as a solo artist and with his band, The Ghosts of Electricity. He also collaborates with other musical kindred spirits and recently appeared at Celtic Connections with Rab Noakes & Friends. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s musings in which you'll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE ‘Holds you in his armchair, you can feel his disease’, chirped the busker to the Saturday morning shoppers. ‘Come together, right now, over me…’ Not for the first time, I thought about how John Lennon’s spiky legacy has become incorporated into our mainstream culture. He crops up all over the place, his bearded, white-suited image as iconic as that of Che Guevara. He’s even had an airport named after him, with a quote from ‘Imagine’ – ‘Above Us Only Sky’ - as its motto, greeting visitors with a clunkily literal reference to his humanist anthem. I prefer the local wits’ suggestion that ‘Imagine No Possessions’ in the baggage-claim area might be more apt. Recently my late and much-missed former colleague, Alan Hull, has been the subject of a campaign to be given some form of permanent memorial in the city of Newcastle. It’s even been seriously suggested that Newcastle Airport could be renamed Hull Airport in Alan’s honour. One can only imagine the confusion this would cause, particularly since the city of Hull does not have a nearby airport bearing its name (try Humberside or Robin Hood). More earthbound proposals have included statues, blue plaques and street or pub names. This would be more like it – Alan would certainly approve of the pub suggestion - though personally I feel that modern city centres might already have enough generic statuary of local heroes wearing traffic cones and football shirts and surrounded by enough litter to make them look as though they’d just finished several Happy Meals. Maybe it’s to do with my provincial background or the time when I was brought up, but I can’t help feeling that these formal, municipally-approved marks of recognition belong to a different era, one which was seen off by the cultural shake-up spearheaded by rock’n’roll. Alan, like his heroes Lennon and Dylan, had plenty to say about the stultifying effects of a bureaucratic establishment on the individual and the imagination, and the local planning authorities (who have responsibility over statues and street names, among other things) were high on his list of targets. On top of that, when an instinctively subversive artist and his or her work are embraced by the establishment and given formal recognition, they become part of an accepted canon and therefore, by definition, part of the very thing they were kicking against in the first place. So, how best to celebrate the achievements and honour the memories of our departed rebels without consigning them to an establishment they wouldn’t have wanted to be part of? This is a conundrum reminiscent of Groucho and his hypothetical club. Of course we can only guess what Alan or Lennon might have made of it, but I have a strong suspicion that they would share the Confucian view that all honours are false and that if offered, should be declined. The Americans have their various Halls of Fame with their attendant induction ceremonies, but these are mostly about professional recognition and are anyway viewed askance by the outlaw faction. Certainly Alan didn’t have much time for awards ceremonies, unless there was money or a drink in it for him. He would have been amused, I think, by the idea of a permanent memorial and if asked, would probably have replied “Go ahead if you want to”. I can understand people’s desire to commemorate Alan’s life, but his best memorial is his songs, and a few of them at least - one in particular - will echo through the bars, streets and terraces of his home city for as long as people have voices to sing them.