RETURN OF THE MINSTRELS: JOHN LENNON & BOB GELDOF - (This article was seen by Bob Geldof on Facebook and given a "Like").

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John Lennon-The Life By Philip Norman

Geldof in Africa By Bob Geldof

 

 

Five-fold are the crimes: The crime of the hand, by wounding or stealing; the crime of the foot, by kicking or moving to do evil deeds; the crime of the tongue, by satire, slander or false witness; the crime of the mouth, by eating stolen things; the crime of the eye, by watching while an evil deed is taking place. The Brehon Laws of Ancient Ireland.

 

Added 2018: BREHON LAW PROJECT

Brehon Law Project. Irish law is the oldest, most original, and most extensive of mediaeval European legal systems. It is a unique legal inheritance, an independent indigenous system of advanced jurisprudence that was fully evolved by the eighth century. It is also far less well known than it deserves.

 

 

 

A duo from the Royal New Zealand Ballet recently devised a choreography of several Beatles songs. With permission rarely granted to those wishing to use the songs of Lennon and McCartney, the ballet was performed before an audience in Wellington, New Zealand. In the crowd was an elderly woman from Liverpool who knew all of the individual Beatles before they became The Beatles.

Now that the Beatles have passed into an eternal realm from live band to an endless brand, there seems to be a growing market for how it all started, hence the Wellington ballet watcher's allusion to Liverpool itself rather than just Beatlemania. There's a film coming up too, called Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon's childhood in Liverpool. It's ironic that acclaimed actress Kristen Scott Thomas will portray Aunt Mimi. Mimi was Lennon's guardian who threw out his poetry and writings. She publicly berated Lennon when he appeared on stage, annoyed at his wasting his life by blathering on about stardom.

 

In this age of reality TV and mass soap opera, Philip Norman's account of the Liverpool Lennon in John Lennon-The Life is in itself a fantastic tale. Other biographies have given the Beatles the limelight and made everything else look like painted trees in a stage design. But this superb book is the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – a sea of faces and culture- spread through 817 pages. For the first time, we learn more about John Lennon, a musician whose dreams took him to America, where he became famous. 

And how his grandson, also named John, became the driving force behind the Beatles.

The other John Lennon, known as Jack, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and toured the USA as a member of the Kentucky Minstrels before settling down as a shipping clerk in Toxteth, Liverpool, where he married another Irish immigrant twenty years his junior. Although Toxteth was then known as “Dickens Land”, for resembling Victorian England, it was a poor suburb. So much so, that Jack's son Alf Lennon had to be educated at an orphanage. This start enabled Alf to court Julia Stanley, a middle-class woman who shared Alf's love of music and good times. They eventually married and had a son called John. Despite Alf's faithfulness to Julia, his frequent journeys as a ship's steward saw Julia enter into a de-facto relationship. Julia's sister Mimi, would not see her nephew raised by a couple “living in sin.”

So John Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi in an affluent suburb called Woolton. And the plot well and truly thickens from there, as John Lennon grows into one of the world's most famous men, founds the biggest rock band/pop group in history, marries an artist descended from one of Japan's leading banking families, and dies at the hands of a gunman in New York.

Lennon also rated himself as a talent scout, discovering both Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono (who hit number one with a club track at the age of 70, over 20 years after Lennon said she would).

 

The ongoing tale of John Lennon, like other greats of history will take centuries to unfold, is about coming to terms with personality, culture, and destiny.

In many ways, John Lennon had a quintessentially English upbringing...music hall; Royal Worcester china; 1950's radio comedy, the works of Lewis Carroll. The Beatles were rewarded with Royal Honours and High Society parties at the height of their fame, for earning millions of pounds in export revenue for the British Government.

 

But John Lennon and the other Beatles had Irish ancestry. Lennon bought an island off the West Coast of Ireland, with a vague wish to live there when he was sixty-four. And he was never more aware of his Irish roots than when he lived in New York.

Lennon's least commercially successful album was also his most politically significant- Some Time in New York City(1972). It was here that Lennon wished to forgo his pop star status in favour of his true calling- that of “minstrel”. He wanted to write a song for the people that would rival “We Shall Overcome”, stating that it was the minstrel's job to write “newspaper songs”, that inform governments and leaders about social issues. Harking back to ancient Ireland, when the minstrel assisted the magistrate in law- making, the production values of Some Time in New York City became the hallmark of John Lennon's life and work.

