Songwriter Frank Turner has said John Lennon‘s hugely popular single ‘Imagine‘ has ‘always grated on him’ for a variety of reasons, including the popularity of the song and its production.
“It’s always grated on me as a song for a whole host of reasons: the production, the lyrics, the sappiness, its popularity, the knowledge that Lennon was so much better than this one song, and yet it’s the one most people know,” Turner has told the AV Club.
“Some of his stuff is transcendental. As I said, that’s one of the things that annoys me about the song. By his standards, it seems almost lazy to me.”
A restored version of the track formed a central part of last summer’s London Olympics closing ceremony after Turner himself had played live inside the stadium as a preamble to the opening ceremony a few weeks earlier.
“There’s a pretty high dose of hypocrisy in here as well. For a man who had a dedicated, refrigerated room in his New York penthouse apartment for storing his fur-coat collection to sing ‘Imagine no possessions’ takes a fair amount of chutzpah,” Turner concludes.