 

Reading Bob Geldof's book of the BBC series Geldof in Africa at the same time as John Lennon-The Life was a symbiotic experience for me. Geldof's individuality and tenacity in drawing our attention to the beauty and deprivation of Africa belong to Geldof alone. His efforts are to be applauded.

Yet there is something both Lennonesque and consummately Irish about Geldof's take on Africa. And when Geldof quotes Bono - “I am, because we are”- Africa, Ireland, and the rest of humanity, begin to look increasingly interdependent.

 

Geldof went to Africa in 2005 as part of then Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa. In Geldof's hands, an epic journey through evolutionary time and geographic space becomes as accessible as a fireside chat, without failing to remind us of our responsibilities as a matter of justice, not charity. Geldof recounts a meeting with a provincial leader in Niger twenty years earlier. As grains of sand sifted through his fingers, the governor explained the loss of 300 languages to drought and famine. Geldof missed those languages even though he never heard them. “In these ways , the lights of genius wink out”, writes Geldof.

Before the journey, Geldof calls to mind his school days in Dublin as his earliest experiences of Africa: Requesting the nostalgic tales of priests returning from the mission fields, as a way of getting out of school work. Perusing National Geographic for their photos of nude female Nubians.

 

Then in the 1980's, he was moved to global action by the sight of multitudes dying from the ravages of famine in Ethiopia. Geldof exhorted us that watching people dying and doing nothing is tantamount to murder. Under the pre-Tudor Brehon Laws of Ireland, an ancient Irish oral tradition, codified by St Patrick, there was a “Crime of the Eye” - by watching while an evil deed is taking place. The Minstrel of the High Kings of Ireland had a twentieth-century name: Bob Geldof.

 

Geldof in Africa takes us through the origins of humanity in Tanzania's Rift Valley. En route to the embattled region of Somalia, he meets the Hadsa people, who live very much as they did 50,000 years ago. While expounding on a rich and complex history of slavery, Geldof alludes to the origins of the word “jazz”- that ultimate symbol of American uniqueness and freedom: When the slaves performed a spiritual drumming ritual in New Orleans, there was an aroma of jasmine-'jas'- in the audience, from the scents of the women who gathered to watch. From slavery to freedom, from jas to jazz.

 

When being led through the Sahara and the city of Timbuktu by a Tuareg who knows the desert as well as Geldof knows the rail at London's Underground, he takes time to observe how a beetle works up a sweat by pushing a ball of sand up a hill, then rolling over on its back and drinking the sweat from its belly.

There's the story of the kola nut, a chief ingredient of Coca-Cola, and the tragedy of war and misgovernment in the Congo, rich in natural resources yet riven by wars over those same resources.

 

As Geldof's vehicle speeds to avoid armed robbers between villages in Congo, his daughter phones from England, asking permission to stay with friends at the weekend. 

Thus illustrating the power of the wireless age, and how mobile phones have enabled wealthy Africans abroad to remit wealth and information back to their home villages.

The football game between Arsenal and Liverpool, viewed via satellite, is discussed amidst beautiful ancient castles with an Ethiopian goat herder, as taking a helicopter to the highlands of the Nile is never too far to escape questions about David Beckham.

Education remains a challenge, in a continent where children are needed for labour intensive agricultural work, and kidnapped, forced into wars.

 

The complexity of the AIDS epidemic is brought home when a prostitute with HIV will continue working because she will die in five years, whereas her child will not live beyond five months if she stops her activity. 

The beauty, hope and luminosity of the continent with “more people, more cultures, more animals, more languages than anywhere else on our world” can be shared and enjoyed by all of us, if treated justly on the geopolitical stage.

As Bob Geldof works with world leaders- and the wider public - to accomplish that, the world comes full circle to a point where magistrates and minstrels collaborate to improve and sustain society. And the newspaper songs of John Lennon from the early 1970's will be looked at in a whole new light.

 

-ADAM GREENWELL March 2009/Edited 2016